photo: jetheriot
Big apples come from small apples. That’s how it works. The apples you find in grocery stores today haven’t always been so large. Go back two thousand years and imagine a fruit market in Mesopotamia. See how the apples were so much smaller then? Go back four thousand more years and imagine a primitive apple tree in a spontaneously flowering orchard. See how the wild apples are even smaller than the Mesopotamian ones? Now fast forward to a supermarket today. The apples are jumbo. Small wild apples, over millennia of cultivation, have become large domesticated apples. “This is the way of all fruit,” I thought to myself, pinching a small wild persimmon I nearly stepped on moments earlier.
I’m not a huge fan of the taste of raw persimmon. Like pomegranate, it’s a fruit I’d rather photograph than put in my mouth. There’s something rotten-tasting about the persimmon to me. Maybe it’s because the first persimmon I ever saw wasn’t a perfectly ripe persimmon plucked from the tree at its moment of optimal flavor, but a rotten one, a two- or three-day old persimmon plopped on the concrete slab at Gammy and Gampy’s where I was trying to bounce a ball. Looking back, I can still sense the dream-quality of that memory. It was autumn, persimmon season. When I saw my mother grab one from the tree, I couldn’t imagine why she’d want to eat it. Had the taint of that rotten persimmon ruined me for persimmons?
Thirty persimmon seasons later, I decided to give them another try, in case my tastes had changed in the mean time. I tried two varieties, a wild one and a cultivated one. The wild one was the size of a large walnut. Mottled purple and orange, it was tender to the slightest touch. When I bit into the persimmon, the flesh was slippery against my teeth, reminding me of the texture of a month-old rotting pumpkin. But it was more than just the funky texture that turned me off, because when I bit into the cultivated persimmon, a non-astringent variety from a tree planted by my parents, the flesh was crunchy like an apple, yet still revolting.
Seeing the two persimmons side by side – the small wild one and the large cultivated one – got me thinking. If there really was a Garden of Eden whose trees grew actual apples, doesn’t it stand to reason that the apple the serpent seduced Eve into eating was more like a small wild apple, more like a tiny crabapple? Some say it was actually a pomegranate. In any case, before the dawn of agriculture, pomegranates would have been tiny too. What we do know with certainty is that if Eve ate an apple, it wasn't a gigantic one, and that Adam in autumn never munched on crunchy persimmons.