38. Beans, Beans, the Magic Fruit, the More You Eat, the More You Toot
Pythagoras advanced many reasons for avoiding beans, especially fava beans. One of the funnier ones was his belief that human beings lost a part of their soul whenever they farted, with a bit of their inner being exiting along with the expelled gasses. More seriously, Pythagoras believed that beans contained the souls of the dead. He got there after a “scientific” experiment to prove that humans and beans were spawned from the same source.
Pythagoras buried beans in mud, and left them for a few weeks before retrieving them. When he dug them up, he saw a resemblance to human fetuses. So he convinced himself of an intimate relationship between beans and humans, and reasoned that eating beans was akin to eating human flesh. Thus, Pythagoras equated eating beans with cannibalism, and not just as any cannibalism, but cannibalism of one’s father and mother. As he explained it to his followers: “Eating fava beans and gnawing on the heads of one’s parents are one and the same“.