Until very recently, the pomegranate hardly sold at all in Britain and western Europe. We like our fruit easily peeled, its flesh sweet and minimally seeded. Pomegranates are exotic and other, symbols for sex and death and, paradoxically, for eternal life. They're among the most captivating things in nature, though: ruddy and gold, studded with jewelled arils, flesh-like tart tears folded into bitter pith. A pomegranate in a bleak London winter evokes sudden sunlight, the wail of a muezzin, distant mountains and a desert in bloom.
They've always taught that you Adam and Eve got wrist-slapped for scrumping. But Paradise must have afforded the couple any fruit they wanted: the rash hand in evil hour could just as easily have plucked a raspberry, kiwi or durian. And some Jewish scholars think the tree of life bore pomegranates, as so do some Iranians, in whose country the fruit evolved.
Pomegranates have always been a big deal in the Middle East. They feature in every major religious text to have spun from the region. Moses assured the Israelites, who missed it during their exile, that it was waiting for them in the promised land. A desert people will always imagine heaven as a garden, and the Qur'an tells its followers to expect pomegranates in paradise.
The Song of Solomon, the most beautiful book in the Bible, mentions the fruit six times in its short text. Its sybaritic verses find echo in Wilde's imponderably strange and lyrical play Salome, where Jokanaan's lips and teeth look like "a pomegranate cut with a knife of ivory".
The ancient Greeks knew of it too. Persephone was the goddess of fruit and fertility. Pluto, the ruler of the underworld, abducted her and dragged her into the howling darkness of Hades. She yearned for the green, vivid world above, and was at last told she could return as long as she hadn't eaten anything during her imprisonment. But Pluto tricked her into swallowing six pomegranate seeds, sealing a fate that saw her forced to return to Hades every year for six months, which plunged Earth into winter.
Juice is how most people in the west have come to try pomegranates. In 2002, 19 pomegranate "products", such as juice, launched in the US. By 2005 this had risen to 258. Google searches for the fruit have risen steadily since 2004. (And note how the made-up word "superfood" appears from thin air in 2006.)
Much of this is down to the marketing power of by far the world's largest and most litigious pomegranate juice maker, POM Wonderful, owned by the billionaires Lynda and Stewart Resnick. They refuse to disclose POM's profits but, according to Newsweek, sales of their juice rose almost eightfold between 2003 and 2006.
POM claims to have spent $34m funding research into the supposed health benefits of its product. It has placed ads and funded research cited in stories in the world's media suggesting that drinking the juice can protect against Alzheimer's, arthritis, breast and prostate cancer, can lower cholesterol, help you get an erection, remove your beer belly, and so on and on.
Until recently, POM's website carried testimonials from drinkers claiming the juice had helped their cancer and caused mysterious lumps in their bodies to vanish. POM went so far as to use shock advertising campaigns (now banned) suggesting their product could literally "cheat death".
Last October, the US Federal Trade Commission decided it had had enough of all this and sued POM for making "false and unsubstantiated claims" for its products. The FTC argues that the drink's alleged benefits aren't supported by accepted scientific standards. POM's largest experiment, which tested 289 people to see whether pomegranate juice reduced hardening of the arteries in heart patients, found "no significant difference". And even if the juice did offer these benefits, a single glass contains almost as much sugar as a can of Coke.
All this, of course, is symptomatic of the skewed way in which many people see food today. The juice is not a drug. It probably won't harm you, and it might even do you good. The deliciousness of the fruit is reason enough to eat it. Pomegranates are at their crimson best when you're trapped in winter, pining with Persephone for the green, the warmth and the light.