August 20, 2009
Fresh Figs, and Bugs?
Fresh figs, courtesy of Flickr user Xerones
Our neighbor went on vacation this month with a heavy heart, knowing she’d miss eating most of the figs just starting to weigh down the branches of her backyard tree. So she asked us to do her a “favor” and eat as many as we could before the birds got to them. Being the kind-hearted souls that we are, we obliged.
I’d never even eaten a fresh fig before, let alone cooked with one, so I needed some suggestions. Between tips from friends on Facebook and Twitter, browsing other blogs and perusing good old cookbooks, I learned a lot.
“Jam them with gorgonzola,” one friend advised. “Figs are great sliced open and stuffed with walnuts,” said another. Lisa suggested a sandwich involving goat cheese, arugula and sliced figs, and another friend sent a link to a recipe for grilled figs with honey and ginger. All of these things sound amazing; what to try first?
Then one friend’s response curbed my appetite considerably.
“I don’t eat figs. I know too much about what’s inside,” she said. “That’s all I’m going to say.”
Which, of course, sent me into a tizzy of Googling and guessing. I remembered a rumor I heard as a kid about there being ground-up bugs in Fig Newton filling—was that it? Yep, I was on the right track. My friend and many others believe there are insects inside figs.
And they’re right, as it turns out. Fig trees only bear fruit thanks to something called a fig wasp. The wasps are born inside the figs, and when the females hatch, they crawl out to find a new fig in which they can lay their own eggs. During this journey, they pick up pollen from the fig’s male flowers and carry this into their new fig-nest, pollinating the seeds inside.
But it’s a one-way trip; the females die after laying their eggs. And the males who hatch inside the fig are stuck there too—after mating with the young females and chivalrously chewing exit holes for them, they’re too tuckered out too leave (and they don’t have wings, anyway).
So yes, there are definitely dead bugs in figs. But the fig essentially digests the dead wasps as it ripens—ashes to ashes, dust to dust, fig to fig, you get the idea—so don’t worry, that crunchy texture in the center of a fig really IS just its seeds.
Besides, there are bugs in much of our food, especially anything dyed red. Might as well get used to it.
Now, who’s got some more fig recipes to suggest?
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Wow — you are lucky to have a nice supply of fresh figs. I’ve been looking in our markets for fresh figs for years — haven’t had any yet. I bought them in Scotland once and I put crosses in the tops and roasted them (I can’t remember with what?! butter? brown sugar?) And then we ate them — most likely with cream, or marscapone, or something…..
[...] hope I didn’t freak you out too much last week by pointing out that most figs have bugs in them—tiny wasps that basically dissolve within the fruit as it ripens—because fresh figs are [...]
It’s not just fig wasps that are inside figs.
I just watched the rerun of the NATURE program on KETA called, “The Queen Of Trees”.
Fig fruits are pollinated by tiny wasps. These tiny fig wasps work their way inside the fruit and pollinate it, laying their eggs inside and then dying inside.
In addition to the fig wasps and their eggs, the fig wasps are infected with parasitic worms called nemotodes. These tiny worms exist the body of the female wasp, killing her and waiting for the new generation to be born.
If that’s not enough, there are also other parasitic wasps that use the fig fruit, though they do no pollinize it. These parasitic wasps are dependant on a male fig wasp to chew out an exit or a passing animal to eat part of the fruit so that they can be released.
So there you have it. Here is what is inside a fig:
1.) Dead female fig wasps
2.) eggs and young of fig wasps
3.) parasitic nemotode worms that infect the fig wasps
4.) other parasitic wasps
I will never eat another fig newton again!
BoyintheMachine: The parasitic wasps are not in all the figs, and some figs self-pollinate. Besides, they dissolve from the enzymes in the figs, and even if they did make it to your stomach they would be killed by the acids. Also, you could cook the figs if you are that paranoid about parasites. There is no reason to get worried about them. Furthermore, there are plenty of insects in nature that work with plants and plant-products that we eat (like bees producing honey in their stomachs).