Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the vault for an older episode
Speaker 1: of the show. This is part two of our series
Speaker 1: on beans called Reconsider the Bean. This episode originally aired
Speaker 1: on May Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Speaker 1: the production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of
Speaker 1: our talk about beans. You know, I'm thinking this one's
Speaker 1: gonna be even even it's like a two bean salad
Speaker 1: if the last episode was a one bean salad. We've
Speaker 1: got a lot of great stuff to get to today. Well,
Speaker 1: this is one I think that especially will well. I
Speaker 1: don't know if it'll make everyone think about beans in
Speaker 1: an way, but it might in m chest because I
Speaker 1: feel like, especially in that first episode, we were kind
Speaker 1: of approaching or I was certainly approaching it. Like, you know,
Speaker 1: beans are are very interesting, but they're also kind of mundane,
Speaker 1: and they're the in this the mundane nature of beings
Speaker 1: seems to run deep. You have beamed doubt well to
Speaker 1: a certain extent. But uh, in the space between recording
Speaker 1: the last episode and uh in recording this one, I
Speaker 1: found a number of new angles and then um and
Speaker 1: then leap frogged off rokoff a couple of angles you explored,
Speaker 1: And I think it really paints a picture of beans
Speaker 1: as a far weirder um part of our world and
Speaker 1: are part of our culture and myth making, even if
Speaker 1: a lot of that weirdness has largely been sort of
Speaker 1: bled out um of sort of the like popular modern
Speaker 1: understanding of the food. Yeah, I think that's right. So
Speaker 1: if you out there still have bean doubts, allow us
Speaker 1: to try to evaporate them with some with some deft
Speaker 1: parching through today's episode. So I wanted to start off
Speaker 1: today by talking about philosophers and beings and a particular
Speaker 1: bean field slaughter from Greek history slash legend. So there
Speaker 1: are actually a surprising number of stories about Greek philosophers
Speaker 1: and beings. There was one that I came across, and
Speaker 1: in the last episode I mentioned this book that I
Speaker 1: had been quoting by Ken Alba called Beans a History
Speaker 1: from Bloomsberry Publishing in and I'm going to refer back
Speaker 1: to that book a lot in this episode two. But
Speaker 1: there was one thing I came across, and that that
Speaker 1: was talking about the cynic philosopher Diogenes, who the one
Speaker 1: fact you may remember about him, if if nothing else,
Speaker 1: is that he famously lived in a jar in Athens
Speaker 1: instead of in a house like on a shelf. No,
Speaker 1: not on a shelf. I think it was like out
Speaker 1: in the out in a public square or something. It's
Speaker 1: like a turned over jar. Uh. And and this is
Speaker 1: consistent with the idea of the Cynic school of philosophy,
Speaker 1: which is not about cynicism and the modern English use
Speaker 1: of the word which means the sort of I don't know,
Speaker 1: a pessimistic suspicion of others. Uh. The Cynic school of
Speaker 1: philosophy meant rejecting unnatural social norms and conventions and sort
Speaker 1: of being true to yourself, for true to your nature.
Speaker 1: So Diogenes was famous for violating taboos and rejecting the
Speaker 1: conventional norms of Greek culture in his day. So I
Speaker 1: think he was known for being dirty, of course, living
Speaker 1: in a big ceramic jar, for hanging out with dogs.
Speaker 1: I think, for being nude, and doing inappropriate things in
Speaker 1: public like if I remember correctly, there's a story that
Speaker 1: he uh decided to defecate while in the middle of
Speaker 1: watching a play. But apparently another way that he showed
Speaker 1: contempt for society's and norms and and the normal sort
Speaker 1: of like a food valorization scale, is that he made
Speaker 1: a point of eating a type of being known as lupins. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is a being that was considered in many cases
Speaker 1: only fit for feeding to animals or for the extremely
Speaker 1: poor and starving. Now, of course this is not true.
Speaker 1: Lupins are a perfectly good food if prepared in the
Speaker 1: right way, and they're part of many uh you know,
Speaker 1: food traditions around the world. But that, like we talked
Speaker 1: about in the last episode, there are often negative cultural
Speaker 1: and especially class associations with certain types of beans. And
Speaker 1: you can't say lupin's are are a very They're a
Speaker 1: difficult being. There there are being you really got to
Speaker 1: get to know because they've got these toxic alkaloids in
Speaker 1: them that you have to get out of them by
Speaker 1: soaking the beans for a long time, and supposedly you
Speaker 1: got to do all this other stuff to make them appetizing.
Speaker 1: But so I think by eating them Diogenes was sort
Speaker 1: of doing the equivalent of saying, like, you know, look
Speaker 1: at me, I'll eat dog food. I don't give a crap.
Speaker 1: But the the Greek philosopher being connection I really want
Speaker 1: to talk about is between Beans and Pythagoras. So the
Speaker 1: ancient Greek philosopher and religious leader Pythagoras lived from about
Speaker 1: five seventy to four nine d b c E. And
Speaker 1: though he was extremely influential, it is actually hard to
Speaker 1: know all that much with certain t about the life
Speaker 1: of Pythagoras because none of his writing survives, so we
Speaker 1: have nothing from his own hand, and the earliest accounts
Speaker 1: of his life and teachings come from hundreds of years
Speaker 1: after he lived, and they often differ substantially from one another.
Speaker 1: So when exploring basically any factual claim about Pythagoras and
Speaker 1: his teachings, there's going to be disagreement within our sources
Speaker 1: and in the analysis of modern scholars. So unfortunately there's
Speaker 1: not a lot you can say about him with certainty.
Speaker 1: But with that in mind, there's a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: you can say about him that can be understood as
Speaker 1: according to some sources. Right, we have echoes of Pythagoras,
Speaker 1: uh As opposed to just Pythagoras like itself in a
Speaker 1: pure recorded form right. But in these echoes from Pythagoras
Speaker 1: some really interesting facts emerge. So a bit of basic background.
Speaker 1: Pythagoras was born on the Greek island of Samos, again
Speaker 1: some time around the year five seventy bc uh. He
Speaker 1: was said to have traveled extensively around the ancient world
Speaker 1: and youth, and he eventually founded a sort of religious
Speaker 1: commune in Croton, a place in the south of Italy.
Speaker 1: Pythagoras taught some kind of mystical beliefs that unified aspects
Speaker 1: of metaphysics about the soul and the universe with mathematics
Speaker 1: and numbers, which seem to occupy some kind of sacred
Speaker 1: position in his worldview, as well as music which tied
Speaker 1: in with the mathematical aspects, and also teachings about nutrition
Speaker 1: and politics, so like in the realm of politics. It
Speaker 1: seems that the Pythagoreans disdained tyranny, and they really disdained democracy.
Speaker 1: They favored a kind of oligarchy where the body politics
Speaker 1: would be ruled by supposedly the best of men, you know,
Speaker 1: rulers appointed for their virtues. That always works out. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And in terms of nutrition, again there's some disagreement, but
Speaker 1: the Pythagoreans were widely understood to be vegetarians, eating bread, honey,
Speaker 1: and vegetables. More on that in a bit now, as
Speaker 1: with his life and his teachings, there are a bunch
Speaker 1: of conflicting accounts of the death of Pythagoras. But I
Speaker 1: wanted to start with one of these stories about his
Speaker 1: murder at the hands of a mob, and oh god
Speaker 1: it again it's hard to keep all these straight. But
Speaker 1: I think in this account, or at least in some
Speaker 1: of these accounts, he's attacked by a mob that favors democracy.
Speaker 1: So the people have spoken and and it is time
Speaker 1: for Pythagoras to be slaughtered. So this account comes from
Speaker 1: the writing of Diogenes Laertis, who is probably writing sometime
Speaker 1: around the third century CES. So understand that it's like
Speaker 1: hundreds of yours, like seven hundred or eight hundred years
Speaker 1: after Pythagoras lived as a long time later. Oh, and
Speaker 1: this is translated by a CD younge. Diogenes writes the
Speaker 1: following Pythagoras died in this manner when he was sitting
Speaker 1: with some of his companions in Milo's house. Some one
Speaker 1: of those whom he did not think worthy of admission
Speaker 1: into it, was excited by envy to set fire to it.
Speaker 1: But some say that the people of Crotona themselves did this,
Speaker 1: being afraid lest he might aspire to tyranny, and that
Speaker 1: Pythagoras was caught as he was trying to escape and
Speaker 1: coming to a place full of beans, he stopped there,
Speaker 1: saying that it was better to be caught than to
Speaker 1: trample on the beans, and better to be slain than
Speaker 1: to speak. And so he was murdered by those who
Speaker 1: were pursuing him. And in this way also most of
Speaker 1: his companions were slain, being in number about forty, but
Speaker 1: that a very few did escape. So what I when
Speaker 1: I first read this, I was like the pigeon and
Speaker 1: moonraker that does a double take? I did that? What? What? So?
Speaker 1: According to this story, Pythagoras and his followers were running
Speaker 1: away from a violent mob, and they came to a
Speaker 1: bean field, and they decided it was better to stop
Speaker 1: running and get chopped to pieces by the crowd than
Speaker 1: to step on the beans. This is the first time
Speaker 1: I'll mention this, but I probably mentioned it again. So
Speaker 1: in the previo this episode, I made a statement about
Speaker 1: how how you know beans are less interesting compared to corn,
Speaker 1: that corn is spook here, that it's children of the corn,
Speaker 1: not children of the being that uh and and uh
Speaker 1: and likewise, you know you would you would maybe be
Speaker 1: afraid of he who lurks behind the rows in the
Speaker 1: corn field, but not in the bean field. Like there's
Speaker 1: something about a corn field that can be kind of creepy,
Speaker 1: especially in Stephen King's stories. But when when we look
Speaker 1: back through uh in this account, but also in other
Speaker 1: accounts that will look at later on, we really get
Speaker 1: the feeling that that the I mean certainly there were
Speaker 1: no corn fields in Italy at this at this time,
Speaker 1: like beans bean fields were that place. So if you
Speaker 1: can imagine a Stephen King's story where Solar, a fringe
Speaker 1: religious leader on the run, refuses to go into the corn,
Speaker 1: would rather face death by mob, but then go into
Speaker 1: the corn, like that makes sense in a Stephen King's story.
Speaker 1: So just sort of imagine that it's beans instead of
Speaker 1: corn in the Stephen king universe, and I feel like
Speaker 1: we get an appropriate idea of how Pythagoras and his
Speaker 1: followers are are believed to have felt at this point right,
Speaker 1: at least according to this story, But yeah, you're you're
Speaker 1: exactly right. I love it. And and and there are other
Speaker 1: versions of the story, by the way, particularly told by
Speaker 1: one author named Iamblicus, who say that it was not
Speaker 1: Pythagoras himself who died because he wouldn't cross a bean field,
Speaker 1: but that it was a cadre of his disciples who
Speaker 1: were chased to the edge of the field and then
Speaker 1: accepted this gruesome death rather than cross it. And in
Speaker 1: iamblicus version in particular, there's this detail that the last
Speaker 1: member of pythagoras Is followers who were slain was a
Speaker 1: pregnant woman named Timyka, who bit off her own tongue
Speaker 1: rather than reveal the secret of why the beans were prohibited.
Speaker 1: That's more, that's more walking behind the rose. I think, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's some straight up Stephen king jus right there. Now.
Speaker 1: As I mentioned, there are other accounts of the death
Speaker 1: of Pythagoras, But what we know is that either this
Speaker 1: account is in some way based on the truth, or
Speaker 1: if not, it was at least considered plausible enough to
Speaker 1: believe given what people knew about Pythagoras in the ancient world,
Speaker 1: and it seems that one of the things widely known
Speaker 1: about him was that he really disdained beans. Have come
Speaker 1: across some really good illustrations of him, you know, just
Speaker 1: saying like no to beans. Like he's standing next to
Speaker 1: a bunch of beans and he's like, uh yeah, both
Speaker 1: hands up, looking away, get away. So why on earth
Speaker 1: would anybody believe that that this ancient Greek religious leader
Speaker 1: would rather die a painful, bloody death than trespass the
Speaker 1: bean field. Well, there are a ton of possible answers,
Speaker 1: and in a way, I think they're all fascinating. But
Speaker 1: here's one of the main ones that I wanted to
Speaker 1: talk about, and we will go through a number here,
Speaker 1: as as explored by Alba in his book, But one
Speaker 1: of the main things comes down to a teaching that
Speaker 1: is consistently associated with Pythagoras in the earliest writings about
Speaker 1: his life, which is that he taught the metaphysical doctrine
Speaker 1: known as metam psychosis, which is usually translated into English
Speaker 1: as the transmigration of souls. This is actually very similar
Speaker 1: to other ideas of reincarnation that you might have encountered before.
Speaker 1: So according to the doctrine of the transmigration of souls.
Speaker 1: The Pythagoreans believed that there was an immaterial and immortal
Speaker 1: soul that was separate from the body. This soul would
Speaker 1: survive the death of the body, and after the death
Speaker 1: of the body, the soul would be installed in a
Speaker 1: new body, possibly the body of another human or another animal.
Speaker 1: And this probably connects to one of the other Pythagorean
Speaker 1: teachings that I mentioned before, which is that it's widely
Speaker 1: understood that the Pythagoreans preached against the eating of meat.
Speaker 1: He and his followers were said to be vegetarians. And
Speaker 1: if if he was both a vegetarian and a believer
Speaker 1: that that human souls and animal souls would transmigrate back
Speaker 1: and forth into human and animal bodies, you can kind
Speaker 1: of see how these beliefs would fit together, like if
Speaker 1: you were to eat a chicken or a cow, you
Speaker 1: might literally be cannibalizing a dead relative. Now, if this
Speaker 1: is truly what Pythagoras taught, it is not known for
Speaker 1: sure where he got this idea, though it's been speculated
Speaker 1: that he could have acquired it from Indian thought during
Speaker 1: his travels. It has has said that he traveled all
Speaker 1: over the ancient world. But where this idea comes from,
Speaker 1: we just don't know. Yeah, I mean it obviously it
Speaker 1: sounds like a in many ways, like a less robust
Speaker 1: version of of reincarnation as you encounter it in in
Speaker 1: in Buddhism and Hinduism. Uh. But yeah, so it would
Speaker 1: be interesting if this was an idea that he picked
Speaker 1: up in his travels. There are some ancient authors, like
Speaker 1: I recall reading somewhere that I think it might have
Speaker 1: been Herodotus who said that Pythagoras got this idea from
Speaker 1: the Egyptians. But I don't think there's any indication that
Speaker 1: Egyptian religion ever featured reincarnation in this way, so that
Speaker 1: seems to be probably a mistake on herodotus part. Now,
Speaker 1: a slight variation on the reasoning here is just that
Speaker 1: vegetarianism was considered consistent with a non violent way of
Speaker 1: life preached by the Pythagoreans. But so this makes sense, right.
Speaker 1: You don't know the exact reason, but it would seem
Speaker 1: to all sort of fit together if he believed in
Speaker 1: the transmigration of souls and also preached vegetarianism that you know,
Speaker 1: don't eat animals because they might have souls that you
Speaker 1: would you know, wouldn't want to be eating in them.
Speaker 1: But then there's this other strange dietary prohibition of the
Speaker 1: Pythagorean cult, which is that Pythagoras allegedly forbade his followers
Speaker 1: to eat beans, which again, modern vegetarians and vegans, you know,
Speaker 1: you know that you need the beans. Yeah, exacting, and
Speaker 1: it seems counterintuitive in several ways. Yes, this is a
Speaker 1: problem right now. At the time, within Greek culture, these
Speaker 1: would have been over overwhelmingly. This would have been referring
Speaker 1: to fava beans, like the Faziola's genus that gives rise
Speaker 1: to many of the common beans we eat today. That
Speaker 1: is a genus that comes from the America's and had
Speaker 1: not crossed the the Atlantic yet. So probably what they're
Speaker 1: talking about here are fava beans. So though I guess
Speaker 1: there could have been lentils and stuff too, but it
Speaker 1: seems they were referring to fava beans, and fava beans
Speaker 1: were a common source of food for people and for
Speaker 1: grazing animals like for cattle in the Mediterranean at the time.
Speaker 1: Of course, beans are an especially important food if you're
Speaker 1: a vegetarian, So why would Pythagoras have forbidden not only
Speaker 1: eating them, but even treading upon them, even going into
Speaker 1: a field where they're being grown. Well, here I'm want
Speaker 1: to quote from Albola's book. Quote. The simplest and perhaps
Speaker 1: most plausible explanation is that beans are part of the
Speaker 1: whole cycle of reincarnation and they house human souls. To
Speaker 1: eat a bean is thus a form of murder. This
Speaker 1: was Varros explanation, and Orphic Fragment puts it like this,
Speaker 1: eating beans and gnawing on the heads of one's parents
Speaker 1: are one and the same. I think that's a sufficiently
Speaker 1: vivid image, right, Like you you want to eat beans?
Speaker 1: How would you feel about chewing on your dad's head?
Speaker 1: It's very it's very dantee and actually it makes me
Speaker 1: think of Count Ugolino and Archbishop grou Giery. But anyway,
Speaker 1: so yeah, the idea here would be that beans contain souls,
Speaker 1: potentially human souls. Now there's more. Now I want to
Speaker 1: get into more explanation on that mode of thinking in
Speaker 1: a bit, But first I also just wanted to mention
Speaker 1: some alternative explanations offered by other writers over the centuries,
Speaker 1: which Albola sort of catalogs and discusses. Now, there are
Speaker 1: some explanations for the being prohibition that would be based
Speaker 1: in politics, So I think these would be more sort
Speaker 1: of metaphorical interpretations of the idea that the Pythagoras would
Speaker 1: would have being scorn. One idea here is that beans
Speaker 1: were a symbol of democracy, the democracy that Pythagoras hated,
Speaker 1: because beans were used to cast votes. Right, you might
Speaker 1: have a jar where if you want to vote ya,
Speaker 1: you put in a black bean, and if you want
Speaker 1: to vote nay, put in a white bean, or maybe
Speaker 1: you put in different jars. You something like that. It
Speaker 1: can be a it can be a way to tally
Speaker 1: anonymous votes. Of course in a proper oligarchy. Uh, nobody
Speaker 1: would need to vote with beans, right, that's right, the
Speaker 1: best rule. And then do you just keep your beans
Speaker 1: at home or in the field? Uh? Yeah, or you
Speaker 1: or you just keep them away. But also the idea
Speaker 1: here is that there could be a political implication, which
Speaker 1: is just that beans are the food of the working class,
Speaker 1: whereas meat was preferred by the rich elites, and probably
Speaker 1: in Pythagoras's view, the better people, the people who deserve
Speaker 1: to rule because of their virtues would have been associated
Speaker 1: with meat, while you know, whereas the people who don't
Speaker 1: know how to rule a city, that they would be
Speaker 1: the people eating beans. I guess one way the one
Speaker 1: thing we have to sort of think about with this,
Speaker 1: this idea of this being the part of the pythagora
Speaker 1: and belief system is to realize too that like, it
Speaker 1: doesn't mean they were necessarily going out trying to liberate
Speaker 1: the bean fields or or necessarily trying to change the
Speaker 1: way that other groups UH consumed food. They could have
Speaker 1: been very like closed off from them and saying this
Speaker 1: is how we live, this is and then we are
Speaker 1: better for it. Um. I think that's that's kind of
Speaker 1: a distinction. I think in general we have to keep
Speaker 1: in mind when thinking about different religious religious groups in
Speaker 1: the contemporary world for sure, but also just historically, that
Speaker 1: that not every religious group is going to be about
Speaker 1: about spreading their belief system to all around them, right,
Speaker 1: and not all like religious dietary restrictions are meant to
Speaker 1: be a universal rule. Right. For example, I think there
Speaker 1: are a lot of religious scholars of say like Judaism
Speaker 1: and Islam that would say, like prohibitions on pork and
Speaker 1: other types of food that are prohibited within that religion
Speaker 1: are not meant to be universal prohibitions, but their prohibitions
Speaker 1: for the faithful. Right. But then again, I'm not sure
Speaker 1: if we That's a possibility always when you're considering dietary
Speaker 1: restrictions that are advocated by religious groups. But I do
Speaker 1: recall coming across at least one legend, though one for
Speaker 1: I don't recall the source of this, where Pythagoras was
Speaker 1: said to have tried to convince a cow not to
Speaker 1: eat fava beans. So if you're if you're preaching the cows,
Speaker 1: that's probably it probably means you want all humans to
Speaker 1: obey as well, right, But then again, that also sounds
Speaker 1: like a perfect parody of someone whose belief system you're
Speaker 1: you don't agree with, don't completely understand. You're like, oh,
Speaker 1: I bet Pathagoras is out there. What's he gonna do?
Speaker 1: Is gonna tell the cows not eat beans? Yeah? That though,
Speaker 1: that that could very well be the context there. Um, Okay,
Speaker 1: So there are other possible explanations. One is more nutritional
Speaker 1: and psychological, you know, pretty straightforward, beans give you gas,
Speaker 1: and gas prevents you from having a clear head, and
Speaker 1: a lot of ancient philosophers were really concerned about like
Speaker 1: cutting things out that would cause problems in the body,
Speaker 1: that would interfere with you having clear thinking. You gotta
Speaker 1: have a clear head to live a good life, and
Speaker 1: so you can't be going around farting. You know, this
Speaker 1: is this is interesting because I was I was thinking
Speaker 1: about this like it in terms of how we think
Speaker 1: about flatulence and plate us. We it's easy to have
Speaker 1: a very like one to one vision of that, you know,
Speaker 1: the idea of like, well, farting is distracting and you
Speaker 1: don't want to do it, that's gonna mess with your
Speaker 1: mental um outlook, or you know, we'll or we'll get
Speaker 1: into some of these ideas later where it's like, well,
Speaker 1: a fart is a ghost. You don't want ghosts coming
Speaker 1: out of your but you know that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: But uh, there's an idea that I ran across in
Speaker 1: a book that I was I was really enjoying reading
Speaker 1: through a book called Plants of Life Plants of Death
Speaker 1: by Frederick J. Simoons and We which which deals not
Speaker 1: not only with beans but various other plants entered traditions
Speaker 1: in a number of different cultures in the East and
Speaker 1: in the West, and uh in Africa, etcetera, about how
Speaker 1: there are these different ideas of life and death wrapped
Speaker 1: up in them. And in getting into the idea of
Speaker 1: of beans and flatulens and in discussing Pythagorean bean bands, uh,
Speaker 1: he discussed several of the possibilities, but but one that
Speaker 1: I hadn't really thought about was the connection between flatuns
Speaker 1: and bad dreams. And he cred it's uh Fridericus bomb
Speaker 1: in this idea. But I've also read that Diogenes touched
Speaker 1: on this in considering Pythagorean ideas quote one should abstain
Speaker 1: from fava beans since they are full of wind and
Speaker 1: take part in the soul. And if one abstains from
Speaker 1: from them, one stomach will be less noisy, and this
Speaker 1: is key, one's dreams will be less oppressive and calmer. Now,
Speaker 1: that quote attributed to uh uh two Diogenes was brought
Speaker 1: up in a l A Times article on beings from
Speaker 1: by Russ Parsons. But I thought that was that that
Speaker 1: was interesting, perhaps more telling. Yeah, if you're if your
Speaker 1: sleep is troubled, if your dreams are troubled, troubled because
Speaker 1: you're you're going to bed gassy with beans, then that
Speaker 1: that could very well darken your outlook on life or
Speaker 1: or mess with your head, especially in an age where
Speaker 1: you have, you know, maybe more supernatural ideas. Uh. Concerning
Speaker 1: dream teams and the interpretation of dreams, Yeah, that's really interesting.
Speaker 1: But I mean another way to think about it, though,
Speaker 1: I guess it's like it's kinda like the coach of
Speaker 1: the chess team is also going to be like telling
Speaker 1: all of their players, like, don't eat cookies right before
Speaker 1: you don't eat pickles when you're going to bet or something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're trying to keep their people in in like ship shape. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like reading through some of the other stuff in Simons book,
Speaker 1: there's you get into a lot of their prohibitions against
Speaker 1: foods because their connection to dreams, but also prohibitions against
Speaker 1: foods that could be consumed in a dream. Like it's
Speaker 1: not not that you shouldn't eat basil before you go
Speaker 1: to bed, but you've offered basil within the dream you
Speaker 1: should abstain. Um. Now, I was looking for more as
Speaker 1: to promise I can't keep Yeah, yeah, I mean once
Speaker 1: you're in the dream, and then not to say nothing
Speaker 1: of the dream within a dream. Um. But but I
Speaker 1: was looking around it for a little bit more about this,
Speaker 1: And I found an echo of this sentiment in Iranian
Speaker 1: tried traditional medicine uh in the two thousand fourteen paper
Speaker 1: Insomnia and Iranian Traditional Medicine by face of Body at
Speaker 1: all UH. Here's the quote. Upward movement of rancid vapors
Speaker 1: towards the brain due to eating flatulent and vaporous foods beans, lintel,
Speaker 1: leak and finn of Greek cause upward movement of vapor
Speaker 1: towards the head, heavy headed, feeling headache, depraved, delusion, nightmares,
Speaker 1: and consequently awaking at night and fearing during sleep. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I think after reading that, I'm even more convinced. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're if you're you know, gassy and full of
Speaker 1: nightmares and flatus is waking you up in the night. Um,
Speaker 1: I could see where that could lead into some ideas that, yes,
Speaker 1: these are some foods that should be avoided, certainly before
Speaker 1: you go to bed, but maybe in general if the
Speaker 1: if the dreams are bad enough, well that makes me
Speaker 1: want to respond to to to these folk beliefs with
Speaker 1: some actual science on farting and beans. So what if
Speaker 1: we take a brief little detail here on the science
Speaker 1: of lagoons and flatulence. Yeah, let's get down to it. Okay.
Speaker 1: So the question is do beans cause flatulence? That seems
Speaker 1: to be a widely believed association, and if so, why
Speaker 1: do they cause flatulence? Well, the answer seems to be yes,
Speaker 1: they do, but maybe not as much as you might think,
Speaker 1: and that there are very good, well known reasons why
Speaker 1: they cause flatulence. So the gas produced during the digestion
Speaker 1: of beans is actually not produced by the cells of
Speaker 1: your body themselves, but by your gut microbiota, the bacteria,
Speaker 1: particularly in your large intestine that breakdown molecules that your
Speaker 1: own metabolism sort of gives up. On dried beans even
Speaker 1: after cooking, usually contain compounds known as oligo saccharides, and
Speaker 1: I found an article in the Journal of Nutrition explaining this.
Speaker 1: This was by in fact, I wonder if we have
Speaker 1: cited this article before. It may have come up in
Speaker 1: our Pardonomicon episode several years back. Um, but this is
Speaker 1: by Donna M. Wyndham and Andrea M. Hutchins from the
Speaker 1: Nutrition Journal, called Perceptions of Flatulence from being consumption among
Speaker 1: adults in three Feeding Studies. This was published in two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven, and so I just wanted to look at
Speaker 1: the relevant paragraph where they break down the metabolic pathway
Speaker 1: that causes flatulence as a result of eating dried beans.
Speaker 1: So quote, most lagoons contain relatively high amounts of both
Speaker 1: dietary fiber and resistant starches. These would be the oligosaccharides
Speaker 1: I just mentioned. The soluble oligosaccharides found in lagoons are
Speaker 1: not digestible by human intestinal enzymes alone. Instead, oligosaccharides such
Speaker 1: as raphinos and stachios are broken down by bacterial fermentation
Speaker 1: in the intestines. Although some rectal gas is due to
Speaker 1: the ingestion of air, the majority of flatulence is produced
Speaker 1: from bacterial fermentation. The byproducts of this degradation are hydrogen,
Speaker 1: carbon dioxide, methane, and sometimes sulfur depending on the bacteria.
Speaker 1: Normal intestinal processes move these gases out of the body
Speaker 1: in the form of flat us. So the primary cause
Speaker 1: of of beans leading to farts is the action of
Speaker 1: the bacteria in the gut. I think specifically the large
Speaker 1: intestine fermenting these starches that the body can't break down
Speaker 1: on its own these oligo saccharides, and the authors also
Speaker 1: point out that while there is evidence that eating beans
Speaker 1: can increase flatulence on average, there is a lot of
Speaker 1: individual variations, so they're not going to increase flatulence or
Speaker 1: increase it in the in the at the same rate
Speaker 1: for everybody. UH to quote from the results of their
Speaker 1: feeding studies a measuring flatulence quote, less than fifty percent
Speaker 1: reported increased flatulence from eating pinto or baked beans during
Speaker 1: the first week of each trial. Only nineteen percent had
Speaker 1: a flatulence increase. With black eyed peas a small percentage.
Speaker 1: Three to eleven percent reported increased flatulence across the three studies,
Speaker 1: even on control diets without flatulence producing components and so yes,
Speaker 1: it does appear that on average, beans do increase flatulence,
Speaker 1: but they say that people's concerns about excess farting from
Speaker 1: eating beans maybe exaggerated compared to how much difference they
Speaker 1: actually make. Now, coming back to a note that's explored
Speaker 1: an Albola's book on this mentioning that these these starches
Speaker 1: that can't be broken down by the body itself but
Speaker 1: have to be fermented by the bacteria in the gut,
Speaker 1: these oligo saccharides, they have to be fermented in the
Speaker 1: large intestine, specifically as a product of eating dried beans,
Speaker 1: not fresh beans. And this is interesting because you can
Speaker 1: see how that has um sort of it translates to
Speaker 1: the differing reputations of these vegetables. Like fresh green peas
Speaker 1: are beans that they are of the family Fabaci, and
Speaker 1: I've never heard anybody link green peas to flatulence. They're
Speaker 1: eaten fresh. Fresh green beans are beings. They're beings still
Speaker 1: in their pods. They're actually the common being Fasiolus vulgaris.
Speaker 1: And yet they don't have this association either, so they
Speaker 1: don't seem to create these oligo saccharide problems. But there's
Speaker 1: a trade off, of course, which is that by being
Speaker 1: served fresh, they have to be more they have to
Speaker 1: be served more seasonally, or they have to be frozen.
Speaker 1: They don't offer the same advantages in terms of the
Speaker 1: simplicity and durability of their storage and shelf life version
Speaker 1: that that you get from dried beans. But anyway, Okay,
Speaker 1: scientific digression on flatulence done Now, I want to move
Speaker 1: back to albola cataloging the reasons that Pythagoras might have
Speaker 1: disdained the eating of beans. So another explanation that has
Speaker 1: been given by writers over the years is, well, what
Speaker 1: if it's just because beans are too delicious, you know
Speaker 1: that this is basically a prohibition against gluttony. This is
Speaker 1: perhaps plausible, though it doesn't seem to fit with most
Speaker 1: of the other thinking of the time that looked on
Speaker 1: beans not as like a decadent luxury, but as like
Speaker 1: the exact opposite of that. Maybe maybe this was just
Speaker 1: offered by some ancient writer who personally really loved beans,
Speaker 1: or perhaps you know, the idea that it's what it's
Speaker 1: something available in bulk enough that that more people can
Speaker 1: be gluttonous about it. I don't know, maybe I mean,
Speaker 1: but but yeah, you don't see that coming up a
Speaker 1: lot like the bean is not the symbol of gluttony.
Speaker 1: You don't think of Uh well no, no, I don't
Speaker 1: think you do. You don't think of the mean like
Speaker 1: it again, it is. It is often attributed as sort
Speaker 1: of the food of the common man. Okay, now we're
Speaker 1: going to get into sexual biomagical explanations of which there
Speaker 1: are a number. So in this category we get into
Speaker 1: some really weird territory under this explanation, and this was
Speaker 1: this was again put forward by a number of ancient
Speaker 1: writers who were commenting on abstention from beings. Uh. In
Speaker 1: this explanation, beans are to be avoided because, in various ways,
Speaker 1: they either resemble human genitals or they have something to
Speaker 1: do with sex, procreation, or regenerative power. And there there
Speaker 1: are several ancient stories that compare fava beans in particular
Speaker 1: to female genitals. But there's another one that connects all
Speaker 1: the way back to the transmigration of souls explanation. And
Speaker 1: this goes from the connection to of beans to testicles.
Speaker 1: Here I want to read from Albala again. Quote Aristotle
Speaker 1: picks up this thread when he explains that beans are
Speaker 1: like testicles, but adds that they are like the gates
Speaker 1: of hades in being the only plant that has no joints.
Speaker 1: That's some great Aristotle logic. Now what would that mean? Well,
Speaker 1: Albila continues that is, bean stems are hollow and have
Speaker 1: no nodes, and thus serve as a kind of elevator
Speaker 1: shaft from the underworld, the means of exchange for souls. Actually,
Speaker 1: they are specifically compared to a ladder. And this makes
Speaker 1: sense if one has ever seen fava bean pods protruding
Speaker 1: horizontally from a plant. They do resemble a ladder. This
Speaker 1: would explain the reluctant to run through a bean field
Speaker 1: and trample the stems, as well as the ban on
Speaker 1: picking the pods or rungs of the ladder. In short order,
Speaker 1: Aristotle also claimed that the beans were avoided because they
Speaker 1: are like the form of the universe, perhaps again a
Speaker 1: veiled reference to their regenerative power. Even otter is the
Speaker 1: idea that a nibbled being leaf in the sun will
Speaker 1: smell like semen or the blood of a murdered person,
Speaker 1: which must smell different from ordinary blood. Uh. The good
Speaker 1: editorializing from all their uh. In any case, all of
Speaker 1: these notions point to the idea that beings are some
Speaker 1: transitional form of human in the great transmigration of souls. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this one is putting flatulence in my brain. The papers
Speaker 1: are floating up. This is the kind of a statement
Speaker 1: here that it can feel like like genuine madness setting
Speaker 1: in you know where, where too many connections are made
Speaker 1: between unrelated things and and then you end up seeing
Speaker 1: like the human soul in everything around you. Um, it
Speaker 1: just sounds like just falling into the philosophic deep end
Speaker 1: and sinking to the bottom. Well, we're going to sink
Speaker 1: even farther the same types of associations they keep going on.
Speaker 1: So Albola explores some linguistic connections between ancient words for
Speaker 1: beings in various languages, I think primarily in like Indo
Speaker 1: European languages, and associations between that and words for swelling
Speaker 1: or rotund nous, which could in some ways connect to
Speaker 1: ideas of swelling up with flatulence, but also to pregnancy, fertility,
Speaker 1: in the generation of life, and in the latter vein.
Speaker 1: Many ancient authors seem to make an association that seems
Speaker 1: quite bizarre, probably to most modern listeners, but an association
Speaker 1: between foods that make you fart and foods that make
Speaker 1: you sexually potent. Again. This there's basically a linguistic conceptual
Speaker 1: logic to it, especially in ancient Greek thought, and Albola
Speaker 1: explains it like this, So, so you've got numa, you know,
Speaker 1: this is where we get like the word pneumatic p
Speaker 1: n e u m A meaning air or breath or soul.
Speaker 1: The Latin equivalent would be anima, as in like animated,
Speaker 1: like an animal is. So there's already this existing linguistic
Speaker 1: association between like the breath or the gas and and
Speaker 1: what the soul is and that this is the principle
Speaker 1: that animates a being and makes it alive. So like
Speaker 1: in much ancient Greek thought, when you die, your your
Speaker 1: breath leaves you, you know, like the gas of your
Speaker 1: soul evaporates from your body. And also in the creation
Speaker 1: of life, there's a breathing of life into things as
Speaker 1: an exchange of gas. Literally. Elbow rights that the numa
Speaker 1: quote was the basic principle of life, and it is
Speaker 1: generated in the stomach in the form of gas, just
Speaker 1: as it is transferred in the act of reproduction. This
Speaker 1: also explains the bizoe our association among authors like plenty
Speaker 1: of flatulence with the libido. In other words, eating beans
Speaker 1: not only makes you fart, it helps you conceive the
Speaker 1: being actually contains the regenerative force, and so this can
Speaker 1: be applied in multiple different ways. Elbow rights that, uh
Speaker 1: that you know, you may want to eat beans to
Speaker 1: absorb the power of these souls if you're trying to
Speaker 1: like stimulate the farting and the libido part of your body.
Speaker 1: But like the pythagoreans, you might do want to do
Speaker 1: the opposite and avoid eating these beans because of the
Speaker 1: sort of like windy regenerative soul power that's contained within them.
Speaker 1: Very weird. Now, we've been exploring a lot of the
Speaker 1: explanations that lie behind this in terms of I don't know,
Speaker 1: linguistic associations and religious thinking and stuff, but there are
Speaker 1: also some biological realities that Elbola explores that could possibly
Speaker 1: have to do with beans uh and and how they
Speaker 1: could have influenced the creation of this story about byThe Aggaras.
Speaker 1: These following explanations that I'm going to mention are not
Speaker 1: things that were explored by any ancient writers. These are
Speaker 1: are modern explanations that have been offered. And the first
Speaker 1: is based on a heritable genetic condition that causes an
Speaker 1: enzyme deficiency. So most people can eat fava beans and
Speaker 1: breathe the pollen of fava bean flowers and they're just fine.
Speaker 1: But there is a very rare inherited medical condition that
Speaker 1: causes a specific enzyme deficiency in the body, which can
Speaker 1: in turn cause catastrophic reactions to the ingestion of fava
Speaker 1: beans or fava bean pollen uh. And this condition is
Speaker 1: known as favi is um, caused by an underlying glucose
Speaker 1: six phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency or G six p d D.
Speaker 1: People with G six p d D can have horrible,
Speaker 1: even deadly reactions to fava beans in their pollen, and
Speaker 1: if a person with this condition eats fresh raw fava beans,
Speaker 1: it can lead to a reaction called acute hemolytic anemia,
Speaker 1: or the sudden destruction of copious amounts of the body's
Speaker 1: red blood cells now outwardly. This can result in symptoms
Speaker 1: like fatigue, difficulty breathing, fever, yellowing of the skin, dark urine,
Speaker 1: and in extreme cases, it can even be fatal. So
Speaker 1: a question some modern scholars have posed is could Pythagoras
Speaker 1: have prohibited fava beans because he witnessed somebody having an
Speaker 1: acute reaction due to G six p d D. Interesting possibility,
Speaker 1: but it seems like one of the I mean, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of explanations like this for records of
Speaker 1: the ancient world that like fit together in interesting ways.
Speaker 1: But I didn't. I don't feel like there's any particular
Speaker 1: reason to favor this hypothesis. No, I mean, it seems plausible.
Speaker 1: You know, either he witnessed this or he heard accounts
Speaker 1: of this happening. Hey, some people have been known to
Speaker 1: eat java beans and grow, you know, extremely ill or
Speaker 1: even die. But yeah, if we don't have any specific
Speaker 1: cases for it, specific instances in in the writing, then yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know if we should put too much emphasis
Speaker 1: on a yea. One thing is it is interesting about
Speaker 1: the idea of avoiding not just eating the beans, but
Speaker 1: avoiding running into a bean field, like if the pollen
Speaker 1: could even trigger the reaction. I mean, that's kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: You could definitely see it potentially playing into some of
Speaker 1: these ideas, especially if we get when we get more
Speaker 1: and more into this, this this realization that the bean
Speaker 1: fear and the being holiness here is by no means
Speaker 1: just uh, something that jumped out of Pythagoras's head, right,
Speaker 1: This seems to have been a cultural idea, perhaps a
Speaker 1: widespread cultural idea, but we'll get more into that in
Speaker 1: a minute. Now. Another interesting scientific observation, Again, this is
Speaker 1: not from ancient interpreters. This one might be original to
Speaker 1: all below, but at least it's it's not ancient. Um.
Speaker 1: This could complement the previous evidence that Pythagoras believed beings
Speaker 1: to contain souls, and the simple fact here is that
Speaker 1: sometimes it looks like being plants bleed yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: chain of biological causes at work here. Essentially, being roots
Speaker 1: can become infected by a bacterium known as rhizobium, and
Speaker 1: these bacteria thrive in tiny little oxygen starved chambers within
Speaker 1: the roots or nodes on the roots, and the bacteria
Speaker 1: exists in a mutualistic relationship with the bean plants. So
Speaker 1: the bacterium is, according to Albola, able to extract ammonium
Speaker 1: nitrate from the atmosphere, which it shares with the plant,
Speaker 1: which is good for the plant. And then the plant
Speaker 1: provides these little anaerobic nodes for the bacteria to live
Speaker 1: on and in, and they both create proteins that bind
Speaker 1: whatever free oxygen is available with the help of iron molecules.
Speaker 1: This might be familiar to people who an anything about
Speaker 1: animal biology or medical science. Albolo rights quote. This protein
Speaker 1: is called leg hemoglobin and functions much in the same
Speaker 1: way hemoglobin does in our blood, binding oxygen with iron
Speaker 1: for our bodies to use in cellular respiration. Moreover, when cut,
Speaker 1: the nodes are red exactly like blood. So imagine being
Speaker 1: in the ancient world. You cut open a bean plant,
Speaker 1: there are parts of it that if you cut cut
Speaker 1: open might bleed or look like they're filled with blood,
Speaker 1: and these little nodes would look red like human blood
Speaker 1: for basically the same reason that human blood is read. Now,
Speaker 1: I know a lot of you are probably thinking right now,
Speaker 1: you're thinking, well, I bet Pythagoras just hated beats then, um,
Speaker 1: And you know, actually, according to Simmons, we do see
Speaker 1: aversion to beats in some cultures. He he mentions prohibitions
Speaker 1: against quote certain plants as food or temple offer rings
Speaker 1: because their coats, flesh, or juice are similar to blood
Speaker 1: and meat in color. So he cites examples members of
Speaker 1: the Bannaya caste of the of the Punjab with meat
Speaker 1: prohibitions here extending two carrots, turnips, onions, and red lentils.
Speaker 1: Also the prohibition of beat roots and tomatoes at Brahmin
Speaker 1: meals and and Gujarat as well as Havoc Brahmin's in
Speaker 1: South India, among others. And he mentions, um, how Frasier
Speaker 1: got into this a bit as well, the idea of
Speaker 1: like similarity between things. Uh So, so that's Interating's not
Speaker 1: again not specifically talking about Pathagoras in this instance, but
Speaker 1: we do see this sort of thing in other cultures
Speaker 1: enough to realize it's you know, it's kind of a universal, uh,
Speaker 1: phenomena of of of of humans engaging with their food.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the food reminds you too much of a thing
Speaker 1: that is prohibited, and the prohibition will extend to those things.
Speaker 1: If not in an every day way, then certainly within
Speaker 1: the realm of sacred ritual. When it comes to beat specifically,
Speaker 1: I can imagine another cause for for for beat scorn,
Speaker 1: which would be possible horror at going to the bathroom
Speaker 1: after consuming beats, which can be even though it doesn't
Speaker 1: hurt you, it just visually you could be quite alarming. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: new parents always warn your child the first time they
Speaker 1: have a lot of beats or or blue cupcakes, either one.
Speaker 1: Now I mentioned the idea that there, you know, this
Speaker 1: idea of being weirdness and beans and death and reproduction
Speaker 1: and so forth, that it doesn't just emerge right out
Speaker 1: of Pythagoras's head, that it is perhaps more universal. That's
Speaker 1: an argument that Simmons makes in his book. Uh. He
Speaker 1: writes quote, since parallels to Pythagoraean beliefs about the fava
Speaker 1: being are found in the being beliefs involving various species
Speaker 1: of beans of widely scattered non Indo European people's in Uganda, India, Japan,
Speaker 1: New Guinea, and the New World. We are likely dealing
Speaker 1: with basic human reactions to beans or lagoons in general,
Speaker 1: which I thought was interesting. Yeah, okay, so this would
Speaker 1: be the idea that since there's there are similar kinds
Speaker 1: of being fascination and being magical beliefs in all these
Speaker 1: different cultures that don't necessarily share like say, language or
Speaker 1: cooking traditions or anything like that, it might be something
Speaker 1: more just like about the raw biology of beans that
Speaker 1: causes people to have these sort of thoughts like maybe
Speaker 1: the ways they look or things they do when you
Speaker 1: eat them, Yes, and just thinking too hard and too
Speaker 1: long about how they relate to our own worldview and
Speaker 1: magical ideas. At this point, I want to I want
Speaker 1: to run through just a few other being uh ideas
Speaker 1: that that that Frederick J. Simmons brings up in Plants
Speaker 1: of Life Plants of Death. These these are all related
Speaker 1: to so what I loosely categorized as being death folk
Speaker 1: reliefs uh sort of leaning into the Stephen king esque
Speaker 1: um world of of of beans in the bean field
Speaker 1: being a place of death, a pay, a place of
Speaker 1: connection to the underworld and potentially rebirth. Okay, so we're
Speaker 1: gonna walk behind the pods, yes, so um uh. He
Speaker 1: points out that there was a British folk belief that
Speaker 1: pregnant women should not eat beans because it could impact
Speaker 1: the child mentally. Additionally, bean blossoms have an evil reputation
Speaker 1: in Northern and Midland England in coal mining districts, because
Speaker 1: it was long held that coal mining accidents were far
Speaker 1: more likely to occur when bean plants were blossoming. He
Speaker 1: also writes that, according to German folk belief, beans and
Speaker 1: peas were quote cult foods of demons, so it was
Speaker 1: best not to eat them on nights that were quote
Speaker 1: favorable for magical divination. Now I have to admit that
Speaker 1: that all kind of sounds like a riddle to me.
Speaker 1: I'm not exactly sure what that would mean, You like,
Speaker 1: don't get down with the fava beans on vol purchase knocked. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: something like that. I would imagine, um uh. Because and
Speaker 1: and certainly there's some more examples where we see beans
Speaker 1: connected to specific uh dates, specific traditional festivals. Because also
Speaker 1: in Germany there were superstitions that eating peas on the
Speaker 1: twelfth night, that's the twelfth night after Christmas. Uh that
Speaker 1: this would give you vermin infestations or leprosy, and it
Speaker 1: beans peas or lintels during this time could at least
Speaker 1: make you itch if you were to consume them. Now,
Speaker 1: there's another British folk belief that bean fields are inhabited
Speaker 1: by ghosts and spirits, and in nineteenth century Leicestershire it
Speaker 1: was said that if you slept in a bean field
Speaker 1: all night, the awful dreams and resulting desires would just
Speaker 1: drive you insane, like you would just you would not
Speaker 1: survive a night in the bean fields. Sleeping a night
Speaker 1: in the bean field would be like sleeping a night
Speaker 1: in a haunted house. Who but, due to my being love,
Speaker 1: I want to say it's gonna be like that Simpson's
Speaker 1: episode where they have to spend the night in the
Speaker 1: haunted house to discover that the tap water tastes better
Speaker 1: than the stuff they have at home. Now, UM, I
Speaker 1: know what a lot of you're probably thinking. You're a
Speaker 1: probably thinking, well, this is all well and good, But
Speaker 1: did beans ever march in battle bringing forth an army
Speaker 1: of the undead to march alongside it, like walking trees
Speaker 1: and Welsh smith. Well, yes they did, because Simmons points
Speaker 1: to the writings of the Welsh bard uh Talison, who
Speaker 1: described just such a scene, quoting quoting the work um
Speaker 1: the Elm trees he quotes quote stood firm in the
Speaker 1: center of the battle. Heaven and earth trembled before the
Speaker 1: advance of the oak tree. The heroic Holly and Hawthorne
Speaker 1: defended themselves with their spikes. And then meanwhile, the beans
Speaker 1: took part in battle by quote, bearing in its shade
Speaker 1: an army of phantoms. So beans and spirits again. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this idea that, like the beans, the bean field is
Speaker 1: where you find the ghosts that will drive you either
Speaker 1: you know, mad or fill you with maddening desire. And
Speaker 1: the idea that you have the trees were to to
Speaker 1: into all the plants were to rise up and march
Speaker 1: in an army, then beans would surely lead an army
Speaker 1: of phantoms into battle. I love that, Okay. I think
Speaker 1: we have a serious deficiency in the horror fiction and
Speaker 1: horror movies of today, a deficiency of bean themed horror. Right.
Speaker 1: This has got to be somebody's got to pick up
Speaker 1: on this. I feel like we have just largely abandoned
Speaker 1: our our understanding of of supernatural beings outside of like
Speaker 1: the one you know of fairy tale about magic beings
Speaker 1: that grow up gateways to the world of the giants. Now,
Speaker 1: speaking of fava beans, I was looking at a University
Speaker 1: of Copenhagen study looking into the possibility of fava beans
Speaker 1: taking over more from soybeans to meet the increasing popularity
Speaker 1: of plant based meat alternatives, specifically in Denmark. The argument
Speaker 1: here is that fava beans put less strain on the
Speaker 1: environment as a crop, and unlike soy, they can be
Speaker 1: grown locally in Denmark as opposed to having depend on
Speaker 1: soy which is largely grown in the United States and
Speaker 1: in South America. UM. And that in particularly in South America,
Speaker 1: that's where you get into some of the in the
Speaker 1: real environmental concerns about you know, what kind of land
Speaker 1: is being transitioned into soy growing land. UM. But the
Speaker 1: particular study here highlights the use of wet fraction nation
Speaker 1: to concentrate fava being protein and removed digestion inhibiting substances
Speaker 1: in the beans, and the result is dry fractionated fava
Speaker 1: being protein rich flower uh so I don't know where
Speaker 1: that will ultimately go, but it's it's an interesting, uh,
Speaker 1: interesting bit of of info there and potentially insight into
Speaker 1: the future again thinking about um you know, turning more
Speaker 1: and more to UM two artificial meats and uh and
Speaker 1: being based diets and returned to the bean fields and
Speaker 1: and perhaps returned to you know, beans, depending on beans
Speaker 1: that that grow more naturally within a given region. Now
Speaker 1: there's another great being I wanted to talk about for
Speaker 1: a bit here, and that's the black eyed pea, also
Speaker 1: known as the cow pea. And yes it's called a
Speaker 1: p but it is a proper bean. It's in the
Speaker 1: family for base And the modern species name of the
Speaker 1: cow pea is vigna on guiculata, which was once known
Speaker 1: as Vignus and insis because it was believed to have
Speaker 1: come from China, but this is now known to be incorrect.
Speaker 1: Modern botanists and archaeologists believed that these beans were first
Speaker 1: domesticated in Africa, probably originating in West Africa that I've
Speaker 1: seen the possibility of Ethiopia as well. But Albala and
Speaker 1: his book and notes that some of the archaeological evidence
Speaker 1: about their history it comes from the Chad basin, which
Speaker 1: seems to indicate that people who were originally making a
Speaker 1: living primarily through animal herding came into the area about
Speaker 1: eighteen hundred b c e. And within about six hundred
Speaker 1: years of occupying the Chad Basin, they began to convert
Speaker 1: to an agricultural civilization, with their staple crops consisting of
Speaker 1: pearl millet and black eyed peas. So again, like we
Speaker 1: see in so many places in the world, a transition
Speaker 1: to a settled farming existence based on a sort of
Speaker 1: crop package of complementary grains and lagoons. I think the
Speaker 1: examples we talked about the other episode were, say, like
Speaker 1: you might have wheats or grasses like iron corn and lentils,
Speaker 1: or you could have maize and beans in UH in
Speaker 1: the Americas. But black eyed peas have been an important
Speaker 1: part of West African agriculture ever since, and they've eventually,
Speaker 1: of course, spread all over the world. They spread north
Speaker 1: to Europe, they spread east to Asia, and they're they're
Speaker 1: popular in all these different regions. Uh And of course
Speaker 1: they eventually became part of the food traditions of enslaved
Speaker 1: people taken from Africa to the Caribbean and to the
Speaker 1: Southern US. So much like okra and rice, which were
Speaker 1: also imported from African culinary traditions, black eyed peas ended
Speaker 1: up becoming foundational elements of Southern American cooking in general. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: I've seen some there's been some excellent cooking documentaries about
Speaker 1: this connection. Uh and uh and and I and I
Speaker 1: have to say, yeah, if if anyone out there, if
Speaker 1: you haven't add um a bean sandwich um connected to
Speaker 1: some of these African culinary traditions or at least descended
Speaker 1: from them, I highly recommended, Like it's it's so good.
Speaker 1: I love black eyed peas, and I've never had a
Speaker 1: bean sandwich, so I gotta I gotta look that up.
Speaker 1: Do you know a good place to get one in town? Um?
Speaker 1: I don't know that I've had one at a restaurant.
Speaker 1: I've just we've just followed some recipes. Uh. But but
Speaker 1: and yeah, you can find some really good recipes online.
Speaker 1: In fact, there's some form for black eyed pea based sandwiches,
Speaker 1: which which can be a way to because we have
Speaker 1: that kind of like loose New Year tradition of eat
Speaker 1: black eyed peas, right because they're they're good luck or
Speaker 1: it's part of a good luck suite of foods. That's
Speaker 1: the health part of the package, right, You eat eat pork,
Speaker 1: black eyed peas, and grains, and that's for what happiness,
Speaker 1: health and wealth? Yeah. Yeah, And so the black eyed peas,
Speaker 1: if they're cooked certain ways, can be kind of a
Speaker 1: hard sell. But I tell you, if you make a
Speaker 1: really tasty sandwich with them, you're good to go. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have to try the sandwich. But but anyway,
Speaker 1: like other examples we've we've looked at, beans seem to
Speaker 1: occupy a sort of hub of religious significance in the
Speaker 1: West African context as well. And Albla mentions that, for example,
Speaker 1: in Yoruba religious practice, people would regularly offer meals, often
Speaker 1: based on black eyed peas, to the godly beings or
Speaker 1: spirits of the Oruba religion known as Orisha's and Albula
Speaker 1: quotes this interesting Yoruba proverb that goes, you do not
Speaker 1: know what black eyed peas are like for dinner? And
Speaker 1: I was like, WHOA, I wonder what that means. But
Speaker 1: he explains that it refers to a person who is
Speaker 1: so stupid and negligent that he is totally unmindful of
Speaker 1: the consequences of his actions. So like you're you're so
Speaker 1: dumb you don't know what black eyed peas are like
Speaker 1: for dinner. That's very eating. But another interesting thing about
Speaker 1: black eyed peas is um that one of the cultivars
Speaker 1: that became especially popular and I think Eastern and Southeast
Speaker 1: Asia are the so called yard long beans. These are
Speaker 1: a variety of cowpy They are Vigna anguikulata, but they
Speaker 1: are the subspecies uh Sesqua pedalists. They are not actually
Speaker 1: a yard long, despite their name. I think they're usually
Speaker 1: about half that, but they are really long. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you've ever bought these and tried to cook
Speaker 1: with them or I remember like just like kind of
Speaker 1: laughing as I was trying to like handle them one
Speaker 1: time at the farmer's market. Yeah, I don't know if
Speaker 1: you included a picture. I don't know if we've actually
Speaker 1: tried to cook with with with peas this long. But yeah,
Speaker 1: you have to like choppaman half right or or I
Speaker 1: think sometimes you you just shell them, like you get
Speaker 1: the fresh peas out of them. But but yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure. I I honestly do not remember what I
Speaker 1: did with them when I got them being enthusiasts, let
Speaker 1: us know, how do you handle these things. I got
Speaker 1: another black eyed pea fact that I think is very interesting,
Speaker 1: And this picks up on something we've mentioned a couple
Speaker 1: of times on the show before. It's one of those,
Speaker 1: you know, those sort of mind opening moments that is
Speaker 1: triggered by a simple reimagination of a food item. In
Speaker 1: the past, we've talked about how avocados. You know, American
Speaker 1: audiences I think primarily are going to think of avocados
Speaker 1: as a savory food, right, you have them in salty
Speaker 1: applications or not necessarily they don't have to be salty,
Speaker 1: but you wouldn't usually think of putting avocados in sweet foods.
Speaker 1: But that is by no means universal, and it is
Speaker 1: in no way based on objective things about the food itself.
Speaker 1: That's just a cultural convention. Avocados are used in sweet
Speaker 1: applications in all kinds of food traditions. Oh absolutely, yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, havocado smoothies, for example, can be quite sweet
Speaker 1: and quite lovely. But there's another food that's like this,
Speaker 1: black eyed peas. Black eyed peas are sometimes used in
Speaker 1: sweet rather than savory dishes. If you haven't had it
Speaker 1: that can be kind of hard to imagine. But for example,
Speaker 1: I was finding a bunch of recipes for a Vietnamese
Speaker 1: dessert food that was like like variations on the idea
Speaker 1: of sweet or coconut sticky rice with black eyed peas. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean that reminds me that you do
Speaker 1: encounter beans in a lot of of East Asian desserts,
Speaker 1: whether it be like a bean paste or a bean
Speaker 1: filling that will be quite sweet. Another one I haven't tried,
Speaker 1: but that's going on my list. So I gotta have, uh,
Speaker 1: sweet sticky rice with black eyed peas and a black
Speaker 1: eyed peas sandwich. Yeah, and get some red bean ice
Speaker 1: cream in there as well. It's good stuff. Now. Now,
Speaker 1: speaking of of of culinary traditions in East Asia, I
Speaker 1: thought we might take a little bit of time here
Speaker 1: to discuss the soybean, a vastly important being and one
Speaker 1: of humanity's principal food crops so um. In Chinese mythology,
Speaker 1: the soybean is one of the five grains which are
Speaker 1: either sacred themselves or their history is considered sacred. I
Speaker 1: think it depends on the telling. Uh So the exact
Speaker 1: listing of five grains varies, but I think every version,
Speaker 1: at least every version I was coming across, does include soybeans,
Speaker 1: while some tellings will include the azuki bean as one
Speaker 1: of the five grains, but the soybeans tend to make
Speaker 1: the list, and the five grains are often connected to
Speaker 1: the myths of Shinong, the divine farmer who we've talked
Speaker 1: about on the show before, the culture hero and mythological
Speaker 1: ruler of ancient China often depicted in um in art
Speaker 1: is having bovine qualities to his appearance, including horns or
Speaker 1: horn like nubs on his head. Oh yeah, we love
Speaker 1: Shinnong here. I think we talked about him in the
Speaker 1: Mushroom Foraging episode, didn't we, Because there's a legend that
Speaker 1: he he sort of tested the mushrooms to see what
Speaker 1: was safe, right, because he is well he in general,
Speaker 1: he's being the father of agriculture. He said to have
Speaker 1: sought out and sampled a vast multitude of plants and
Speaker 1: you know, and that would include mushrooms in the ancient sense,
Speaker 1: in order to determine what was beneficial and what was not.
Speaker 1: And in doing so so, it's also sometimes said that
Speaker 1: he sampled seventy poisons in one day. So again he's
Speaker 1: just it's the father of of of agriculture and into
Speaker 1: a large traditional medicine. But also he's his personification of
Speaker 1: the gradual process of human entity figuring out what different
Speaker 1: plants do if they're consumed in different quantities. Now, as
Speaker 1: um Heimowitz and a Shirtlift pointed out in two thousand
Speaker 1: fives Debunking Soybean Myths and legends in the historical and
Speaker 1: popular literature, there are a lot of myths about soybeans
Speaker 1: that get passed along, and they ultimately involve everyone from
Speaker 1: Shinnong to Benjamin Franklin. While it is sometimes said that
Speaker 1: the mythical Chinong gave us the soybean as a domestic
Speaker 1: crop five thousand years ago, uh, the author's stress at
Speaker 1: the real time period is likely um eleventh century BC,
Speaker 1: or perhaps a bit earlier based on recorded history. So
Speaker 1: it's still really impressive. Yeah, Now, do we know anything
Speaker 1: about how the soybean was domesticated or does it seem
Speaker 1: like one of those things we have to infer kind
Speaker 1: of like the examples we were talking about in part one,
Speaker 1: where it was probably like an accidental process of of
Speaker 1: picking and then cultivating the ones like the pods that
Speaker 1: stayed closed the longest in the natural varieties. I believe
Speaker 1: that's the case. I was reading, Uh Robert M. Stupars
Speaker 1: Into the Wild of from and p N A. S.
Speaker 1: And the exact date uh they write is still a
Speaker 1: matter of dispute. And quote, most estimates approximate the domestication
Speaker 1: occurred somewhere between three thousand, one hundred and nine thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, so a fair amount of leeway. And you know,
Speaker 1: in in any attempt to really pinpoint when this was domesticated.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, this is actually something I came across, uh
Speaker 1: with the number of beings referenced in Albola's book, which
Speaker 1: there are a number of cases where we really just
Speaker 1: don't know when they refers domesticated. It's just not you know,
Speaker 1: big question mark. Now I want to get things back
Speaker 1: into the magical realm here because I ran across this,
Speaker 1: this wonderful tradition, this festival known as setsubun, and it's
Speaker 1: um It's a tradition in Japan involving beans. It's a
Speaker 1: spring festival and it means changing of the seas, and
Speaker 1: it has the same energy as a number of seasonal
Speaker 1: change traditions in uh in in Eastern cultures, in cultures
Speaker 1: in general, including the expulsion of evil spirits and bad
Speaker 1: luck and the invocation of good luck and good health. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this one in particular appears to have roots in
Speaker 1: Chinese Lunar New Year traditions that took on new form
Speaker 1: in Japanese culture. So one of the activities around this time,
Speaker 1: and you know, there's several different things, it's not just
Speaker 1: one thing you do. But one of the activities involves
Speaker 1: driving the only out of one's house. So the only
Speaker 1: we've I think we've discussed them on the show before.
Speaker 1: Uh in one of our Halloween episodes. Only were evil
Speaker 1: spirits or demons thought capable of causing illness and disease.
Speaker 1: I think we may have even discussed some kind of
Speaker 1: traditions of driving the only out of your house. This
Speaker 1: sounds very familiar. Well, one way you can do it,
Speaker 1: especially at sets a bund, is by pelting them with
Speaker 1: roasted soybeans. Ah. These are these are also a traditional
Speaker 1: snack of festivities, but they symbolize purity. Oh, this makes
Speaker 1: me think of something that uh, you know, it is
Speaker 1: something that so when I grew up, I always thought
Speaker 1: of beans being cooked in a wet application. You know,
Speaker 1: they're they're cooked in water, boiled over time. Of course,
Speaker 1: you know you usually need to do that to dry beans,
Speaker 1: because this is another thing we actually haven't talked about
Speaker 1: in this episode yet, but many, many dry beans can
Speaker 1: have high levels of toxins in them if you do
Speaker 1: not boil them for before eating them. So you don't
Speaker 1: ever want to take a dry bean and then just
Speaker 1: soak it and eat it. That can give your food poisoning.
Speaker 1: You don't want to do that. You got to boil
Speaker 1: the beans or cook it with high heat somehow. But
Speaker 1: another common method in in many food traditions around the
Speaker 1: world is roasting beans, roasting them dry in some way.
Speaker 1: And I think you could probably do this with with
Speaker 1: fresher beans probably, but you can kind of pop some
Speaker 1: beans like you can make popcorn. Yeah. And and certainly
Speaker 1: if you're trying to drive only out of the house,
Speaker 1: you don't want to be thrown like handfuls of of
Speaker 1: canned beans or whole candy beans. Yeah, especially since a
Speaker 1: lot of the times you can look at pictures of
Speaker 1: this in videos. It's pretty pretty charming because apparently sometimes
Speaker 1: at schools you'll have a principle, or a teacher put
Speaker 1: on the only costume, and the and the children will
Speaker 1: be in the hallways and then they will throw the
Speaker 1: beans at the only to drive it out of the school. Now,
Speaker 1: I was reading a little bit more about this on
Speaker 1: the Japan Society website, and uh, I want to read
Speaker 1: a quote from from their web page that gets into
Speaker 1: some more answers about why you would throw these beans
Speaker 1: at an own e. They write quote, to find an answer,
Speaker 1: we must go back in time and look at Chinese numerology,
Speaker 1: where many concepts come in fives to correspond to the
Speaker 1: five elements would water, fire, metal, and earth. Soybeans were
Speaker 1: included in what we're designated the five cereals or the
Speaker 1: five most important crops. That's what we we just talked about. Uh,
Speaker 1: they continue. Soybeans or Da Dao literally the big being,
Speaker 1: were considered particularly powerful because they were believed to contain
Speaker 1: the spirits of all the serials combined. Um mommy or
Speaker 1: being is a homophone for mommy, and I'm sure I'm
Speaker 1: I'm not saying mommy correct in these these cases, but
Speaker 1: in both cases they're saying it means destroying evil. So
Speaker 1: soybeans were thought to be especially effective weapons against only demons,
Speaker 1: somewhat like garlic is believed to be powerful against vampires
Speaker 1: in the West. Wow. Okay, so the being the word
Speaker 1: being as a homophone for another word that that sounds
Speaker 1: similar but means destroying evil. Yeah yeah, so, uh, you
Speaker 1: know that's you see that connection come up time and
Speaker 1: time again when you're dealing with you know, particularly with
Speaker 1: I've seen this, you know plenty of times in um
Speaker 1: in Chinese writings where you know, something just doesn't translate,
Speaker 1: like the various ghost stories in um uh In Tales
Speaker 1: a Chinese studio, Like in translation. Uh, They're all still
Speaker 1: really amusing, but a lot of times if you were
Speaker 1: reading them in the original Mandarin, there would be there
Speaker 1: would be homophones in place that would make everything more
Speaker 1: meaningful or perhaps more funny in some cases, that sort
Speaker 1: of thing. Yeah, there's I mean, there's so many features
Speaker 1: of Chinese poetry that I've read about. It's just so
Speaker 1: difficult to capture effectively in translation. Uh. And I do
Speaker 1: love a lot of Chinese poetry in translation, But I
Speaker 1: mean that's one thing. Another thing I've read about is
Speaker 1: just that, like a lot of really good Chinese poetry
Speaker 1: has a has a quality of density that cannot really
Speaker 1: be communicated in English. Yeah. Uh, Now, this is this
Speaker 1: idea of using beings as a as a weapon against
Speaker 1: the demons, or some sort of protective amulet against demons. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: this can be found in plenty of other cultures as well.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to come back to Frederick J. Simmons
Speaker 1: Plants of Light, plants of death, because he has a
Speaker 1: number of other examples in which the beans are serving
Speaker 1: as a weapon or a protection against evil spirits. He
Speaker 1: points out that British folk belief once held that beans
Speaker 1: were associated with witches, and you could protect yourself against
Speaker 1: a witch is evil spell by spitting a bean at
Speaker 1: her u food. So yeah, I mean it's I would
Speaker 1: not I don't think you should spit beans that people
Speaker 1: you think might be witches, but clearly it was once done.
Speaker 1: All right, here's another. He also writes that at the
Speaker 1: start of the eighteenth century, on the Aisle of Harry's
Speaker 1: in Scotland, melucca beans, especially white meluca beans, were worn
Speaker 1: around the necks of children as a ward against the
Speaker 1: evil eye and also sort of witchcraft in general, and
Speaker 1: if evil magic came shooting in at the child, the
Speaker 1: bean would turn black. Whoa, which also reminds me of
Speaker 1: some of the you know, we've talked about poison detection,
Speaker 1: uh in various cultures. You know, it sounds like trying
Speaker 1: to achieve the same thing but with a bean, like
Speaker 1: your little radiation detector badge, except is for witchcraft. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: Now there are other European beliefs of protective beans. The
Speaker 1: Cilian traditions held that beans had protective qualities for childbirth.
Speaker 1: So a woman in or approaching labor could eat nine
Speaker 1: black beans and that would serve as a protective Uh
Speaker 1: not really, an emulated would be a protective act. I
Speaker 1: guess there's also a tradition of stacking nine black beans
Speaker 1: and placing them on a table near a newborn child
Speaker 1: protect to protect it from evil spirits. Wait, how do
Speaker 1: you stack black beans? Um? I think it would be
Speaker 1: like a little pyramid of black beans, kind of make
Speaker 1: a structure of the black beans. Now, in Morocco, uh,
Speaker 1: an ambulance of of seven black beans could be used
Speaker 1: to protect sheep and goats from smallpox, and seven black
Speaker 1: beans could also be used by Moroccan scholars or scribes
Speaker 1: rather in order to become invisible, so you know, using
Speaker 1: black beans and some sort of essentially sorcery. Now that's
Speaker 1: the kind of spell that I would imagine is probably
Speaker 1: more like cataloged by somebody who attributes the the used
Speaker 1: to others rather than somebody who did it themselves, because
Speaker 1: you could probably quite quickly find out if you were
Speaker 1: actually trying this, that you cannot become invisible by using
Speaker 1: black beings. There are also traditions in Morocco of five
Speaker 1: black beans being used in protective amulets. So these might
Speaker 1: be for instance, sewn into fabric, so you could have
Speaker 1: have the five black beans in this piece of fabric.
Speaker 1: Then then you then wear as an amulet. And he
Speaker 1: He also makes mention in the Book of European Traditions
Speaker 1: concerning St. John's Eve. This is the um the the
Speaker 1: eve of celebration before the feast day of St. John
Speaker 1: the Baptist, but the celebration itself existed before the coming
Speaker 1: of Christianity. Um and uh it's tied. Simmons explains to
Speaker 1: summer solstice anxieties and the belief that this is a
Speaker 1: time when demons and evil spirits will rise up and
Speaker 1: must be driven back. And if this sounds a lot
Speaker 1: like Nido and Bald Mountain from Disney's Fantasia. While you
Speaker 1: are correct because the original title of of Masursky's music
Speaker 1: was St. John's Night on the Bare Mountain. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: was new to me as well, But at any rate,
Speaker 1: it's it's a time during which you have these various
Speaker 1: traditions involving fire but also medicinal plants, uh such as St.
Speaker 1: John's wart, And unfortunately it also entailed more than a
Speaker 1: little burning of black cats. But given the fava beans
Speaker 1: association with the underworld and spirits, it may have been
Speaker 1: connected as well. In Tuscany, St John's fire was lighted
Speaker 1: in a field of beans to make them ripe and faster,
Speaker 1: it's said, And in Sicily you ate your fava beans
Speaker 1: with a word of thanks to St. John. And there
Speaker 1: are other other religious and traditions of three beans that
Speaker 1: were ritually consumed, representing wealth, competence, and poverty, depending on
Speaker 1: the state of the peeling. Oh yeah, well, this ties
Speaker 1: into another thing. I guess we sort of got into
Speaker 1: this when I was mentioning uh Oogenies the Cynic Philosopher.
Speaker 1: But the in there there is also a tradition of
Speaker 1: intentionally eating beans to signal asceticism, like the ascetic life,
Speaker 1: you know, to say that I reject the pleasures of
Speaker 1: this world and I'm going to be a person of
Speaker 1: the simple virtues of the spirit, meaning that you know,
Speaker 1: I I'm not going to be eating butter and bacon
Speaker 1: every day. Instead, I'm going to be having beans. Which
Speaker 1: makes me think, of course, about the associations with John
Speaker 1: the Baptist, Right. John the Baptist lived in wilderness, and
Speaker 1: he you know, he wore rough clothes and he ate
Speaker 1: honey and locusts, which might be the equivalent of a
Speaker 1: medieval European monks saying, Okay, I mean, I mean I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna eat beans. I'm gonna be a you know,
Speaker 1: a person. I'm gonna be a man of the wild
Speaker 1: and just commune with God. Now I have one more
Speaker 1: to mention here, and this one brings us back to
Speaker 1: German celebrations of Twelfth Night. And this was the idea
Speaker 1: that Germans and uh And and other Northern Europeans once
Speaker 1: would select a king of the being and sometimes a
Speaker 1: queen of the bean as well. Uh And they would
Speaker 1: do this by by baking a cake which contained a
Speaker 1: single bean um uh, this would be like a single
Speaker 1: black bean perhaps, And basically it would be like everybody
Speaker 1: gets a piece of cake and if yours has the
Speaker 1: bean in it, then congratulations, you are the bean king.
Speaker 1: Now was it good to be the bean king? Or
Speaker 1: bad to be the bean king? Because there are a
Speaker 1: lot of traditions there's something you get a special piece
Speaker 1: of cake, and that means you're kind of like scorned. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: this one doesn't seem particularly wicker manny, if that's what
Speaker 1: you're asking, Um, this is this is what this is
Speaker 1: what he writes. Um. Of particular interest to us is
Speaker 1: the report that the first act of a being king
Speaker 1: after he had been enthroned and congratulated, involved his being
Speaker 1: lifted three times to the ceiling of the house, where
Speaker 1: he drew white crosses of chalk on the beams and
Speaker 1: rafters to protect against evil spirits, devils, and witchcraft for
Speaker 1: the coming year. Also prominent in some places have been
Speaker 1: concerns about whether crop fertility and yield and the cake
Speaker 1: itself serving in divining good or bad things that might
Speaker 1: affect people in the ensuing year. So, I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't know what what else it necessarily entailed, but that
Speaker 1: first major act of being king of the bean doesn't
Speaker 1: sound too bad? No, no no, no, it's a no. It
Speaker 1: doesn't sound like they're about to throw them into the
Speaker 1: fire or anything. All right, Well, hopefully we have introduced
Speaker 1: a new, spooky, supernatural world of of bean fields to
Speaker 1: everyone out there. Uh and and just made you think
Speaker 1: a little bit more about your beans. And we would
Speaker 1: love to hear from you. What are your favorite beans? Uh?
Speaker 1: Do you are you privy to any uh superstitions or
Speaker 1: customs or rituals involving beans that we didn't mention here,
Speaker 1: because definitely right in and tell us about them. Also, um,
Speaker 1: are are do you own the company Rancho Gordo and
Speaker 1: want to send Joe and I free beans because we
Speaker 1: mentioned your company? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I go for it.
Speaker 1: We would. We'd love to love to be a part
Speaker 1: of that. But uh yeah, in general, we just love
Speaker 1: to hear from everybody out there, um about about beans. Beans,
Speaker 1: the the magical fruit, the mystical fruit, the supernatural fruit,
Speaker 1: but also not a fruit, not technically. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: if you would like to hear other episodes of stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your minds, you know where to find them.
Speaker 1: You can find them in the Stuff to Blow Your
Speaker 1: Mind podcast feed and you'll you'll find that wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcast these days. I don't know, there's so
Speaker 1: many places to get podcasts, but we should be wherever
Speaker 1: that is that you're going. And if you can rate
Speaker 1: and review the show at that place, if they let
Speaker 1: you do that, uh well, then do that. That helps
Speaker 1: us out. That's uh that uh that's supposedly good, or
Speaker 1: so they tell them, Um yeah, yeah, give us five
Speaker 1: or five beans. Five out of five beans, but only
Speaker 1: the good beans, not the not the witchcraft beans, just
Speaker 1: the the demon defeating beans. So I don't know, sort
Speaker 1: them out, figure out which one's which five out of
Speaker 1: five haunted bleeding beans for sexual potency. Hugh's thanks as
Speaker 1: always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If
Speaker 1: you would like to get in touch with us with
Speaker 1: feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
Speaker 1: topic for the future, or just to say hi, you
Speaker 1: can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production
Speaker 1: of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
Speaker 1: this is the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever
Speaker 1: you're listening to your favorite shows,