Forbidden Fruit

I got a text from my husband while I was at work today. It was a picture of my daughter and her friends eating seeds from a very large pomegranate with a caption that said, “We found this floating in the creek.”

My husband started homeschooling our daughter in 2020. She was enrolled in public school at the time, but when the schools shut down due to Covid, he started supplementing her online learning. That eventually evolved into homeschooling. I was skeptical at first, but she is learning all the core subjects, plus they have extra time for music, literature, poetry, and nature hikes. I am so proud of them both!

We’ve made friends with a lot of interesting people while homeschooling, free spirits with a sense of adventure. It was one of these friends that invited my family out for a hike today. Why wouldn’t they eat a strange object they found floating in a creek? Carpe Diem!

When I first learned about their little snack, it reminded me of the time my daughter’s nature group cooked and ate cicadas. Under the tutelage of a trained naturalist, they are often eating things they find. Their next project involves tapping a maple tree to make syrup. These kids carry knives and build their own campfires. I’m not sure how it ended up this way, but here we are. I want her on my team in case of zombies.

But where did the pomegranate come from? Pomegranates don’t grow in Northern Virginia. This one must have been part of someone’s picnic lunch that got away. They are not cheap either. A single pomegranate is about two or three dollars at the grocery store. It is very unusual to find one gently bobbing down a creek in the woods.

I was nervous about the safety of eating something possibly contaminated. When my daughter came home, she rushed over to my desk and presented me with the open fruit like Hades to Persephone. I ate one seed to be polite. Was I eating food of the underworld? More importantly, would this give me diarrhea?

Tonight, we posed the idea to some other friends, a sort of trial by court of public opinion. “Would you eat a fruit you found in a creek?”

My husband prefaced his argument by saying, “It was sealed. We had to break it open.”

The counter arguments came fast and furious…“Isn’t the skin on a fruit porus? Would you eat a hard boiled egg from the creek? A banana? A honeydew?”

“Did the water look polluted? Was there trash in it? Was it cloudy?”

“It was idyllic,” he insisted.

In spite of his outward confidence, he got paranoid and took a minute to look up the potential dangers of consuming creek water. This particular incident was so unusual that he actually had trouble getting any search results. When he tried the phrase, “Can you get sick from eating creek food,” Google asked “Did you mean Greek food?”

He eventually found an article about people that drink creek water, but the authorities can't get them to stop doing it because not enough people are actually getting sick from it. By my husband’s logic, if hillbillies are drinking this water unscathed, then surely we can eat something that’s only been dunked in it. At least the weather was cool. Bacteria and parasites thrive in warm environments.

We will probably be fine, but I can’t resist teasing him about it.

“When you opened the fruit, what condition was it in?”

“It was a little spongy.”

“Ah, ha! Everyone is getting the shits tonight!”