Referring back to my last post and the apple. In the West, the apple is often referred to as the fruit with which the serpent tempted Eve, which ultimately led to the Fall. Right, well I've been doing some research on forbidden food and began to wonder just as author Philip Thody did: "Why then, did the apple never become the subject of generalized taboo supplementing the ban originally placed on it by God?"
Thousands of years after the ban on swine, muslims still adhere. Thody answers the apple question himself: "fruits and vegetables are very rarely at the receiving ends of taboos. Apples have always been absolutely kosher: they are so obviously healthy that nobody in his right mind would ever want to forbid people from eating them." And he's right, but was it really an apple then? Did they even have apples? That answer is no.
In fact the Bible never mentions apples.
From Genesis:
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat...
...and the rest is history. So there was no apple. There were however pomegranate. Pomegranate is one of the few fruit mentioned explicitly in the Bible. Pomegranate was first recorded to have been sewn for harvest in 3000-4000 BC. Though I could find no evidence of the pomegranate ever being forbidden in the Holy land, the Greeks seemed to also have a famous story involving the pomegranate. 
from the blog: semantically driven
Demeter, mentioned before the Olympian gods and very rarely by Homer was the goddess of the Earth.
The story goes that her daughter, the very pretty Persephone was out one day innocently picking flowers with some nymphs. When along came Hades through a cleft in the Earth and kidnapped Persephone. Demeter, not knowing what had happened became distraught and searched endlessly for her daughter. The Earth grew cold and nothing would grow. The people became hungry. The sun (Helios) who sees everything eventually told Demeter what happened. Before returning the girl to her mother, Hades tricked her into eating a few pomegranate seeds. It was the rule of the Fates that whosoever consumed food or drink of the underworld would be doomed to remain there forever. Persephone had not realized this so, she was released to her mother on the condition that for a period of time each year she would return to be queen of the underworld. Of course this time is now known as winter.
It is rumored that during Demeter's search for Persephone she passed through Elusis, where she revealed her secret rites to the people there. This sharing of Demeter's wisdom (go figure?) was commemorated by a festival known as the Elusinean Mysteries.
These cult ceremonies held every year in ancient Greece, were believed to elevate man above the human sphere into the divine and to assure his redemption by making him a god...
It will come as no surprise then that during the festivities it was forbidden to eat pomegranate.
p.s. This is the story behind my favourite poem by Sir Algernon Charles Swinburne: The Garden of Proserpine
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