Most likely, it would not seem strange to you if I asserted that food is important.

We find a somber, profound anecdote for the importance of food in Viktor E. Frankl’s memoir Man’s Search for Meaning: “Let us observe the majority of prisoners when they happened to work near each other and were, for once, not closely watched. They would immediately start discussing food”. Frankl is speaking of his experiences in various Nazi death camps, and that in the midst of intense misery, the prisoners found temporary escape by imagining their favorite foods.

In Food of the Gods, Terence McKenna argues for the importance of food, in a precise manner: “The ways in which humans use plants, foods, and drugs cause the values of individuals and ultimately whole societies to shift. Eating some foods makes us happy, eating others sleepy, and still others alert." Some obvious examples of this include the consumption of coffee, or tobacco, for instance.

We see that food plays an important role on both the individual and cultural levels. But what may prove more difficult to convince you, my dear reader, is of my belief that food and mythology are thoroughly interconnected.

But I am not alone in my argument, there are other scholars who argue for the importance of food in mythology, perhaps in indirect ways.

Karen Armstrong’sA Short History of Mythchronicles the different stages of human evolution and culture, alongside their changing mythologies. She begins with discussing The Paleolithic Period (c. 20000 to 8000 BCE). This is the period in which human beings completed their biological evolution, and this is before the advent of agriculture. These were hunting societies, not unlike the modern Pygmies or the Australian aborigines. The mythologies of these people center around their means of getting food, hunting; these are, therefore, not profane but sacred activities, which bring mortal men and women into contact with “Dreamtime”. When an Australian goes hunting, for example, “he models his behavior so closely on that of the First Hunter that he feels totally at one with him”. The hunter myths describe a spiritual world that is immediate, and accessible.

In Mushrooms, Myths, and Mithras, Carl A. P. Ruck, Mark A. Hoffman, and Jose Alfredo Gonzalez Celdran propose that entheogen (magic mushroom) consumption played a crucial role in Mithraism (a modified Persian religion which became popular in Rome in the first century BCE). This team of scholars ultimately argues that this drug cult played a formative role in the beginning of Western culture. This is similar to the work of Terence McKenna who argues for the importance of psychedelic mushrooms during protohuman development in Food of the Gods.

Perhaps it would be interesting to look at a few specific myths, and the role that food plays in them.

Take the story of Gilgamesh, for instance, one of the world’s earliest recorded myths. It is the consumption of a “magic plant” that would give Gilgamesh immortality. He is unable to bring the plant back home, however, because “a serpent of the place/ became aware of the fragrance of the plant,/ breathed its perfume, desired it, and approached,/ and stole away with it among the reeds” this is taken from David Ferry’s wonderful Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse. We’ve heard of a different story in which a serpent ruins everything, haven’t we?

Jumping to a later literary tradition, food plays a central role in the biblical creation story in Genesis. God tells Adam that he may eat of any seed bearing fruit except for the fruit from “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”. He does, of course, and ruins everything. In A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong says that in the biblical story, “ the loss of the primordial paradisal state is experienced as a falling into agriculture”. That is, Adam will actually have to work for his food now.

Food is as crucial to modern Christianity as it was in the late fourth century AD when St. Augustine was writing about stealing pears from a neighbor’s orchard. The obvious example is the eucharist, in which the body and blood of Christ are substantiated or transubstantiated (depending on the sect of Christianity) into bread and wine (or crackers and grape juice) and then consumed.

In the American imagination, the “forbidden fruit” from Genesis is often thought to be an apple. The apple has become a symbol for the corruption of innocence. This past weekend, I happened upon two examples of this. The first is from Vladimir Nabokov’sLolita. It is a scene in which Humbert Humbert watches Lolita in their house as she “had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple”. My second encounter this weekend with the “forbidden fruit” was in Robert Eggers film The Witch, in which the family is haunted by the forces of evil, and eventually, the young Samuel coughs a red apple out at the family after being corrupted.

What is interesting is that apples are at once used both as a symbol for corruption but are often used in a positive sense in common English idioms such as “You’re the apple of my eye," or “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”. For many, there is also an affinity to the Apple logo sported by the 2015 USA's 12th largest company by revenue.

As we speak, I am writing from my place of employment, Whole Foods Market. Currently, there are 12 different kinds of apples at this Whole Foods, including Honey Crisp, Fuji, Gala, Pink Lady, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, Granny Smith, etc.

Whole Foods Market is known for the company’s stance against carrying GMO products. However, the FDA approved two varieties of GMO apples, which are apparently safe to eat, and which will not darken after being cut. Perhaps this “forbidden fruit” caused man’s downfall, but in the process, he managed to improve its aesthetic from its original state…

You may be thinking that I have steered far off topic from our discussion of mythology; however, the ways that people imagine these foods and the debates about GMOS, organics, etc. have become mythologies in their own right.

More thoughts about food and mythology to come…