This bit of education comes from Bro Tom Vickery.

I was sitting next to a priest in a pub in Boston having Irish bean soup and raving about how great it tasted…when he offered that “the Irish have a strict rule that this soup have no more than 239 beans per serving.’

I ASKED,  “Why this strict rule?”

And in his finest Irish tongue he said, “If we added just one more bean it would be too farty.”