Image by Ray Shrewsberry • from Pixabay
Earlier, I started divulging my theory about Adam and Eve and went off down a different path. One thing about us humanoids is we love a good story. If narratives had been passed down over thousands of years, could Adam and Eve represent the old way of life, in other words living in connection with nature and thriving from its abundant spoils?
Then one day, Eve twiddles her thumbs, while Adam goes hunting. On this occasion he comes back empty handed but he notices Eve has not been idle. She is wowing at the fruit, which has ripened on her pet tree. Adam is cautious. Is this too good to be true? Does this mean I can just stay at home and pluck juicy morsels from your tree? That would be useful in a leprosy lockdown for sure.
Hungry both, they muse the implications of this discovery. Adam thinks: “No more hunting? Putting my feet up of an afternoon, while wifey grows food on the dwelling doorstep then puts it in my lap, asking if I have had a good day, Dear?” Eve thinks: “Meat”, after all the fruit orchard was already here. Had you not noticed it before, Dear? Do you appreciate the household chores I do each day?”
As the tree bore apples, they made cider and got squiffy together. Adam made a revelation. He was a terrible hunter anyway and had long planned to turn vegan. That was it. He was becoming a grower.
Fast forward a decade and the fruit trees have perished, because they had been genetically modified to be red, sweet and sickly and had turned into a monoculture orchard without the biodiversity to thrive and the land beneath them has died.
Adam blames Eve, as it was she who took the bite of that apple. And now look at them. Toiling over the soil, which seems to have moved away from the fertile crescent, after each field becomes barren and dry, now that competition for wheat is fierce in the food market. Most people sell fake relics and wood carvings at inflated corn prices.
All the land has become one massive wheat field – let’s have a wheat festival! All because some idiot decided we suddenly needed a “currency” and to collect taxes, although we had managed up until now, perfectly fine thank you, with a needs-must barter system that worked. Now we all need to count how much storage each family has – no mind the weather, which is outside our control, determines how much of this stuff we end up with anyway – and the more you have, the more you are given by everyone else. So, just for having the most corn, you now get to tell the rest of us what to do, is that it?
Bloody Eve. She had to interfere and wreck our lives. I’m out. Adam walks off in a huff followed by a puff of dry dust.
Sophie Sweatman 