@katlin well it's also allergens. However, beans are also full of anti-nutrients and are allergenic. It also depends upon the nut and bean.

@katlin well in say california - there's native walnut trees - so they're adapted to the environment. Just collecting the nuts could keep more walnut trees from popping up - thereby decreasing water stress levels, especially due to wildfires.

The issue is that the almond industry uses them as rootstock - knowing how well walnuts work.

Large-scale nut production is due to demand - people want almonds. This leads to unnatural, water-stressing conditions.

However, trees - while they use a whole lot of water, also have a role in conserving and bringing it forth. They hold water, to decrease erosion, as well as topsoil degradation from droughts drying it up.

A native plant will be adapted to its surroundings. You just don't see many people taking up on acorns - they go rancid and need leaching. I get it.

Black walnuts, hazelnuts, pine nuts - to get pine nuts from siberia because california won't take up upon what they have is madness.

Walnuts are a great source of omega 3 - yes, I get that soaking helps, but you can eat them as-is. Same with hazelnuts.

Lentils and peas - I don't see them as native. Lentils are adapted for desert conditions, peas can grow in vertical farms. Chia is a small plant. Beans aren't that nutrient dense. It's better to grow spirulina or grass (like barley grass) than them.

I think grass leaves and microbes are much easier to grow, but it's not the whole story.

Trees create their own microclimate - so they provide nutrients to other plants to bring forth more food. So just looking at the water usage of trees is not the whole picture.

Legumes contribute to the soil and its microbiome with nitrogen fixing b12 bacteria.

I've picked beans from a farm myself - and foraged nuts. Trees are harder to move, but provide a whole lot.

Protein is more than just protein - our body makes its own from amino acids - and uses carbs to help form proteins from that. Nuts have a decent level of protein and carbs, much like all the other you mention.

Sunflower seeds are easy to grow - I can understand, but if nut trees are already around - it would be greater effort to plant sunflower seeds.

It's all relative.

Now there is 1 that is the exception: pumpkin seeds - they are the most water-efficient protein I've seen - and gives a whole lot of a vegetable to go with it. Watermelon seeds and poppy too (although both aren't native to california - the ones that are eaten of course).

California's water stressed because I read how most of the state was flooded and then it got drained for fertile soil. I bet if it didn't get drained - trees would be able to survive it, so the draining might've been for the small seed providing plants, but we'd never know would we?