Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that makes you hungry.

I'm your host this week, Shea, and with me is:

I'm Aaron, and this week I learned that if everyone who smelled it is dead, ‘twas Poseidon who dealt it. More on the depth’s smelly gasses in the patron segment.

That one time in Scotland

The pandemic and the incompetency of our last administration has made it harder and harder to make ends meet. Our unemployment rate is higher than ever before and access to good healthy foods is near impossible without being loaded. I decided to look back through history and find a story of perseverance, a story of people, who, when the chips were down picked themselves off and made a new life for them and their family. This story comes from Scotland back in the 1700’s when life wasn’t nearly as fun and easy as it is now, this story recounts the life, love, and eventual destruction of one Sawney Bean.

Alexander “Sawney” Bean was born the son of a poor farmer in the late 17th century. Growing up a poor farmer Sawney felt like his talents were being wasted. His talents, by the way, were being incredibly lazy. So he ran away from home and took to the streets to see if he could make some easy money. During this time he fell in love with a woman named Agnes Douglas who was into the same things as him, being lazy, it was kismet! Not long after their marriage Swaney and Agnes were run from town, though exact reasons why are unclear, though one source claims Agnes was accused of witchcraft. Now on their own, destitute and alone their luck was about to change. While searching for a place to stay the couple found a great abandoned cave off the coast of South Ayrshire, kind of South West of Glasgow. The cave stretched about a mile into the earth and had a single entrance that disappeared with high tide, a perfect place to build a new family.

Lacking a trade, it was Sawney’s plan to support his new wife on the proceeds of robbery. It proved a simple enough matter to ambush travellers on the lonely narrow roads that connected the villages of the area. You remember Sawney was quite lazy, this seemed like the easiest method for making money. They fed themselves by living off the land. Lest images of wheat, turnips, fish and rabbits come to mind. Disabuse yourself of that notion. Old tales claim the means by which the Bean’s sustained themselves was by robbing any man, woman or child unlucky enough to cross their paths.

Swaney soon worried he could be identified by his victims and made the decision, not to stop, but to kill his victims. A lot harder to finger someone when you’re dead. After the bodies were looted and carefully searched Swaney had another brilliant idea, why let this meat go to waste…

Once dead, the Beans removed the corpses to their lair and chopped them up. They satiated their immediate hunger before prudently pickling some leftovers for when times were lean.

The years passed and the family grew. The eight sons and six daughters needed feeding so they continued in their barbarous practices, hunting in a pack to ensure that their quarry could not escape. One estimate puts the amount that the family killed at around 1,000 souls.

The high protein diet seemed to have been effective as Mrs Bean started to produce little baby Beans. Fourteen little Beanie babies in total, each with a very unhealthy appetite for human flesh. As the Beanie babies grew up and in turn, through incest, produced Beanie babies of their own, their cooking pots increased in size dramatically. Over two decades, generations of Beanie babies grew up in Bennane Cave, refining their skills of murder and cannibal cuisine including, the now lost art of salting and pickling the flesh, they prepared for leaner times. When their rations would eventually spoil, we all forget stuff in the back of the fridge,