Pythagoras v. Beans

Though all of his writings were lost, it is widely accepted that Pythagoras believed strongly that beans should be avoided at all costs. This was incorporated as a tenet into the quasi-religion he developed and his acolytes, the Pythagoreans, are said to have adhered to it unflinchingly. Bertrand Russell has gone on record as saying that bean-eschewing was among the two most important principles of the religion, yet may have led to its eventual downfall. Russell notes that Pythagoras "founded a religion on which the the main tenets were the transmigration of souls and the sinfulness of eating beans. His religion was embodied in a religious order, which, here and there, acquired rule of the state … But the unregenerate hankered after beans, and sooner or later rebelled."

However, even as the perfidious revolted others came to the support of the protein prohibition. The Pythagorean poet Callimachus even wrote a poem about his concurrence:

Keep your hands from beans, a painful food:
As Pythagoras enjoined, I too urge.

His fellow poet, Empedocles, took up the cause as well with his own turn of phrase:

Wretches, utter wretches, keep your hands from beans.

As did the Christian ‘heresiologist’ Saint Epiphanus in his collection the Panarion (‘Medicine Chest’) or Adversus Haereses:

Pythagoras the Samian, son of Mnesarchos, said that the monad is god, and that nothing has been brought into being apart from this. He was wont to say that wise men ought not to sacrifice animals to the gods, nor yet to eat what had life, or beans, nor to drink wine.

Cicero too, attempting to further explain the proscription in the process:

So Plato bids us go to our beds with our bodies so composed that there is nothing that brings distraction of disturbance to the mind. That, it is thought, is why the Pythagoreans are forbidden to eat beans which cause considerable flatulence and are thus inimical to those who seek peace of mind.

Yet whether Pythagoras actually refrained from eating beans is a source of some dispute. Aristoxenus, musical scholar and student of Aristotle, has noted that Pythagoras was no vegetarian and certainly had no problem with beans - even suggesting that beans were his absolute favorite food:

Pythagorus esteemed the bean above all other vegetables; for he said that it was both soothing and laxative – that is why he made particular use of it.7

Yet still the wretched among us long after these forbidden little pockets of iniquity and wonder why peace eludes us.