Apple apple on the tree
Let me start - I’m Irish after all - with a STORY.😁
We just about all know the story of Adam and Eve, the first people on earth, and how they lived in the abundance of the Garden of Eden —Paradise, Nirvana, Arcadia, Janna, Elysium, here among us on earth, whatever.
The fruit of only one tree is forbidden. A snake tempts Eve to pluck the fruit, she does so and gives it to Adam: the temptation to eat it overcomes them both and they are expelled from the Garden.,Now, the story emphasises, every day we experience the dire consequences of that expulsion from the fruit-filled Garden that we once thought was ours.
The lavish fruitfulness of the imagined Garden of Eden
It is a wonderful story, embedded deep in the mythology and though, art too, of all the abrahamic religions.
So it would seem to make sense to start from the apple, the things that tempted our first forbears.
Eve with apple, by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1528) W
All that is well known. Except that —
Except that the Bible doesn’t say “apple”. It speaks merely of “fruit”.
And several up-to-date scholars now hold that it wasn’t an apple at all!
So there is now a debate over what the fruit “really” was. Several others have been suggested, such as fig, grape, pomegranate, pear, quince? Some mediaeval accounts speak of Eve holding a citron. A 13th-century translation of Maimonides's The Medical Aphorisms of Moses, calls the banana “the apple of Eden". In 16th centurySyria and Egypt too it was indeed commonly considered to have been a banana.
Some modern scholars agree.
How, then, did the “fruit” come to be so widely taken to be an apple?
It may have been because in Latin the words for “ evil” and for “apple” (malus) are the same. Or maybe it was that in Old French pom meant both apple and fruit in general, so that "Adam and Eve ate a pom [a fruit]” was easily interpreted as “they ate an apple" .
Whatever the reason, the apple is now a stfood added a kind of glow to our small overgrown apple orchard - it made it into something steeped in something of the eternal, not wholly of this everyday, struggling, world.
So, to leave our dear apples for the moment (I will return at a later date)/what about fruit in general, both now and in the past?
Aztec men at a feast. Florentine Codex (16th century).
Eat of the fruits of the earth (Proverb)
The proverb had it right - and we always have done , yes always. Some fruits have been growing in earth form millions of years and are still a regular part of our diet. Indeed of all the joys of life, fruit must be near the top. We consume fruits as light-hearted snacks, as serious items for cooks, in everyday meals, as both sustenance and symbolism in feasts. Fruit was prominent in ancient cuisines. The ancient Egyptians adored the sycomore fig and developed a technique to get it ripe in just four days. In200BC well-off Romans were dining on figs, dates, pears, and grapes. In 8th century China, Yang Guifei, one of the “Four Beauties of China” , persuaded the Emperor to get her lychees every day; since they grew 1000 miles away and spoil quickly, this meant daily top-speed relay riders.
Aztec men at a feast. Florentine Codex (16th century).
Unsurprisingly, fruit is a common subject in art, and fruit-themed sayings and poetry abound, from literal descriptions to fruit as metaphors for love, life, or social comment. It we follow the Genesis account,it grew in God-given profusion in the Garden of Eden, for in the beginning, as Genesis has it, God said “I have given you the seed-bearing plants throughout the earth and all the fruit trees for your food”.
Humans have certainly made much of this gift, for, you may be surprised to learn, contrary to the common image of “ man the great hunter, throughout history we have fed largely on fruit.
In fact —a surprise for me too, overturning many long-held assumptions — though we may have more variety now than in the past, outbdiet is in basics essentially the same as that of our far-off ancestors at the beginning of our species 300,000 years ago , and probably that of all the many human species who lived for millions of years before that too. Amazing.
Images from the free-to-use sources of Wikipedia and unsplash .
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Why the apple is not, as we might have thought, the world‘s favourite fruit (do you know what it is?), and more about the surprising history of foods, come back next time.
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