WHEN IS AN APPLE NOT JUST AN APPLE?
Does an apple represent the Biblical apple that Eve took from the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden? Or is it the apple a day that’s supposed to keep the doctor away? Maybe it’s the poison apple the jealous
ueen gave to Snow White. Could it be the Apple of Discord that led to
the Trojan War? The Golden Apples of immortality that Alexander the
Great was looking for?
Alcohol, too, is used differently in different cultures. For Jews and
Christians, wine has always been a crucial part of the religion. In ancient Greece, wine was consumed after the meal at a symposium, a religious and political ritual attended only by men. In ancient Rome, men
and women drank wine with the meal. Americans couldn’t wait for the
meal and invented the cocktail.
Whether you take your tea with sugar, cream, and small sandwiches
in the middle of the afternoon, green in a special ceremony, iced, call it
“chai,” or use the leaves to smoke foods or tell your fortune depends on
where you are—England, Japan, the U.S., India, China, or Turkey. If you
think cinnamon is a hot spice that belongs in a meat sauce, you’re in
western Asia. If it’s a sweet sprinkling on a breakfast bun, you’re in Europe or North America.
Let’s take a look at an average household in two cultures that seem
the same. Both spend a great deal of money on plants and take great
pride in their landscaping. Both keep animals. Both have habitats for
fish. But in the first culture, everything is for food. The plants and animals are edible and the artificial ponds are stocked with fish for eating.
In the second culture, everything is for show. The plants are ornamental, the animals are pets, and the fish in the aquariums are expensive,
exotic, and inedible. The first culture is ancient Rome; the second is the
United States. The Romans had words for meadow and grass (herba), because those were places where sheep could graze. But a lawn, which is
a holdover from European estates 300 to 400 years ago, would have
made no sense to them. These are vast differences in culture and in humans’ relationship to nature and to their food supply