Low Carb Philology
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N.B.: I’m experimenting with writing for output, not originality. Nothing below is original to me, it’s cobbled together as I wander the internet and connect dots.
P.S.: Happy New Year! I didn’t set any sort of intention to write again in 2020, but I’ve been going through a bunch of my old notes and decided to surface some of it on this newsletter for fun.
Art De Vany converted me to a way of thinking about our fitness for the pre-agricultural world. It hit me that the fruits that we eat are, like bread, the product of agriculture, not nature. Fruits are not so natural, after all.
Thus, the word "Fruit" is a “Retrospective Distortion” -- projecting our modern experience of fruit into the past. As you’ll see below, ancient fruits were different enough to radically alter what we should think of as a natural part of diet. And it is reflected in the philology of the words for the fruits themselves.
Fruits in the Mediterranean were not as sweet then as they are today. I am convinced of that, on two accounts.
First, consider the taste of traditional fruits. They have been bred for progressive increases in sweetness (sweetness is addictive and contagious: the crusaders did not know about dessert before they encountered what became the sorbet and the honey-sweetened cake ). Husbandry is a selective process leading to sweeter and sweeter fruits owing to the treadmill effect of the artificial. And I believe (but could be wrong about this part) that this growth is geometric (multiplicative), so the divergence is linear on a log scale.
Second, examine the names of fruits in ancient Mediterranean languages: for a fruit to have been prevalent, it would need to have a name in the Hebrew Bible, or possible the younger classical (or perhaps even pre-demotic) Greek. Non-indigenous names would logically be fruits that were imported.
The word Apple exists in old Semitic languages (Tapouach, תַּפּוּח, Taphaha تفاحة), though it may just mean “fruit” (I assume that apple was the forbidden fruit–the sweetest then). But the old apple then was not what we would call apple today. There are apples from ancient regions in the Levant. There are areas in its holy mountain region that have resisted tinkering—altitude is too high for the inhabitants to have a choice of what to grow. They are not sweet. Nor are the grapes from there sweet. Fruits had an acidity to them not easily found anymore. They were low-carb.
Higher carbs items, such as the orange, did not exist in the ancient world—there is no name for orange. Bitter lemons grew then. The orange came from Southern India and was slowly and progressively invasive—in Dickensian times, a single orange was the ideal Christmas gift. And not just in Victorian England: In France, too, it was a delicacy. In modern Greek, they bear the name πορτοκάλι, portokali as the Portuguese marketed them. So were tomatoes—imported from Central America (a tomato is technically a fruit). So were carrots—roots were bitter in the ancient world.
Berries (tut) were the main fruit. But strawberries they were not: they were small, wild and tart. There is no biblical name for strawberries.
Brazil—papaya, (modern) bananas, mangoes. All these are newly prevalent in our diet.
What is sweet is not so natural.
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Appendix // Esoterica
Example:
The orange was domesticated through agriculture, thus it’s modern.
See evolution of modern fruits: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/02/explore-food-citrus-genetics/
And this section on its parent, the mandarin orange: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_orange#Genetics_and_origin
And this paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674205218301874
The Nanling Mountains are also home to northern and southern genetic clusters of domestic mandarins that have similar levels of sugars in the fruit compared to their wild relatives, but appreciably (in some almost 90-fold) lower levels of citric acid.