A can of beans

Hello, furiends!  Today I would like to talk to you about a can of beans.  (The connection between beans and Furry will be left as an exercise to the reader.)  Wifey thinks we bought this can from the "discontinued" bin at Central Fresh Market (which was originally a butcher shop and still offers excellent prices on meat and terrible prices on everything else).

It is your typical 19-oz can of mixed beans.  Usually I get the Unico® bean medley, which contains only four kinds of beans (red kidneys, chick peas, romanos, and great northerns).  This Mr. Goudas® product contains nine kinds of beans (chick peas, red kidneys, white kidneys, romanos, limas, pigeon peas, soybeans, black beans, and blackeye peas), plus the usual water, salt, calcium chloride, and disodium EDTA (which makes suds to tell me that I haven't yet finished washing the canning fluid off the beans).

Okay, I admit it: I've been padding this text to try to match it up with that tall photo of a bean-can to the left, but this is ultimately pointless because your browser is probably set to a different font-size than mine.  Thank heavens for <br clear="all">!

Okay, now for the next photo!

I was not able to completely separate the label from the steel can, but I think my flatbed scanner did a decent job on this.  The scribble on the UPC is to indicate that this product was reduced for quick sale.  Everything is written in both English and French, as required by Canadian national standards.  (Maybe someday the American national standards will require both English and Spanish.)  The product name "9‑ͭ‑ͪ Symphony/9‑ͤ‑ͫ‑ͤ Symphonie" is obviously a pun based on the number of bean types and the fact that beans cause intestinal gas unless consumed along with Beano™ brand α-galactosidase.

Okay, now let's get to the interesting part: the talk-balloons coming out of the mouths of the white bean and the purple bean do not say the same things in English and French!  Usually this happens because the text in one language uses an untranslatable pun and/or idiomatic phrasing, so the other language will use a circumlocution to express the same idea.  But in this case, the two languages do *not* express the same idea.

The English text advertises that this product generates flatus, suggesting that there exist customers for whom that is a selling-point.  The French text says nothing of interest, so clearly it has been censored.  "Chauffer et servir" is just wrong — bean medley is best served at room temperature, straight from the can (I generally use a fork); the English text says nothing about heating.  "Prêt à servir" is redundant with the text on the red stripe along the bottom of the label.  The writer of the French ad-copy just plain chickened out regarding the rectum opus aspect of this food product.  (I highly recommend that last link, which is an excellent example of what in Medieval Irish was called Braigetóir.)

Having consumed the contents of this can, I can confirm that its English label text is accurate regarding the effects of the product upon the large intestine.

p.s. If you're still unsure what beans and Furry have to do with each other, here's a hint: butt.