We stood in the vestibule flummoxed, and it wasn’t until the same guy who had conducted the tour passed by and spotted us that we were let in. Sure, we could buy a pie, he told us—but not before some security measures. We took turns standing behind a screen while the guard patted us down, and then grabbed a seat in a row of chairs by the door while a perfect formation of white-shirted young boys filed past. Eventually a blue-bedecked woman who introduced herself as Sister Medea came out with two official Nation of Islam Supreme Bean Pies. We forked over $18, and before we could ask too many questions, we were gently sent on our way. The university parking lot’s automatic metal gate—wide open when we turned off Stony Island—closed behind us when we pulled out.
Made from cooked, mashed, small navy beans, the bean pie is the iconic food of black Muslims everywhere, but locating one in Chicago in recent years has been a hit-or-miss proposition. That’s surprising given the zeal Elijah Muhammad, the Nation’s leader for 41 years, had for navy beans. “Eat food that Allah (God) has prescribed for us,” he wrote in How to Eat to Live, a two-volume dietary guide for followers of the Nation, whose main points are repeated with the circularity of an industrial-sized mixer: “Even take little things such as beans. Allah (God) says that the little navy bean will make you live, just eat them. He said to me that even milk and bread would make us live. Just eat bread and milk—it is the best food. He said that a diet of navy beans would give us a life span of one hundred and forty years. Yet we cannot live ½ that length of time eating everything that the Christian table has set for us.”
In some ways Muhammad’s Nation of Islam diet was ahead of its time. He advocated eating unprocessed foods and mostly vegetables (definitely not pork) in moderation. On the other hand, it’s an extreme form of moderation. He advised eating just one meal per day, or every other day if you were strong, or—for those who could work up to it—once every 72 hours. “The European white race,” he wrote, “blessed with the privilege of eating the best food the earth provides, has taught us to eat the worst (divinely prohibited) foods. We eat all the time, three and four times a day. This is enough to wear out the intestines of a brass monkey.”