Apples

Ryuk treats earthly apples as the one food worth eating, prizing their juicy bite and likening the pull they exert on him to the hold that drink or tobacco has over people. He limits himself to red varieties, and going without them throws him into something resembling withdrawal: he twists his body into painful shapes and grows desperate enough to obey commands for a single piece, as when he scours Light's room for hidden cameras.

The fruit of the gods' own world bears no resemblance to its earthly counterpart, looking instead like shrivelled, dark maroon peppers. When Misa once trades Ryuk a ripe human apple for a taste of one he is carrying, she immediately spits it out and likens the flavor to sand. Over time, apples grow into a sought-after commodity within the gods' realm, valuable enough to function as a kind of currency among its inhabitants.

The fruit is bound most closely to Ryuk, whose habit shapes much of his behavior, but its influence spreads through the realm of the gods of death. In the C-Kira side story, Midora trades thirteen human apples to the King of Death in return for a spare notebook that she passes to C-Kira. Another god of death, Gukku, observes that Ryuk's practice of hauling earthly apples back home is the very reason killer notebooks became so easy to obtain, though he admits uncertainty over whether that has been a good thing. Series writer Tsugumi Ohba has said he settled on apples because their look struck a sharp contrast against Ryuk's dark frame.