The story
National Lentil Festival in Pullman
Since 1989, Pullman, Washington has celebrated its signature Palouse-region crop with the National Lentil Festival, held the weekend before Washington State University classes resume. Conceived to promote both tourism and lentil farming at a time when the Palouse grew the vast majority of America's lentil crop, the festival is famous for its World's Largest Lentil Chili Bowl and draws roughly 10,000 visitors annually.
Pullman sits at the heart of the Palouse, a rolling agricultural region straddling southeastern Washington and northern Idaho known for its distinctive wind-sculpted hills and, for much of the twentieth century, an outsized share of America's lentil production.