Consider Fruit
Feb 5th, 2021 | By Bradley Yam SY ‘21
In an effort to restore a sense of optimism in these trying times, I offer a meditation on fruit. Yes––apples, pears, plums, bananas and berries aplenty. Fruits have not only fed, nourished, and pleased humankind with infinite color and variety since the beginning of history, but they have also offered wisdom that has largely been forgotten in the modern industrial food system. In other words, when you might be feeling down, there’s nothing quite like thinking about the goodness of fruit. [1]
Pictured: Mesh bag of peaches poured out over white countertop.
It is generally agreed in the folk wisdom of most cultures that fruits (and vegetables) are good for you. The science on this topic can hardly agree more. In various meta-analyses, fruits (and vegetables) have been shown to be good at reducing your chances of cardiovascular diseases, certain types of cancer, and even depression. [2, 3] But fruits are not only good for you, they are also good for the environment. In general, fruits grow on trees, which store carbon, help to maintain clean air, provide wildlife sanctuaries, and improve soil quality. They come in their own biodegradable, edible packaging. Fruit by-products are often extremely useful, producing dyes, oils, textiles, insulation, and let us not forget, alcohols. They are the ultimate sustainable product and the original, millenia-old player in the “circular economy.” In fact, fruits are a key part of the plant’s reproductive process––in other words, fruits help to make more trees and also more fruits. It is no wonder that the ancients often used fruit as imagery for the sexual and romantic. [4] And, to top it all, fruits are delicious.
But fruit is not simply the bounty of nature’s cornucopia, lest we bow in idolatrous worship to Pan. Beyond the blandly-lit Stop-And-Shop fruit aisles lies a long and wondrous history of humankind’s co-development with our fruity cultivations. Each civilization often had their own defining set of fruits that produced the unique flavours, customs and economies of the region. As with many stories (think The Odyssey), this one begins with home. Fruit orchards were arguably the first capital-intensive goods. Unlike grains or vegetables, fruit grows on trees that often require a long period of pre-pubescence before maturity. This implies a commitment to a piece of land, often requiring its protection and constant irrigation. Some scholars posit that this may have been the genesis of territoriality, urbanism and the formation of complex societies.
Consider the date palm, the poster-boy of Mediterranean fruit. The palm itself was esteemed for its wood and leaves and longevity, but the dates that it produced were sweet and could be consumed fresh or preserved through drying or the production of jams. The palm itself is able to grow in the harshest of desert conditions as long as a steady supply of irrigated water is provided. This interesting duality gave rise to the Arab proverb describing the date with “its feet in running water and its head in the fire of the sky.” Cuneiform records from ancient Ur (where Abraham, father of many nations, originated), indicate a deep knowledge of date horticulture, even describing the process of artificial pollination and the cultivation of “male”/staminate dates for the purposes of artificial pollination.
The fact that date horticulture required artificial pollination gave rise to an even more interesting social dynamic: probably the first recorded instance of sharecropping. The owner of the date plantations often had too many dates to pollinate by himself, so he would hire labourers to tend to the plantations for him. But renting out the land itself was a complex social arrangement that faced many complex questions: what would happen if the crop failed? Who owns the ploughs and the hoes (expensive capital equipment)? The legal innovations to deal with these situations were first detailed in the Code of Hammurabi, from Babylon in 1700 BCE. Sharecropping was an arrangement between the tenant farmer and the landowner that involved splitting the harvest in some ratio between the two of them, which also divided the risk. The Code of Hammurabi details how to split the payments to repair damages from natural disasters, how to split pre-harvest storm losses, and how to accurately judge a tenant farmer’s effort (from the harvest of his neighbours). [5] It was also a cooperative arrangement that incentivized both tenants and owners to not defect on their agreements to maximize the long-term gain of both parties.
Turn your attention to the olive, perhaps the most useful fruit in all of history. Like the date palm, the evergreen olive tree, one of the most fire-resistant trees in the world, is uniquely suited to its mediterranean climate. Knobbled and gnarly, olive wood is extremely hard and good for furniture. In myth, Odysseus and Penelope’s bed was made from olive wood, indeed built into an olive tree, a symbol of the immovable and unshakeable domestic foundations of their marriage. It is the most mentioned fruit (along with the grape) in the Hebrew Bible. But perhaps the most useful product of the olive is its oil, which can be used in cooking, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and medicinals, fuels for lamps and for sacred purposes such as for “anointing”, in the Jewish tradition. In Hebrew, “Christ” or “Messiah” literally translates to “the anointed one.” The oil is an important marker of authority and spirituality. The notion of anointing is deeply intertwined with peace, harmony and unity of the people. For example, in Psalm 133, the psalmist waxes lyrical about how good and pleasant it is when “God’s people live together in unity.” This unity is compared to the anointing of Aaron, the old chief priest of the Hebrew people. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the connection between fruit and unity can be found in the cooperative nature of olive farming. [6] In other words, the hope for the peace and unity that the Messiah is supposed to restore is evoked by the precious oil of the olive fruit cultivated by a peaceful and united community.
Like any other fruiting tree, olive trees take time to mature, between 3-12 years. For this reason, the Torah (Hebrew Law) prohibits the cutting down of fruiting trees, even in warfare. The olive tree itself grows extremely slowly, making its wood very valuable. Olive farming can yield benefits from cooperation for two reasons. First, olive yields usually increase with irrigation, irrigation being a capital and labour intensive job, usually requiring the cooperation of multiple smaller farms. Second, olives are usually propagated via grafting, that is, taking a high-yielding olive species and grafting it onto all of the existing olive trees, thereby also making them high-yielding. Cooperation can thus increase yields by encouraging the selection of preferable traits in olive trees. Olive trees are also extremely long-lived, often being hundreds or even thousands of years old. Tradition has it that the olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane were the same trees that hung sadly over Christ in his moment of crippling, blood-dripping despair. It is no wonder then that one of the first Christian apostles, Paul, used olive tree grafting as his central metaphor for the uniting of the Jew and Gentile cultures.
Now consider parthenocarpy. Parthenocarpy refers to a mutation that produces seedless fruits. They are often selected together with strains of fruit that are sweeter, instead of bitter or starchier. These mutations alone do not make for a viable species, simply because they cannot reproduce on their own. However, together with human cultivators and the use of offshoots, these have become some of the most successful fruit species today. Bananas and plantains fall into this category. Wild species of bananas are full of seeds and contain very little sweet flesh. By the time bananas entered into historical consciousness, they were already domesticated and exhibited parthenocarpy, but bananas found in the wild are still extremely seedy. Nature’s sweetest fruits would not be so sweet without human cultivation.
And if one were to think that fruit horticulture is a closed book, they would be mistaken. Cranberries were famously difficult to cultivate and pick because they usually grew in shrubby, thorny bushes in the middle of bogs. However, since their introduction to the American Northeast in the 1850s, various methods of wetland cultivation have been developed. Popularized by Thanksgiving and the purported medicinal properties for urinary tract infections, cranberries are now harvested en masse by flooding cranberry bogs and allowing the cranberries to float on top of the water, where they are then collected. Humanity continues to find new ways to cultivate and consume fruit for all their goodness.
And this is not to mention pineapples, which are really clusters of berries, or Japanese persimmons, which have preservative properties due to their high levels of tannin, or the combinatorial varieties of citrus hybrids. Consider also the various fruit-related gift-giving cultures across the world, like how mandarins are a gift symbolizing prosperity and longevity during Chinese New Year, or how Sembikiya in Japan has popularized artisanal fruit with melons auctioning up for as much as $45,000.
If the reader at this point has obtained some relief, and perhaps some wonder, at the goodness of fruit, then this article has succeeded. But if curiosity permits the reader to wonder about why fruits are so good, they may find that this is actually a deep philosophical, almost religious inquiry. Fruits have always, in every culture, been considered the gift of the divine. It is not hard to understand why. In the very first chapter of Genesis, God proclaims “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.” In the very last chapter of the last book of the Christian bible, in the middle of the new city, there appears again “the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2, ESV). In a time where many of us are praying for the healing of the nations, the goodness of fruit is a useful meditation, and may well lead to more fruitful meditations on the goodness of God.
Notes
[1] I will say, right from the beginning, that most of these wonderful bits of information were provided by the paper “The Origins of Fruits, Fruit Growing, and Fruit Breeding” by Jules Janick.
[2] Meta-analyses are academic papers that summarize the literature put out by other papers. Each of these meta-analyses summarizes up to 100 papers at a time, giving an impressive sense of a wide breadth of literature.
[3] A good meta-meta-analysis: https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/77/6/376/5474950
[4] Song of Solomon 7:8 “May your breasts be like clusters of grapes, and the fragrance of your breath like apricots.”
[5] From https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3022&context=cklawreview, it is interesting that this article also notes that the Hebrews did not seem to have a sharecropping arrangement, because it seems like they had other economic mechanisms for risk pooling, including the “bondsman redeemer” concept and community support, and the gleaning laws.
[6] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264837716311589
