Costco just brought back a popular item — beef chili — which has been received to great fanfare, but has also reignited a fierce food debate because of one controversial ingredient.
On Sept. 27, popular TikToker Laura Lamb (@costcohotfinds) posted a video on both TikTok and Instagram about the chili returning to Costco’s premade sides section. In her video, the big-box buff shares a quick review of the chain’s chili.
“The beef chili is back at Costco,” Lamb says in her video, adding that the item is four pounds as she picks it up from a store fridge. “It is my favorite and, at $3.49 a pound, this is a great deal for chili that’s ready to heat and serve. This would be so good over a Costco hot dog, but today I ate it with the Costco bakery’s French bread.”
Taking a closer look at the chili packaging in Lamb’s video, the main components include cooked beef crumbles, kidney beans, pinto beans, tomatoes, onions and green bell peppers, among other ingredients.
Now, although tomatoes are also a source of chili discourse, it’s Costco’s inclusion of another ingredient — beans — that had Lamb’s comments section boiling over.
“there’s no beans in chilli......I don’t know what that is but it’s not chilli......” wrote one TikTok commenter, adding, “still looks pretty good though.”
“That’s not chili that is bean soup with cheese,” wrote another commenter, this time under Lamb’s Instagram post.
“Real chili has no beans here in Texas,” wrote another Instagram commenter.
“Yeah, not gonna sure if this is gonna do well in Texas since it has beans in it lol,” commented another.
This age-old debate has been raging for nearly a century on what ingredients are “allowed” to be in chili and which turn your concoction into a spicy stew.
While the exact origins of the dish now known as chili aren’t definitively known, most historians credit 18th century immigrants from the Canary Islands for introducing the dish to what would later become the Lone Star State.
As Texas was colonized, annexed and populated by all sorts of folks, inevitable alterations to chili happened over time, much to purists’ ire, including one very contentious historical event colloquially known as The Great Chili Confrontation. In 1967, an author from New York and a journalist from Texas competed over the inclusion of beans in a chili cook-off in a town near the Mexico border. Yes, really.
Clearly, many folks today still prefer to stick to its original definition, including the characters on popular TV show “Yellowstone,” who had an expletive-laden discussion of whether or not the legume belongs in chili in one famous scene.
“People who are arguing about beans, they don’t know beans about American foodways,” food scholar and Texas-bred cookbook author Melissa Guerra told the San Antonio Express News, adding that the dish went national because of women in Alamo Plaza in the late 1800s who sold bowls of the stuff known as chili queens.
“The chili queens, they knew how to run a business, and of course they would have put beans in chili because they were smart,” she said.
Lamb — another Texan, despite comments under her video assuming the contrary — shares this view.
“I love beans on my chili so it hadn’t occurred to me how many bean haters there were,” Lamb tells TODAY.com with a laugh. “It’s flying off the shelves so most must be a fan!”
