Supposedly, it all started with an apple. In the beginning was the garden, the serpent, the woman—and “those fair apples,” as Milton writes in Paradise Lost. That was the beginning, or perhaps the beginning of the end.

By Naomi Kim 

Last October, I went apple picking for the first time. I’d grown up in the Deep South, and now that I lived in the Midwest, I wanted a full-blown fall experience at a carnival-type farm. I wanted the pig races and the pumpkin cannon and the funnel cakes and the canned goods in the farm store. I wanted to have the experience of apple picking, but the apples? I confess: they were kind of an afterthought.

Supposedly, it all started with an apple. In the beginning was the garden, the serpent, the woman—and “those fair apples,” as Milton writes in Paradise Lost. That was the beginning, or perhaps the beginning of the end.

But was it an apple, really? English translations of the Bible refer simply to the forbidden, fateful fruit as, well, a fruit. Where “apple” first snuck into the story—and later into Milton’s—is through St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate. While translating the Hebrew Bible into Latin, it seems that Jerome decided to incorporate a pun: the Latin words for evil and apple are both malus.

Or maybe—Latin aside—there’s something about apples themselves. After all, there are at least two other apples that will live on in infamy, rounding out an appropriate trinity of deathly fruits. The apple from Snow White, of course, is one. Who wouldn’t recognize the moment from the old Disney animation where the evil stepmother dips that lovely red apple into a gooey green poison? And older still from the mythic past: the golden apple of discord. The Trojan War, depending on how you look at it, was also started by an apple—this one rolled slyly into a gathering of gods and goddesses.

Behold, the apple, bringer of death and destruction.

The original sin, they say, was pride. Adam and Eve wanted to be like God, so they ate the fruit of wisdom, henceforth referred to as the apple. But the apple, to me, has always been a humble fruit. An ordinary one. Boring, even. It was made banal by its ubiquity. Grocery stores seemed permanently stockpiled with apples. I grew up with apples in my picture book Bibles, perfectly round and red. (Adam and Eve were illustrated with strategic shrubbery around them.) There were apples in alphabet books and posters in the early classrooms where I learned to read. Apples adorned anything education-related, actually. The apple was a symbol on one hand of sin and on the other hand of school, both of these coalescing—in one sense or the other—around knowledge. And it all ran together. There were apples everywhere. Who cared?

As a child, I never got the hype around apples. I was skeptical of Eve’s judgment and of Aphrodite’s, even of Snow White’s. (She didn’t have to eat the apple, you know.) What was so attractive about the apple? And yet what these stories assume is that the apple is somehow desirable—on a cosmic scale, even, so desirable that you would risk everything just for one bite. In the Greek myth, Aphrodite is practically willing to spark a war so that she might attain this coveted apple. (Okay, it was enchanted, but still. Why did Eris—goddess of discord—pick an apple, of all fruits?) In Genesis, Eve finds the (putative) apple so desirous that she breaks the one and only rule God has set for life in the perfect garden.

Maybe if I had grown up in a region where apple picking was a seasonal activity, I would’ve formed a different perspective on apples—because it was after my first experience in an apple orchard that I began to understand.

The weather that day was impeccably autumnal, promising that full-blown Midwestern experience I was looking for. The sky was clear and blue and high, pitched like a tent in the heavens above us. It was sunny and bright, and there was a perfect crispness to the cool air. The “fun farm,” as it was dubbed, was full of families and couples trooping about in their cozy sweaters. The little piglets raced along a little racetrack, their charming speediness powered—according to the announcer, “Rusty Pliers”—by one pre-competition Walmart cookie each. And there was even a tractor to take us out to the apple orchard through a haze of dust. When it settled, there we were. There the endless rows of apple trees were. They stood smaller than I had expected, but in the golden light their apples—so many apples!—were illuminated in an inviting glow.

Wandering down the rows, I breathed in the sweet scent of apples. Thoreau, I would later learn, loved that fragrance, too. “One [apple] is worth more to scent your handkerchief with,” he wrote, “than any perfume which they sell in the shops.”

What I wanted to know, as I surveyed the abundant fruit, was whether an apple plucked freshly from the tree tasted any different from the ones piled up in grocery stores.

I reached for an apple. I took a bite.

Apples, like most of us who live here now, are not indigenous to America. They were brought to this country by settler colonists, who then spread throughout the land with apples in tow. The apple, similar to those colonists and subsequent waves of immigrants, has so established itself here that it is mistaken as native.

And certainly, it has bound itself to Americanness in both language and literature. Think of that classic American aphorism, coined by Benjamin Franklin: an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Think too, of Johnny Appleseed, depicted in storybooks as an apple-loving, seed-scattering American legend. Or Jo March, the beloved American heroine of Little Women, eating apples in the attic with her books and her writing and her rat. And of course, most telling of all: as American as apple pie. Historically beloved, proudly defended, pie has long held a special place in American cuisine—and apple pie most of all. “Every true American,” wrote a journalist in 1889, “eats apple pie.”

In my immigrant family, apple pie—specifically, warm apple pie with vanilla ice cream—really does feel like an American dessert. When my mother was taking English lessons at a local church, her English conversation partner there—a white Southern woman—introduced us to this combination of apple pie and ice cream. (She also introduced my family to chili, cornbread, and Miracle Whip, which for nearly twenty years we believed was what mayonnaise was in America.) We, too, have eaten of America.

Food for thought: What does it mean that this representative American food—the apple pie—has undeniable literary and cultural ties to original sin? To malus?

One bite, and I fell for apple picking.

The sweetness of Braeburn burst in my mouth, the flavor so much stronger and fresher I had expected. Was it the magic of autumn? The apples glowing in the sunlight? The fragrance of them? Or had I just never paid enough attention before? It was true, I had never quite paused to note the distinctive tastes of different apples. I really only knew the obvious tartness of Granny Smith and the rather crumbliness of Red Delicious, but now as I wandered the orchard rows I realized: they were different. Suncrisp had a brightness to it I had never noticed.

I reached for apple after apple till my bag was heavy in my arms. But as I cradled my bounty, what niggled at me were all the apples that lay strewn on the ground beneath the trees. Many of them looked like perfectly good apples, if a bit streaked with dirt, or slightly bruised from their tumbles. There were so many of them there that I nearly tripped over them. And even so, the apple trees kept bearing fruit. In fact, their branches were bowed down by the weight of their bounty, the apples multiplying in heavy bunches like the giant grapes of the Promised Land.

What a waste, I thought with dismay. I thought of all the apples that would rot away here. That no one would pick or eat. How many apples a year were lost this way? How many so wantonly wasted in the grass?

But it occurred to me, as I stood there gazing at the trees, that there was, perhaps, a lesson here for me. A lesson from the apple trees themselves, these marvelous trees bent by their ever-giving abundance. And perhaps—perhaps the lesson need not be about wastefulness.

Perhaps the lesson was, instead, about fruitfulness. It was the kind of fruitfulness I did not have. As a grad student, I’ve often felt bound by the law of productivity, driven to write and conference and publish more and faster and better—to strategize my work, my words, my future. And yet here were these apple trees, giving freely. It did not matter to the tree, the way it mattered to me, if they bore fruit that went to waste. They simply kept bearing fruit, gifting the world with apples upon apples. Their principle was not usefulness; it was not about measuring output or garnering praise or winning recognition; it was not about efficiency. Their principle was one of generous fruitfulness. Of abundance. Indeed, of extravagance.

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“Be fruitful and multiply,” God said, and the apple, at least, listened. Its meanings and significances have certainly multiplied in our literary and cultural imaginings, full of joyous contradictions. It is everywhere from Paradise Lost to Twilight. It is tied to sin to be lamented, education to be prized—knowledge pulling two different ways. It stands for health and leads the alphabet. It is a reminder of settler colonial history. It tastes of Americanness.

But even as it is the fruit we attach to sin, to the fall, the origins of this conception are a pun—a cleverness, a wittiness, a levity that stands in contrast with our usual associations with sin. The apple is a paradoxical fruit. It is the fruit of jealous stepmothers and scheming goddesses and first sinners, and yet it is also the fruit of dedicated schoolteachers and elementary school students and (in the form of a homemade pie) humble salt-of-the-earth America. If apple is so tied to the concept of sin, then the undoing of sin’s hold—its seeming iron-clad authority, its seriousness and weightiness—is couched into the language that encodes it. Malus, Jerome wrote centuries ago, and maybe laughed a little.

And indeed, if the apple is the fruit of death in one literary work, so too is it bound up in the promise of life in another. In Marilynne Robinson’s 1980 novel Housekeeping—one of the most extraordinary novels I have ever read, and one of the most religiously saturated—the narrator Ruth offers a meditation on the dead apple trees in the garden, on holding “a windfall apple, sour and cold from its affinity with deep earth, with only a trace of the perfume of its blossoming.” Yet her thoughts turn from the rotting apple, the trees long dead and bare, to “the life of perished things” (186). Indeed, Ruth muses that “if ever a leaf does appear [on the dead apple trees], it should be no great wonder” (185)—as though impossible resurrection were the rule of life, not the exception. As though the apple trees, even in death, testified to this truth.

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Under the Suncrisp trees, the yellow apples were scattered like gold coins tossed carelessly, generously over the earth. They were gift; they were grace; they were revelation.

Behold, I thought, marveling at the sight of them. Here is the way to live.

Naomi Kim is a PhD student in English and American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis