The fig may have been humanity's first crop, planted before wheat
In a Jordan Valley village called Gilgal I, archaeologists found nine figs roughly 11,000 years old. They belonged to a seedless variety that can only spread if people plant cuttings, which suggests deliberate cultivation a thousand years before wheat and rye were domesticated. A fig, it turns out, is not even a single fruit.
What we eat is a syconium, a hollow fleshy vessel whose inner wall is lined with tiny flowers blooming out of sight. Each fertilised flower becomes a minute one-seeded fruit, so the crunchy seeds are really the true fruits. A narrow opening at the tip lets the fig wasp Blastophaga psenes crawl in to pollinate. Ficus carica, the common fig, is the type species of a genus of more than 800 plants and grows as a deciduous tree up to about 10 metres, with pale smooth bark and big lobed leaves.
Not every fig needs the wasp. Common or persistent figs, favoured by home gardeners, set fruit without pollination. Smyrna types drop their fruit unless wasps bring pollen from wild caprifigs, and San Pedro figs manage a first spring crop, called the breba, unaided but need pollinating for the main late-summer crop. Aristotle already noted that wasps from wild figs help cultivated ones hold their fruit, and Greek farmers tied wild branches onto orchard trees.
Figs fed ancient Israel, where pressed fig cakes were stored in jars, and Rome, where Cato the Elder listed several strains around 160 BC and figs fattened geese for an early version of foie gras. Rumour held that Livia killed her husband Augustus with poisoned figs from his garden. Pliny recorded thirty varieties, including the ancestor of today's Kadota. Spanish missionaries under Junipero Serra planted California's first figs in 1769, and the Turkish Lob Injir became the Calimyrna.
In 2020 the world produced 1.26 million tonnes, a quarter of it in Turkey. Because ripe figs bruise easily and keep poorly, most are dried or processed. Hardy trees survive as far north as Hungary, and Germany's Palatine region alone has an estimated 80,000 garden fig trees. The milky sap of green parts irritates skin.
Source: Fig
