Why are you chosen as the evil fruit, the one that Eve plucked in search of truth, the one that destroyed the fate of humanity, filling us with sin? I don’t understand it, because I see you so differently. First, who can resist your variety alone? I haven’t seen too many types of strawberries, and they are pretty much all red, aren’t they? When do you ever hear about a Granny Smith versus a Mackintosh mango? But with you, my apple, I couldn’t even count on two hands how many names, shapes, colors, and sizes that you offer. In fact, upon a simple Google search, I came across a web site that listed at least one, and as many as fifteen, types of apples for every letter of the alphabet, even q, u, x, and z. What other fruit can compete?

Oh apple, that is not why I love you (though who doesn’t like a little spice in their life?). What I love is your durability—how, unlike other fruit that shrinks and stinks and rots, you hold your tough skin for weeks, months even. I love how I can buy American-grown apples every month of the year, and that in June they taste as fresh and delicious on my tongue as in September. I love the crisp semi-acidic taste that accompanies the sweetness of each bite. I love how you fit into so many molds—homemade cinnamon applesauce that flavors my morning oatmeal, apple cider and juice that kids worldwide live for, apple pies and tarts and cobblers, baked apples, apple dumplings, apple butter.

I could go on, but you know how precious you are to me—part of your grace, your ultimate inner beauty, is how unassuming you are. Most people wouldn’t bring apple straight to mind when they are labeling their favorite fruit—they would pick something more phallic, like a banana, or more exotic, like a pomegranate. But nothing in my mind, on my tongue, can taste more delectable, and at the same time bring so many happy memories, as a freshly picked apple. What other fruit can boast that it grows in every state of the nation, in every country of the world? I’d like to see a pineapple planted along the shores of Lake Ontario, a kiwi cropping up in Sweden. But you, my fruit, will be there, wherever my travels will take me.

People all over the world cherish you, and you ask nothing in return. You become the name of companies. No one says, “She was the orange of my eye,” or, “A grape a day keeps the doctor away.” It’s all about you, apple, with your teeth-cleaning pulp and fiber-filled skin and your ever-glistening beauty, glorious on a teacher’s desk or as the first fruit a baby mashes in his mouth.

Perhaps Eve didn’t know what she was doing. Perhaps she didn’t realize that one bite would lead us to millennia of endless bites. But I think, rather than walking us into a world of sin, she was simply taking the first bite of the world’s most perfect fruit.