DUST TO DUSTThe Apple Doesn't Fall Far
by Wendel Potter
May 23, 2005
Some things don't seem to taste the same anymore.
Take the apple, for instance. I was preparing a fruit salad for dinner the other day and was slicing up a Red Delicious apple to throw into the works. There was more than enough, so I took a chomp out of what was left over.
"Apples don't have the same flavor they did forty years ago," I complained to my wife. "I can still remember that particularly juicy, robust taste when I'd pick an apple off a tree and sit down right there in the grass and eat it."
"I've never eaten an apple directly from the tree," she said.
"Never? Wow! Maybe if you'd been the first woman back in the Garden of Eden, mankind wouldn't have taken the Big Fall."
"Our family only ate produce from the supermarket, and after it had been washed."
I imagined my wife being tempted in the Garden by the Serpent.
"Go on, lady! Pick the apple and take a bite already!"
"No, thank you. I don't eat unwashed fruit. I'll wait and buy some at the grocery store. They have those little spray jets."
"But if you eat that apple, you'll gain Knowledge and be as smart as God."
"And end up in the emergency room with food poisoning? How smart would that be?"
If it came down to an argument over clean food, the Serpent would be no match for my wife.
"We did clean our apples after we picked them," I assured her. "Wiped them down good on our sweaty, grubby tee shirts. Put a fine polish on those apples."
Strawberries were a different story. You couldn't hardly wipe them on your shirt without smashing them to a pulp.
With strawberries, we'd just search the patch for the berries that were plenty ripe and least caked with dirt. Of course, we'd scrape off the excess earth with a rusty pocket knife before we ate the strawberries.
After all, we weren't about to just sit and eat clumps of dirt. We weren't barbarians! But you were bound to get a little soil in your mouth when you ate unwashed strawberries fresh from the patch.
Oh, well. God said something about Man being "dust and unto dust we shalt return". So what harm would be done if we got a little dirt in our bellies along the way?
Maybe I've figured out why some things just don't taste like they did when I was a kid. They're too clean.
Copyright 2005 Wendel Potter
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