Editor’s Note: This article is purely satirical and fictitious. All attributions in this article are not genuine and this story should be read in the context of pure entertainment only.

Author’s Note: While I am a lima bean purist, I feel obligated to preface my tragic tale with a quote from the scientist I was forced to reach out to for comment: “Lima beans are not poisonous when cooked in boiling water or soaked for 24-48 hours.” Also, “you will not get sick from eating lima beans if they are cooked properly.” 

“A Bad Case of Stripes” by David Shannon is a classic of Gen-Z childhood. Maybe you remember that it was about a girl whose skin shape shifts into various patterns, maybe you remember that it taught you about authenticity, or maybe it just haunted your nightmares for years. Want to hear my hang-up about this book? (You’re going to hear it anyway). Those goddamn lima beans.

Camilla Cream loves lima beans (and who doesn’t, girl?). But as it turns out, she has weird friends who are averse to this beautiful bean. She is so insecure about her passion for the forbidden legume that she stops eating lima beans altogether. Her insecurity manifests strangely — she grows stripes, which then morph and shift into all sorts of patterns until she is eventually just a blob of tentacular growths. 

This is what happens when you do not eat lima beans. As a sprightly young eight-year-old, the plight of Camilla frightened me so much that I went on the strict Lima-Diet — no food, fried or frozen, unless it was a lima bean. At the time, I could not properly cook these lima beans, as I was not trusted to supervise a boiling pot of water. So I ate a few, and then I was hooked. I kept munching and crunching the lima beans (they were just so good) until I grew dizzy and nauseous. I was found hours later on the kitchen floor surrounded by several jumbo sized bags of lima beans furiously ripped open, thousands of beans askew around me.

Turns out, lima beans contain a plant compound that releases cyanide when the bean is chewed or processed. The book should have mentioned that, for I was hospitalized that evening, and almost died. 

But I didn’t become a miserable pile of roots and tentacles. In fact, I have continued eating lima beans day in, day out since the incident and never found an abnormal appendage or even a discolored rainbow patch of skin. While I have never had ice cream, sushi or anything else since, at least I’ve never grown tentacles. 

So in conclusion, “A Bad Case of Stripes” is a scary book with good intentions and an even better moral of the story: cyanide aside, you are in more danger if you do not eat the lima beans. So go, eat them. 

Do it.