Beans

Appears in
A Canon of Vegetables
A Canon of Vegetables

By Raymond Sokolov

Published 2007

  • About
Pythagoras, apostle of the hypotenuse, forbade his followers to eat beans. Why? Because they reminded him of testicles and because they produce flatulence. Eating symbolic testicles was metaphorical cannibalism of a particularly noxious sort: patiophagy, fatherfeeding. Farting was an even more obvious transgression. We moderns don’t like it any more than Pythagoras. Consider the ironic childhood jingle:

Beans, beans, the musical fruit, The more you eat, the more you toot. The more you toot, the better you feel, So let’s have beans at every meal.