Photo by Rick Geary

In India, Eve lures Adam with a banana.

Hi, Matthew: How did the apple come to be the symbol for the “forbidden fruit” in the Garden of Eden mythology? The account in Genesis doesn’t say anything about an apple, so why has it been depicted as such? — John Kent, Carlsbad

Hard to figure how the same fruit is linked to both the loss of Eden and patriotic, pie-baking American momhood. Somewhere between Eve and Betty Crocker, the apple made a 180. Blame the Eden connection on the earliest religious painters, who chose to depict Eve with an apple because it was familiar and ubiquitous, known in most parts of Asia and Europe. And “apple” was once a generic term, referring to any type of fruit. The artists might also have borrowed the image from Druid, Greek, and Roman mythology. It was a hair-pulling cat fight over an apple, after all, that eventually started the Trojan War. And Druids tied apples to fir trees at the winter solstice in honor of the god Odin, eventually giving us our Christmas tree with its shiny red balls.

Depending on where they place the Garden of Eden on the map, biblical scholars figure Adam’s appetizer would more likely have been a quince, apricot, citron, or maybe an orange. But to show you the apple’s influence in the history of fruitdom, consider that the Romans called the quince a Cydonian or golden apple, and the apricot was once known as the Armenian apple. For the sake of completeness, I’ll add that in India, Eve lures Adam with a banana.

If the tomato is the ultimate, gene-manipulated corporate fruit, the apple is a triumph of nature. It does not grow true from seed, but only from grafting or budding, so most of the popular varieties sold in markets today were found by chance — someone happened upon a single seed-grown tree with fruit that looked good and tasted great. A succession of grafts was the only way to preserve the character of the new variety.

A good example is the popular Granny Smith. Whether or not you believe in Adam, Eve, the serpent, or the apple, you must believe in Granny Smith. She was Maria Ann Smith of Ryde, Australia, near Sydney, wife of an apple-grower. About 150 years ago, Granny discarded some Tasmanian French crab apples into her compost pile, and one of the seeds sprouted into a tree that bore juicy, crisp, tart green apples that stored well and cooked well. All Granny Smith apples today can trace their ancestry back to that single tree in Ryde and are genetically identical to Granny’s backyard fruit.

The first wrinkly black lumps identified as apples date from 6500 B.C. in Asia Minor. Pharaohs cultivated them; the Pilgrims brought the seeds to the New World; “Johnny Appleseed” Chapman spread them West. Apples were first baked into pies in the 14th Century and are now America’s number-one choice, according to the International Apple Institute. They add a telling quote about the “king of fruit” from an American newspaper of 1902, “No pie-eating people can be permanently vanquished.”