How TikTok Fell for Canned Beans
“I get a lot of DMs about farts,” Violet Witchel tells me as she hands me a deli container of the dish that has changed her life: a dense bean salad. Over the last ten months, the 24-year-old’s approach to meal prepping has swept TikTok, and this week she made one of her favorites: a sun-dried-tomato salad featuring white beans, chickpeas, loads of veggies, mozzarella pearls, deli turkey, and a tangy vinaigrette. As Witchel’s 2.7 million TikTok followers have learned, with that much fiber in one dish, flatulence is inevitable.
A dense bean salad is exactly what it sounds like — a hearty, bean-forward dish filled with vegetables and a protein, all dressed in a vinaigrette that binds the flavors together. The DBS promise is that you can make it on a Sunday and it’ll still taste good the following Friday. It is ideal for a young woman with a busy life who cares about what she’s eating but doesn’t want to spend $20 on a lackluster grain bowl. Witchel — tall, blonde, and remarkably put-together for someone who graduated from college two years ago — has been making them for years, but only this year did she debut them on her TikTok as Dense Bean Salads (she’s working on getting the trademark). Now, the app is riddled with videos of people preaching the gospel of canned beans (and the importance of rinsing them).
At the door of Witchel’s San Francisco condo, I’m greeted by Wally, her enormous Bernese mountain dog. Witchel is six feet tall and blonde — very baby Goop. She offers me a Poppi before leading me to her kitchen. Imagine a Nancy Meyers movie about a Gen-Z cooking influencer: Natural light bounces off pristine white countertops and cabinets, accented with deep-crimson floral wallpaper. Perched above her sink is a small light and a tripod holding a Sony ZV-1 camera.
Witchel began posting cooking videos on TikTok during the summer of 2020, just before she began her junior year at Vassar College. Quarantined before the semester began, she started filming herself cooking. Her early videos are mostly faceless, with Witchel holding her phone as she smashes avocado onto toast or stirs a homemade soup in her dorm. There were simple, college-friendly meals like grilled cheese and oatmeal bowls, as well as more ambitious fare like pulled pork and steak with chimichurri. Shortly after she started posting, a video of her making chicken tacos went viral.
“I had 10,000 followers overnight, and then I just kept posting,” Witchel says. By the time she graduated in 2022, she had 2 million followers. She had previously interned at a hedge fund, but when it was time to leave Poughkeepsie, that option seemed small. “I was making more money from socials than I was working in finance. So it was like, I should do this full-time,” Witchel recalls. “Like, what am I doing? Finance sucks.”
Fast-forward to almost exactly a year ago, when Witchel posted a video of what she called a “crunchy balsamic Mediterranean-inspired salad.” The name wasn’t there yet, but the pitch was. “It held up so well in the fridge; it was the perfect way to make sure I got all my veggies in,” Witchel says in the video, which now has over 12 million views. In January, she made a salad inspired by a grinder sub. (She has Celiac disease and can’t eat gluten, so bread is out.) That one is “packed with protein, holds up really well in the fridge, and is so flavorful.” She made it again the next week, this time telling her followers that it is “delicious, vegetable-packed, and dense.”
By February, she had landed on the branding: Dense Bean Salads (DBS). “In my head, a voluminous salad would be kale or spinach. You know how it’s fluffy and when you stick a fork in it, there’s quite a bit of give. A Dense Bean Salad is compact,” Witchel explains. “They’re quite hefty, which I like, because it means they don’t get soggy in the fridge.” The name does have a certain ring to it. “Dense Bean Salad is my next band name,” reads the top comment on one of Witchel’s early DBS videos. “Dense Bean Salad was my nickname in high school,” reads another.
Witchel really does make a DBS for herself every week. By the time I arrive, this week’s salad has been chopped, mixed, and portioned out into deli containers, labeled with the date. Believe me that I would tell you if this whole thing was a sham and actually tasted like damp beans drenched in salad dressing. In reality, the flavors are balanced and it’s filling without being heavy. The tang of the sun-dried tomatoes and artichoke hearts is evened out by the starchiness of the beans and the creaminess of the mozzarella.
When I suggest to Witchel that Dense Bean Salads took off because they don’t require too much skill, she pushes back. “I would say they’re actually not that easy; they’re time-consuming to make,” she argued. “I think they’re very easily adaptable, and people can customize them.” It is true that several of her videos involve more complicated steps, like marinating chicken or throwing steak on a grill. Though, as she points out, they’re easy enough to skip or work around, subbing in a rotisserie chicken or deli meat or opting for a full vegetarian salad. A DBS recipe is, in my experience, mostly a suggestion.
Witchel thinks that the real reason the salads took off is because a lot of meal prep is nasty. Dry chicken breast portioned into Tupperware does not taste good after a day or two. “Most meal prep actually does not keep well in the fridge at all,” Witchel says, whereas day four of a DBS might be the best one.
The rise of the DBS has also coincided with a newfound obsession with fiber as a miracle nutrient. Witchel became the face of beans just as dietitians were going viral for extolling the benefits of fiber. Her followers regularly tell her that making a DBS has helped with their PCOS symptoms. In one instance, someone told her that they got pregnant after they started making Dense Bean Salads. “I think it helps reduce inflammation,” Witchel says. “Or … maybe they just got pregnant.”
And then there are the farts. “So I ate a Dense Bean Salad for dinner for five days straight, and don’t get me wrong, it was delicious. It hit as much as y’all say it did,” a TikTok user named Patrice shared in a viral video from September. “But after the first or second night, it dawned on me that I’m eating a bunch of beans. Why doesn’t it tell you how gassy it makes you?”
“That’s literally the #1 fact about beans,” one commenter wrote. “I’ve been eating a dense bean salad every day for lunch for 3 weeks straight. Now my intestines are SQUEAKY clean,” wrote another.
What’s next for Witchel, beyond hearing about people’s intestinal journeys? Despite her success on TikTok, she actually doesn’t love the app. She prefers Substack, where she has 125,000 subscribers and makes the majority of her income. DBS fever has inspired her to apply to culinary school, which she hopes will help her get taken seriously as more than an influencer in food circles. She’s also about to start pitching a cookbook — but it won’t be so legume focused. “I can’t do a full cookbook of Dense Bean Salads. I don’t think 100 good ones exist,” Witchel says. Plus, her fiancé is getting a little sick of beans.
“Life is long,” she says. “There was a period when I was Taco Girl, I was Kale Salad Girl. If I’m Bean Girl for now, I think it’ll go away eventually. But I’m not mad about it. I like the beans.”
Related