Pythagoras, Beans, and Murder

From the never-ending and often satisfyingly strange vaults of Wikipedia:

"Some authors mentioned a "Pythagorean diet", the abstention from eating meat, beans, or fish. Firenze debated the Pythagorean diet in 1743.[22]
 Some stories of Pythagoras' murder revolve around his aversion to beans. According to legend, enemies of the Pythagoreans set fire to Pythagoras' house, sending the elderly man running toward a bean field, where he halted, declaring that he would rather die than enter the field – whereupon his pursuers slit his throat.[23] It has been suggested that the prohibition of beans was to avoid favism; susceptible people may develop hemolytic anemia as a result of eating beans, or even of walking through a field where bean plants are in flower.[24] It is more likely to have been for magico-religious reasons,[25] perhaps because beans obviously demonstrate the potential for life, perhaps because they resemble the kidneys and genitalia.[26] There was a belief that beans and human beings were created from the same material.[27]
 According to accounts from Diogenes Laertius, and or Eustathius, it is thought that the fava bean was particularly sacred to the Pythagoreans; this is because fava beans have hollow stems, and it was believed that souls of the deceased would travel through the ground, up the hollow stems, into the beans where they would reside.[28]
 Callimachus is quoted: Keep your hands from beans, a painful food: As Pythagoras enjoined, I too urge.And Empedocles, is quoted: Wretches, utter wretches, keep your hands from beans.[29]"