Betweens

🍎🍎🍎 Fruit was with us from the beginning. We had to create vegetables over a long time and with patience, but Fruit was here all the time. 🧅🧅🧅 Most plants living on Terra gain nothing by us eating them. They do not need our bodies to reproduce, so they have not been under evolutionary pressure to develop roots, stems or leaves that we like. For example, the Vegetable, which left it all up to us – if we wanted to eat it, we had to cultivate it. However, there are also plants that quickly understood that the bodies of Terrans could be useful to them as seeders, so they began to pack their seeds in sweet fruits. They wanted us to eat them, carry them in us and excrete them throughout in the world. They have put a lot at stake; in the juicy pulp we actually swallow their sexual organs: testicles and ovaries. 🍑🍑🍑 Fruit seduced us when we lived with trees, long before language, in times of touch and closeness. We remember the light glinting through the swaying green of the foliage, the hand reaching for a shiny berry. Overripe pulp bursts with a light touch, sticky juice flows into the palm of your hand. I lick my sticky fur, sipping sweet droplets from among the hairs. A sugar rush – we tasted fruit and were lost. After thousands of years of chlorophyll monotony and chewing leathery leaves, the soft sweet tissue immediately conquered us. After that, Fruit did what it wanted with us: in the course of the next millennia it had given us toothache, color vision, as well as good and evil. The First of us, those who lived before the Great Oligocene Extinction, squinted resolutely into the green crown, to spot the colorful fruits before the mastodon found them or the giant indricoterium reached them with their keratinized tentacles. They strained their vision until photoreceptors for short, medium and long wave pigments sprouted on their retina. Trichromatic vision brought them a bright world, better orientation, and an advantage over relatives. Fruit was not only a tasty treat, but also an evolutionary opportunity. The first ones had jaws and teeth adapted to crushing twigs and thick leaves, they were useless when devouring figs or prehistoric raspberries. Fruit did not need to be chewed and sugars etched their enamel like water in snow. The lazy jaw shrunk with inactivity, the teeth became brittle and pressed against each other, hiding places for bacteria, and cavities were created. Finding the Fruit was more difficult than just reaching for the leaf. Each Fruit looks a little different, can grow on hard-to-reach branches, requires strength and dexterity when opening. The First Stage, thanks to encountering Fruit, gradually acquired a larger brain; in adaptive radiation, they began to differ from the others, leaving behind their leafeating relatives. Thanks to apples and pears, they gradually evolved to the Second, Third, Upright, Skillful and Reasonable. 🍇🍇🍇 In old stories, Fruit has great power over us, it evokes transformation and ecstasy in us, as well as excess and chaos. For a few eaten pomegranate seeds, the gluttonous Persephone has to return to the world of the dead. As long as she is underground, nothing grows on the surface of Terra; meanwhile, the population is threatened with famine and death. The first one, who could not resist paradise in the Garden, snatched humanity from infinite timeless innocence in one gulp and plunged it into painful mortality. The generous mango tree stood by Siddhartha for 49 days and sacrificially nourished him until he became the Buddha; Dionysus’ grapes bring knowledge and oblivion. 🍐🍐🍐 Most of the plants on Terra are poisonous. Every taste of an unknown green leaf was a leap of faith. Eating was a courageous exposure to the other, learning about the world at the most detailed, mitochondrial level: we let something-that-not-is-me enter into us, we open ourselves to it with confidence, and we let ourselves be influenced and remade by it from within. Satiety, pleasure, convulsions, hallucinations. In the alchemical process of digestion, we change the substance, and the substance changes us. Thorough knowledge requires that we intimately connect and mix with the thing we are getting to know in order to become one. The first one in the Garden did not accept that there are things from which she has to keep her distance. She longed to know each plant intimately, she wanted to connect with everything. In this she was a typical human – she refused to leave some things untouched. 🌰🌰🌰 The sensible ones knew their world perfectly: the river, the cave, the forest. They knew the smell of the rising sun, and the edible roots underground. They recognized the voices of birds, the splashing of fish and the shapes of medicinal herbs. They lived here and there, letting themselves be led by a migrating herd of bison or ripening nuts. With the spirits of the place they negotiated the booty: sometimes they returned to the fire with greasy bacon, sometimes with a piece of rotten carcass, sometimes with nothing. They knew that land, strength and life were on loan, and were ready to return it at any time. They were able to live in nonleadership, uncertainty and secrecy. The time came when the Reasonable ones began to behave unreasonably. No one remembers exactly why, but sometime shortly after the Flood, they decided that they no longer wanted to receive food, but to produce it themselves. They tied themselves to the clay and, by the sweat of their brow, began to grow grain. Grain by grain, harvest after harvest, one failed attempt followed another. They exchanged the wild variety of nutrients for a monogamous dependence on one plant, pit themselves against the weather, weeds and pests. Rather than accepting that we do not know what will happen, it is easier to make sure that something happens in advance, no matter how disadvantageous it will be for us. When we decided to cultivate plants, we invented the future, the division of labor and private property. The consequences were devastating: malnutrition, infectious diseases, decline. What followed were 7,000 years of weak and anemic generations with porous bones, who died of pandemics and famine, knowing that that muddy field and those two bony goats were theirs. At that time, the sensible ones stepped towards nitrogen fertilizers, cattle pumped with hormones and chickens that have no space to even turn around in the cage. 🌽🌽🌽 For us, the Last, the picking of Fruit was a sacred ritual: it was a commemoration of the freedom of the First ones, of sharing without ownership and trusting in submission to the cycle. However, as the Heat progressed, there was less and less fruit. Moments when a person stumbles upon a colorful berry in a green thicket became rare until they disappeared completely. It was no longer possible to rely on luck, the time of gifts was over. 12,000 years after we planted the first seed, the responsibility for fruits was ours alone. Therefore, as it is good and beneficial, we bring you our first crop of Novocia. We respect the tradition of team Reasonable, and we join the crowd of nameless noblewomen who, in the slow process of artificial selection, scion by scion, year by year, forced the plants to get to know each other, mix and merge into one. Accept our harvest and see it as a monument to a future that may never happen. 🥔🥔🥔 Text: Lucia Tkáčová