7 Things That Make Beans Magical
You might know beans are delicious. You may even remember all the words of the schoolyard rhyme about them, but what else do you know about the fruit? Most people take beans for granted because they seem to be such a simple side dish, but there’s a whole lot more to beans than you probably realized.
A Bean By Any Other Name
Because beans are grown all throughout the world, it’s common for certain species to have multiple names. In fact, at least 11 types of beans have four names or more and certain species like the fava bean and navy bean have over 10 names. Other names for the fava bean include broad bean, butter bean, Windsor bean, horse bean, English bean, fool, foul, ful, feve, faba, haba and habas. The navy bean is also known as Yankee bean, white pea bean, pearl haricot, Boston bean, Boston navy bean, pea bean, haricot blanc bean, small white bean, haricot bean and fagioli. You may have thought you never tried a type of bean and actually just heard one of its alternate names.
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Beans Kick It Old School
These fruits are one of the longest plants to be cultivated by humans. Broad beans have been planted and grown since at least ancient Egypt and common beans were harvested over six thousand years ago in the Americas. Most of the beans we eat fresh come from the Americas and were first discovered by Christopher Columbus.
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They Really Are Somewhat Magical
Or at least, magical enough to be involved in folklore. There are multiple folk tales that involve magical beans growing all the way into the clouds –the most famous of these is, of course, Jack and The Beanstalk. There is also a Grimm’s fairytale that describes a bean that laughs at the failure of others so hard that its sides actually split open.
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They’re Often Considered Lucky
Multiple cultures associate eating or planting beans on certain days with good luck. Certain areas of Europe consider it to be lucky to plant beans on Good Friday. In Nicaragua, newly weds eat a bowl of beans for good luck. New Year’s Day involves a number of superstitions, in the Southern U.S., Malta, Brazil and Italy eating beans or lentils is considered to bring increased prosperity in the next year.
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Attack of the Killer Beans
Certain beans, especially those that are red in color, contain harmful toxins that can only be removed through cooking. Strangely, eating these beans when they are undercooked may be more toxic than eating the beans raw. Sometimes the undercooked beans will still taste and smell fine though. The toxicity will usually not result in death, but in severe nausea and diarrhea.
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Ever Wonder What Makes Them So ‘Musical?’
It’s widely known that beans and cabbage can make you fart. The reason is that many beans have the same sugar molecules found in cabbage. Because a certain enzyme that humans don’t have in their body is needed to digest these molecules, bacteria in the large intestine digest the sugar. This digestion produces increased gases as a byproduct. Soaking the beans in water for a few hours can help reduce this problem, so will the induction of certain other enzymes, like those found in Beano.
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Hold the Beans Please
The followers of Pythagoras had a lot of dietary restrictions, on top of being vegetarian, they also refused to eat beans. The reason is unclear, but many people believe it was due to flatulence, while others believe it was because they look like female genitalia. The most commonly accepted reason though is that the beans and humans were said to be created from the same material.
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14 Times the Luck!
If you thought a four-leaf clover was lucky, check out this thing: it’s a 56-leaf clover. The clover was found by Japanese farmer and clover expert Shigeo Obara, featured previously on Neatorama. That’s a lot of clover leaves – enough luck for a whole village!
Link – via observationsofanerd
(image credit: Kyodo News)
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Two Minors Married Off to Frogs
In a strange traditional ceremony, two 7 year-old girls in Tamil Nadu, India were married off to two frogs.
The ceremony, an annual feature during the Pongal (harvest) festival, is conducted “to prevent the outbreak of mysterious diseases in the village”.
The girls, Vigneswari and Masiakanni, dressed up in traditional bridal finery — gilded sarees and gold jewelery — married the frog ‘princes’ in separate, elaborate ceremonies at two different temples in the presence of hundreds of villagers.
These are two frogs that will not be turning into fairytale princes, they actually got released back into temple ponds after the ceremony. I wonder if the girls are still allowed to get married when they grow up.
Link Image Via Somegl [Flickr]
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The Secret of Luck: Why Some People Have All the Luck
Why do some people have all the luck while others are perpetually unlucky? Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire was determined to get to the scientific bottom of the phenomenon of luck, and what he discovered may surprise you:
I placed advertisements in national newspapers asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me.
Hundreds of extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research and over the years, have been interviewed by me. I have monitored their lives and had them take part in experiments. The results reveal that although these people have almost no insight into the causes of their luck, their thoughts and behaviour are responsible for much of their good and bad fortune. Take the case of seemingly chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not.
I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities. I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. I had secretly placed a large message halfway through the newspaper saying: ‘Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $50′.
This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than two inches high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.
Unlucky people are generally more tense than lucky people, and this anxiety disrupts their ability to notice the unexpected.
Link | Richard Wiseman’s official website | His book: The Luck Factor
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The Outrageous (Mis)Fortune of Terry Gilliam
Anyone who’s ever seen the heartbreaking documentary Lost in La Mancha knows that esteeemed filmmaker Terry Gilliam does not have fortune on his side when he’s making films. But what might be less familiar to people is that his bad luck has followed him almost since the beginning of his career. According to film blog Cineleet:
No director in history knows more about compromise than Terry Gilliam. Part and parcel of being a visionary is being constantly told you can’t get the shot. Forces of Darkness conspire to defeat you, often in the form of studio executives, sometimes in the form of Nature herself.
Right now, they have a great post documenting many of the challenges Gilliam has faced, from 1977’s Jabberwocky all the way through next year’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which was dramatically affected by the tragic death of Heath Ledger (Ledger was slated to portrayed one of the film’s main characters). I can’t imagine the fortitude it takes for a man like Gilliam, who’s suffered countless setbacks, to keep pressing forward. I’d like to think that the visions he has for his movies prevent him from stopping.
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