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Maybe we should have ordered out
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Should we order pizza or Chinese?
What was the fruit that so tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden? Nowhere in the Book of Genesis does it ever identify the fruit that Eve found so beguiling.
The woman saw that the tree was good to eat and pleasing to the eye, and that it was enticing for the wisdom that it could give. So she took some of its fruit and ate it. She also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it. (Genesis 3:6)
Among western Christians, the apple has typically been used to represent that damning piece of fruit. My first bite of a MacIntosh apple right off the tree in an apple orchard in Ontario when I was 19 could back that up. With that first taste, I understood immediately just how wonderful apples truly are. I also tasted corn fresh from the stalk that autumn, but somehow maize seems a bit of a stretch in this context.
Or perhaps not. While the Quran doesn’t tell us which fruit it was, either, in some Muslim and Jewish traditions wheat was the draw. I like that. It’s a nearly perfect allegory for man’s invention of agriculture. With the rise of agriculture and the processing of raw grains into bread, humanity no longer had to hunt to survive and then had time to give in to the temptations of civilization.
Still, others have suggested grapes or the lovely pomegranate (In Greek mythology, too, the pomegranate was Persephone’s downfall), and in Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, it was the tamarind. The tamarind, with its complex tart and sweet flavorings, would certainly have been an eye-opener to the possibilities of life lived outside the fold.
We have our own fruits from the Tree of Knowledge today, of course. Every year, someone declares a particular food to be the answer to all our problems – blueberries one year, pomegranates the next – or we burden a particular food group with all the weight of our collective guilt and renounce it in a fit of Puritan aggrandizement.
If Eve could have seen into the future, she might have ordered out, instead.
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