Beans and Men

Today I read that Plato thought you could find men's souls inside beans. This statement was accompanied by no explanation. I don't know whether it's true, but I was immediately intrigued. What kind of beans? Pinto beans? Garbanzo beans? Did the soul enter the bean upon the bean's creation, or was it added afterward? What happens when you cook and eat the bean?

What if our souls really did end up in beans? I imagine my death at 80, my soul lifting away and flitting to the grocery store where it inserts itself into a dried black bean in a package of black beans high up on a shelf. There it will stay until we're purchased. Perhaps I share the bag with the souls of truck drivers and Chinese immigrants. Will I be conscious? What is a soul, anyway? What is it like inside a bean? Perhaps it's like being a genie in a bottle. Perhaps I am only distantly aware of a confining presence about me, the fiber of the bean, and of time passing. Then I am purchased and sit on a new shelf for months, dimly aware. Then I'm dropped into a pot of water.

Will I drift up to heaven when my bean confinement softens? Perhaps I will become soft as well, the toughened edges of my soul weakening and disintegrating in the heat. Then I will be eaten.

The others will be eaten too. Whole mouthfuls of souls being chewed and swallowed, sliding pulpily to the stomach. There we will be digested.

On further looking into this beans thing, well, the idea was more popular than we might have suspected. I quote this site:

"Considerable credit for an aversion to beans may be given to Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher who lived towards the end of the 6th century BC. It was Pythagoras, before both Socrates and Plato (who documented Socrates’ pedagogy,) who taught that knowledge should never be written down as it may only truly evolve through the oral tradition."

Though I didn't find any evidence that it was Plato who thought the thing about the souls, apparently someone did. Perhaps Pliny. No mention of the specifics, though. Our elders weren't very taken with quantification, were they? But I shouldn't be too hard on them. We haven't yet developed the equipment to detect when a soul is about. Unless you accept that you can detect a soul by exactingly monitoring the weight of the body in question. Or, presumably, the weight of a bean.