First, the news: A truck carrying 44,000 pounds of dried chickpeas “burned up” in early December while driving through Death Valley National Park. According to SFGate, it’s the seventh vehicle fire in Death Valley this year.

The fires usually happen the same way. A driver rides his or her breaks when going down steep passes. The brakes then overheat and catch fire. So it goes in one of the hottest places on earth.

This got us thinking though. How much (potential) hummus was lost out there?

First, we start off with our scientific Chickpea to Hummus Conversion Ratio TM.

We’re going to say it takes about 1 pound of dried chickpeas to produce approximately 3 cups of hummus. Our starter pack is 44,000 pounds. Do some math and we have 132,000 cups of hummus.

Put the cups into our Gallon Conversion Kit and we now have 8,250 gallons of hummus.

And if we then decide to sell Death Valley Road Hummus in 10 ounce containers like they have at our local market, we fire up our Gallon to Fluid Ounces Conversion Kit and see that we end up with 105,600 packages to sell at our roadside stand.

As said, that’s a lot of hummus.

And for the concerned, some reassurance from Mike Reynolds, Superintendent of the park, “There’s very little chance that stray chickpeas not cleaned up will become invasive species in the driest place in North America.”