Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Figs!

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why figs (aka "wasp piñatas") are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5Get tickets to see us LIVE at the London Podcast Festival this September: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/comedy/secretly-incredibly-fascinating/(Alex’s old podcast hosting service required a minimum of 5 characters per episode title, and he's keeping that going for fun. So that’s why this episode’s title has an exclamation point)

Folks, as you heard, saying it again here, we are doing a live episode in London. Me and Katie are meeting up at the London Podcast Festival in September. There's a link in the description of the episode to get tickets, and we'd love to see you there. Figs. Known for being fruit. Famous for being newtons. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why figs are secretly incredibly fascinating.

Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie! Yes? What is your relationship to or opinion of figs? Full of wasps. Teaming with wasps. Yeah, I didn't know that before researching and it's really fun and it'll be a significant chunk of the show. Yeah,

a little teaser. I hope I didn't spoil too much of it, but when I think figs. No, I think it's a hook. Yeah, they're full of wasps. Yeah, it's a hook. Full of wasps. We'll explain later. Yeah, I used to not eat figs because of the wasp thing. And now I do eat figs. No, I actually really like figs. I think they taste very good. Do not like Fig Newtons, never had, never have. Cause Newton was wrong about physics.

He didn't understand general relativity. So I boycott them based on that. This week we're going to fully cover figs and also the first chunk will be all about fig newtons. Okay. Because that was my only exposure to figs until really recently. And then I had them on a pizza as a pizza topping and that was pretty much it. But did you like it?

Was it good? It is good, especially for kind of a sweeter pizza. and that was pretty much it. But did you like it? Was it good? It is good, especially for kind of a sweeter pizza. They put honey on it too. Yeah, I like the weird pizza flavors with the stuff. I had a pizza with flowers on it, like squash blossoms. It was the best thing, the most heavenly experience ever. I think I've had figs on like a flatbread before and that was really good. Definitely it's like a cheese board thing if you want to feel very fancy, you have your

figs on there. Oh, very fancy, yeah. And I'm the reverse of you. I like fig Newtonsons. I see, yeah. I like figs. I like the way they taste, but I used to be afraid of them because of the wasps. I didn't know about the wasps and I also thought they were kind of inaccessible, I think.

They're in Fig Newtons, but I was like, is this some kind of fruit in the Middle East that just I can't get to? And we'll talk about the biblical element and it is a lot of it originally from the Middle East, but also not in an interesting way. Were you aware of things like boats and aeroplanes at this point in your life, Alex? What's any of that? Because I like how you're like, there's no way I could get access to this fruit. This is from an entirely different world region. Anyways, I'm going to have some pineapple now.

region. Anyways, I'm gonna have some pineapple now. Maybe some green tea. Yeah, that's me, extraordinarily closed-minded, not interested in the world. That's it. It's a good character. And also thank you to listeners, Zentor, for suggesting this on the Discord and me and Katie. Zentor. Also, their avatar is a very sweet picture of Kermit the Frog. So I just imagined Kermit talking like that, which is good. Zentor. And me and Katie brought it up on a previous episode that it'd be a good idea and here

we are. Yeah. And on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week that's in a segment called, Nobody stats it better, makes me go sum up the rest. Nobody stats it half as good as Sif. Baby, that's the pod. And that name was submitted by Vout Anders. Thank you, Vout. We have a new name every week. Please make a Missillian wacky and bad as possible. Submit through Discord or to

sifpod.gmail.com. We haven't done a lot of ballads, I think. That one, it's a Carly Simon song that was a James Bond theme. It was the theme for The Spy Who Loved Me. Oh. Didn't see that one. It's both a ballad and cool spy stuff. Did the spy love him?

Turns out, yeah. Roger Moore. Loves everybody, you know? Yeah. And like I said, we're going to do all the fundamental Fig stuff, but we're starting with Fig Newton stuff. Man, that Newton. Yeah, and the number is 1891.

That is when Fig Newtons are from and have been made ever since. 1891. So, it's a pretty old snack. Yeah, that does seem pretty old. I mean, still after Newton's time, still can't forgive him for thinking that gravity is a force. What a fool. What a charade. But yeah, I've never really cared for the flavor of them, but it is an interesting treat because it is like a tiny fruit tart that is portable. Yeah. And I if I had been pressed, I think I would have guessed they're named after Isaac Newton.

But it turns out this deserves a mini takeaway. Number one, Fig Newtons are named after the Boston area and recently dropped the fig part of the name. Wait, they're named after the Boston, there's a Boston area new town? Yes, yeah, like colonizers set up a town near what's now Boston, Massachusetts that was originally called New Town and then shortened to Newton. Okay, yeah. So the snack is named after the current town of Newton, Massachusetts. Right. I think I've seen or passed through that, the Newton, but I have always pronounced it in my head as Newtown. Like I think I've seen it on some of the train system maps, but I'm like,

oh, Newtown. And that's where the name came from. It's totally unrelated to the scientist. Yeah. Right. Some people also assume that a Newton is some just long running style of cookie, but this was one specific company called the Kennedy Biscuit Works created the cookie and named it after Newton Massachusetts. In your relation to the Kennedys? Like plausibly, I didn't find one, but they are a Boston area company. They're based in Cambridge nearby, the Cambridge mass. They had a whole line of different snacks that they just named after different towns in the area. They had a Trewsbury Hill, they had a Harvard, they had a Beacon Hill.

Like they had a Trewsbury Hill, they had a Harvard, they had a Beacon Hill. And then when they came up with a machine to do an extrusion process to mass produce British style fig rolls, they just picked Newton, Massachusetts. And it could have been any place in the Boston area. It was kind of random. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with watching factories squeeze food into shapes and then cut it up. That was like incredible. It made me kind of not want to eat those foods a little bit. Like it was not appetizing, but it was fascinating to see them. Like when you say extruding, it's like you're pushing like the dough and the filling like

through a tube and it comes out and then you have a little chopper that chops it up. It is grimly fascinating. Right. I love that that's how these are made, that it's like toothpaste or some kind of injection process, but that's how they do fig paste and cookie dough all at once. Yeah. When an employee thought of that, that's why they made the product. Because apparently this style of snack is a long running British pastry cookie kind of cake, which is called a fig roll. But people would hand make that. And so when an employee of Kennedy Biscuit Works thought of this extrusion machine for

it, then they made it a mass produced snack. I mean, it's interesting. Do Fig Newtons really only come in fig flavors or are they like, did they just start with the fig flavor because it was like a fig roll? Because it seems like you could put any kind of jam in there. That's an excellent question because for a very, very, very long time they were just made with figs. And then in this century, they started doing other flavors of fruit. I see. Would you say they didn't give a fig about other flavors of fruit, Alex?

Yes, I would. People can't see me, but I look very solemn right now because saying that killed me a little bit. Only a little, we can keep on going. All right. Yeah. And yeah, they especially started pushing other fruits, you know, more than a hundred years after they started making the cookies. And the big number there is 2012.

Because in 2012, the manufacturer dropped Fig from the brand name. Like these were always called Fig Newtons, but I noticed this in the store and it bugged me. Like if you buy them now, it just says Newton on the package and then it says Fig in smaller print kind of below it. Newton Fig. Because they're pushing all sorts of other fruits, especially strawberry in there. I guess because the youth today, they're not very fig focused. Yeah, that is what they found in market research. Apparently, the Mondelese conglomerate that now makes these, they did market research after several consecutive years of declining sales and found that most people still like them, but most people were specifically unenthusiastic about the fig part, and felt like it was like

old people coated sort of like prunes. And so they thought they would vary it up. Yeah, how did prunes become like so old person coated? Cause raisins are still like, I don't like raisins or prunes really, but you know, they're essentially the same thing. They're dried fruit. I mean, there's a bunch of dried fruit, but like prins or prunes really, but they're essentially the same thing. They're dried fruit. I mean, there's a bunch of dried fruit, but like prunes and prune juice, it's like, ha,

ha, you're eating prunes? Are you trying to poop while being old? Yeah, prunes and figs have a lot of fiber and are good for your digestion and pooping. And so I think that's just how people got there. But everybody has to poop, not just the old. I put in like a very official source link to everybody poops. We brought up some scholarship on this actually. Sorry. Everybody poops, 2003.

I don't know when that was published. Yeah. In like the start of the 2010s, they said Fig Newtons have a really strong specific niche in cookies, but it's declining. In 2011, they launched a fruit thins version with less filling and a less chunky shape and a lot of different fruits. Then 2012, they fully changed the branding to be just Newton and try to make it look like figs are just one option for this wild cookie that

can be lots of different things. What are the flavors? All of them. Alex, tell me all the flavors. Come on. They launched the change with three. They did triple berry, sweet peach and apricot, and baked apple and cinnamon. That last one kind of sounds good. I would have all of them and they push the concept that it's a hundred percent whole grain

because there's not like a ton of dough and I guess they made it whole grain. I see. And like across the whole history of this product part of the benefit has been that especially from a US perspective this feels healthier than other cookies. Yeah, there is fruit. That is true. How healthy, like, are they actually that healthy though? Because maybe it's like less devastating

than say a different cookie, but is it actually like healthy at all? The short answer is it's maybe healthier than what it competes with, which is especially Oreos and chocolate chip cookies. There is a fruit there and it's a naturally very sugary fruit. Figs have a lot of sugar in a fruit way.

I'm not a nutritionist, so this is, take this with a grain of salt, which is funny because that's also food. But sugars and fruits are more complex so that it takes longer to digest. But I think the other reason that fruits are healthier is it's just like less concentrated sugar. Like you eat an apple that has sugar in it, but it is dispersed over an apple, which also has a ton of water, a ton of fiber, all these other things. And then you feel more satiated after eating an apple. Whereas like if you have an apple Fig Newton, it's highly concentrated and without as much of the

fiber and certainly without the water content. So like you can also eat a lot more of it. So you can get a much higher dose of sugar than you can with eating an apple. You're also getting some of the fruit stuff in there, which is probably good. I don't know. Yeah. And the rise and fall of these has pretty much all been driven by our perspective on figs. And especially like in the mid 1900s, they were able to push this as a somewhat novel, somewhat healthy fruit that you don't find anywhere else. In particular, once Kennedy Biscuit Works got merged and merged again and became part of Nabisco, which is now part of Mondeliz. Then they were able to really push it nationally. They even had a hit ad

campaign on 1970s TV with an actor wearing a giant fig suit and he was a character called Big Fig and would sing and dance. That's incredible. Probably one of the first times a lot of Americans saw a picture of a fig, sort of. Like, just what the fruit looks like. Well, it's probably the first time they saw a fig who could dance and speak as well. Yeah, in 1900s, we were like, how do we make fruit and vegetables dance? We need veggie tails, we need the California raisins, we need everything.

Like, yeah. Remember the green giant? That scared the poop out of me as a kid. Green giant? I was so afraid of him. I actually didn't hate peas and green beans so much, but the green giant scared me. And there were some really weird commercials with him that were like, I don't know, it was like, you know, the-

Kind of sexual, right? Yeah, a bit. And I mean, I think that went over my head as a kid, but it was mostly like giant man and he's green and I'm scared he's going to eat me. Yeah, he's like Godzilla. And also those weird Renaissance paintings of a person made of fruit. Yes. Yeah, it's a lot. I like the dancing. I like the, I think I was a little friend of the California Raisins too, because they were like claymation, which is a little bit weird. Claymation was always a bit scary. I was fascinated by it, but it was also like a little uncanny. But yeah, dancing fig sounds

friendlier, I think. And that's what people thought. Guy in a fig suit. Yeah, they liked him and liked the idea of, oh, this kind of fits the invention of the idea of health food in the later half of the 1900s. And the last number here is third, because according to Mashed.com, Fig Newtons were the third best-selling cookie brand in the United States in the early 1990s. Specifically 1992. They were only behind Chips Ahoy and Oreos. Okay.

Well, that's actually quite impressive. Yeah. And then they kind of dropped off in the last few decades, but then I've tried to flip it with- Because of anti-fig propaganda. It started to reach a point where it was like they were truly the only fig thing and it felt weird to people. And so then they dropped it and are trying to put other fruit in, but they still make the fig Newton and you can still get it. Next number here, this relates and gets into

figs in general. It's more than 85%. More than 85% of the world is figs? What? 85% of the world is figs? What? It's a fig world after all. More than 85% of the world's fig crop gets dried out after harvesting. What? That's criminal. Almost all the figs we grow, we dry out

to use for stuff like Fig Newtons. And that's coming from the book, Figs, A Global History, which is by David C. There's a book about everything. I love it. It's so exciting. I love it. It's so amazing. David C. Sutton is the author. He's a trustee of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.

I thought you were going to say the Symposium on Figs. The Beef and Dairy Network is such a good podcast about such a fictional world, but then there are also these places where people are that committed to a thing. It's great. Yeah. It's reflective of reality. And Sutton says only about 3% of the world's fig crop gets eaten fresh. And it's partly because they have one of the shortest

shelf lives of fruits that we grow as crops. It's really just a few days of it being ripe and not too ripe. So about 10% gets canned or bottled and the other 85% gets dried out to greatly extend the shelf life and also have another kind of new flavor and texture that we also like. I mean, I guess that does track with like, I thought fresh figs were fairly expensive compared to other fruits. I don't buy them very often.

I've actually never bought a fig for myself. I'm usually at a fancy place or something. Well, I'm not usually at a fancy place, let's be real. But when I am on rare occasions at a fancy place, sometimes there is like a fig that is offered to me and so usually like part of a cheese board or something, charcuterie, crudites, and I'll eat it and I'll enjoy it.

But I've never actually gone out and been like, I'm going to purchase a fig. It almost makes more sense at a restaurant context because they can buy a whole crate and serve them to hundreds of people during the couple days they're still fresh. And then like, if you're just home by yourself, it's hard to run through that whole box in a few days. Yeah. Although, you know, my parents have a fig tree and I would have figs from the fig tree that they have and they live in Southern California. So like everything grows there. It makes me so mad when I try to grow a lemon here and it just like is sad and dusty and it's like, oh yeah, we just have everything. Everything grows.

This week's bonus show is all about figs in California specifically. Hey! And the next number here is almost 5,000 years old. Almost 5,000 years old is the oldest written record of figs as a food. Well, what did they say about it? Yeah, it's a Sumerian king. Because he was a king, some of his writing got carved into stone. I still don't really know why he would carve this into stone, but he described figs as a food with medicinal properties that he likes. Okay. I mean, King says it.

It's probably a lot of things he said that they had to record that were not, were kind of banal, like my foot itches, but you know in that way where when you scratch it, it doesn't really do anything because the itch is like under the skin. And then they wrote, it's like, no, no, keep going. Like I ran out of tablet. You got to get some more out from the quarry because he keeps talking about this itchy foot. Yeah, it does. It does feel very quotidian to be carving it, but you know, it's like if the little stuff Larry David Mutters got carved into stone.

I don't know why you would bother. Do you respect wood on a big plinth? Yeah. So, yeah, the King Urukagina of two Sumerian study states called Lagash and Girsu had that carved around the year 2900 BC. And apparently a few centuries before that, we think people started cultivating figs and farming them. I see. Primarily in places that are now the countries of Syria, Turkey, Yemen, Iraq, Iran. And that

wouldn't make it the very first crop cultivated by humans. We think wheats and rices and beans were at least a few centuries earlier. Especially given if it has such a short shelf life, that would be perhaps they were drying it early on as well, but that would still make it seems less useful than say other fruits or other crops. Yeah, and apparently they since ancient ancient times, have been drying them. You could either let them dry out on the tree or just put them on kind of wooden shelves and pallets and let them dry in the sun.

So in a place where you can easily grow a ton of figs, if you also dry them, then that's kind of a staple crop. That's a solid way to feed beef. So when King... Oruka Gina. Yeah, Dennis said that it had medicinal properties. Do we know what he meant by that? What did they think were the medicinal properties of figs? Helping your digestion and pooping. There's so much ancient medical science that's bunk and that one they probably could have

gotten right. It's pretty noticeable. Yeah. It's like, this is quite an interesting little teardrop shaped food. Oh, goodness. I sense activity in my lower regions. Right? Your servant specifically for poop tells you how much better it's going and you're like,

that's good information. I'm going to carve that. My pooper maid says this is good. But all that said about this probably not being the first crop, there is a theory that it is our first crop by a huge margin. The number there would be 11,400 years ago. Whoa. Because there was a find in what's now Palestine, where they found a few things from a fig tree, in a way

we'll discuss, in somebody's house. And that suggests that if this was farmed on purpose, it would be the very first crop we did by many thousands of years and totally change our understanding of human civilization. Yeah. Like that's like 11,000 years ago. That's like, I think somewhat around the time when we started domesticating dogs.

Yeah, it would be very early. And this is a theory that we lean away from thinking is true, but can't totally disprove either. And the explanation for that gets into a mega takeaway number two. The botany and biology of fig trees could be our whole episode and then some. There's so much here, including the wasp stuff you mentioned. They're a weird fruit that is somewhat of a wasp piñata. And if you've ever looked at the inside of a fig, it is true. It's not like your apple where you have this solid flesh.

It is wild. It's got all these weird little nubbins in it. And I'm sure we'll talk about why that is, but it is like just like look at a fig that's been sliced open. And you will see that there's more to this strange object than meets the eye. There really is. The botany and the involvement of wasps is so different from many other fruits. And this isn't even really technically a fruit in the way others are.

And it's amazing. It's very strange. And lots of sources here, including digital resources from the US Forest Service, pieces for Smithsonian Magazine by Jacob Roberts and by Amanda Fiegel, National Geographic pieces by Liz Langley and by Emma Maris, and also NPR coverage of the study I mentioned that maybe changes how we think civilization worked. The thing is that figs come from trees, but they also come from co-evolved species of wasps.

Before researching, I had heard of a kind of tree called a ficus. That's a genus of trees. There's at least around 750 species. Saw their estimates approaching a thousand species of ficus. Within all this, there's a mini takeaway number three. Figs are only sort of fruits and are more like packages of inverted flowers. Yes. Plus, maybe inverted flowers. Yes. Plus, maybe wasps.

Yes. Like you're probably eating some wasps if you eat a fig, but not necessarily. And either way, for these things we call fruits to exist, it takes an extremely specialized species of wasp that co-evolved with an extremely specialized species of tree. Yeah. And also these are not big wasps. They're actually really, really, really tiny. So when you think of a wasp, this is why I was scared of them as a kid, because I had heard this thing that they have wasps in them. And I was imagining you'd bite into one and then a hive of angry wasps would come out and see you.

But no, these are like, they can be smaller than ants. So they are very itty bitty. Yeah. And yeah, so small to the point that they often burrow in and out of the fig and we can't see it because they made such a tiny hole. It's a really, really small insect. Let's put it this way, if you're biting into a fig, you're not going to notice it. Yeah, you won't know.

Like if you do get a wasp, it doesn't really matter, but often they will actually exit the fig before you eat it. Yeah, and there's two amazing processes going on. One of them is a wasp thing. The other process is that when a ficus tree wants to spread its seeds, it makes flowers, but all of the flowers are inside of a structure that is like bending in on itself in a bulbous stem. And that's called an inflorescence. And so when you look inside a fig, you're seeing many, many very tiny flowers. Those are those little structures in it.

Yeah. Yeah. It's wild. When you really focus on it, it kind of looks like a sarlacc pit, but it is delicious. Yeah. They look like kind of space alien fruit to me. Yes. Even though I've lived on earth a while and I'm a grown person, I just think of science

fiction. Yeah. And depending on the species, that fig could have several dozen flowers in it, it could have several thousand flowers in it. And that's not quite technically a fruit. But what happens is it grows all those many, many flowers that have seeds. And then those mainly get spread by the one species of wasps that evolved with the one specific species of tree. Apparently there's one at most two wasp species for each tree type and they both depend on each other to exist. They would die out without each other.

It is really, really weird too because like the female wasp goes into the immature fig and sort of bores her way into it. And this is, this is okay for the fig because again, they're like teeny tiny. This is like a, this is like a very fine syringe going in. And when she gets in, she like kind of wiggles around, like moves through this like mass of these young immature flowers and she lays her eggs. This is kind of a suicide mission because usually

like the process of actually getting into the fig like rips her wings off. So like she will just kind of die in there. You don't generally see them though, because as the fruit matures, it basically like the wasp just gets absorbed into the plant and just kind of becomes part of the plant, like almost like fertilizer. Yeah, that lady queen wasp, when she lays her eggs, then the male ones hatch and apparently

are wingless usually. This varies because there's so many hundreds of species, but the wingless males go around the fig impregnating as many females as possible, possibly while they're still at an egg stage. Then they burrow tiny holes toward the outside of the fig and then die. Then the females hatch travel out through the holes to find new figs on new trees. And that cycle is always happening. Right. And one fig is approached by many female wasps. So it's not just Game of Thrones style, they're all brothers and sisters. There's there's a lot like a lot of wasps like different wasps will lay their eggs

in it. So it's more like a singles bar happening inside of a fig. Yeah. The show Game of Figs is a lot more upbeat even with the death and the weird biology. It's like, yeah, we're not we're not fighting. We're all just panning from fig to fig. Yeah. And this process both propagates the wasps because they're burrowing in, burrowing out, laying eggs, thriving that way. Also, as they do that, the bodies of especially the females just bring pollen from fig to fig and there's flowers inside of there.

So that's how the trees live and the trees keep making more of themselves and more fruit. Yeah. Because as the female comes in, she's spreading around pollen. So it's like a double reproduction. It's a symbiotic relationship that is specifically mutualism because they both benefit, but it's also they are facilitating each other's reproduction, which is really, really cool. Yeah, and like you said, there's no harm to the fig part that we eat because this really evolved to happen over, according to National Geographic,

going back hundreds of millions of years. It was a really long running process and supposed to happen. And then with both these species going on, several thousand years ago, a third species got into the process, which is people. Look at us. Oh, I thought, okay, I thought you were gonna talk about

the, there's actually another species of wasp that is a parasitoid wasp that will lay, it's a, yeah. Cause it has a special, yeah, it has a special ovipositor that actually has, it has zinc in its ovipositor and its ovipositor, the ovipositor is like, it looks like a stinger and actually stingers and ovipositors are usually like the same, like evolved from the same structure. And so the ovipositor deposits eggs. It's a long stinger like thing that deposits eggs.

And so for this parasitoid wasp, it has that zinc reinforced ovipositor. It sticks it into the fig and then it will be able to lay its egg precisely near the eggs or larva of the other wasps and this is like the way to, then they'll feed on these other wasps. I laughed so hard at zinc because I just imagined our evil robot. I know zinc is a chemical element that's all over nature and the world, but what a parasite. That's incredible. Yeah. Yeah. And there's also, there's like what makes it even more like robot-like. The

ovipositor itself may have a chemoreceptor that can detect CO2 so that it would be able to detect the exhalations of larva inside of the fig and then like lay its eggs directly on top of the larva. Good for them. Yeah. So it's just like, it is kind of a wasps pinata, but you should still eat them. It's okay. They're tiny. Won't even notice them.

Well, then people are the fourth one getting involved. And there's also like monkeys, birds, lots of animals that just eat figs too and spread the seeds with their poop in a whole nother way. And humans can if we don't put it down a toilet. Which is great because it helps you poop and you're pooping. In a way, that's also a symbiosis, isn't it? Yeah, fakes are good for everybody. It's great. It's a mutualistic relationship between our bathroom habits and their ability to propagate. Really works. Good for fiber. Yeah. The human role in this is really weird because these plants are doing fine as they are, but

with figs, we did the thing that we did with a lot of plants like bananas and maize and stuff where we recultivated and bred it to make things we're more excited about eating. We talked on the bananas show about the origin of that being a very tiny, horrible, seedy little thing that we turned into something delicious over a lot of years of farming. Sure. Quote unquote delicious. I hate bananas. Yeah.

Poor Katie. That's such a good fruit. So with figs, we did a really weird thing where we took, again, there's hundreds of species of ficus trees, but we took some of them and made them generate kind of whole new structures until one of these flowering bulbous things felt like a fruit to us. And they also still make the old structures. The name that we've given the standard kind of inflorescence that fig trees evolved to make is called capra figs. A capra fig is a little greenish wizened kind of thing. People can eat that. It's

not poisonous, but it's not something we really seek out in most cases. And then from there, we guided them to grow another kind of inflorescence that we call Brabus, which is also called green figs. And we eat that too, but it's not so much the fig newton kind of fig. That comes from a third stage where we developed further tree changes to make further inflorescences that we call black figs, purple figs, late summer figs, or simply figs. And that thing we cultivated is just so juicy and flavorful that we call it a fruit. Culinarily, it's a fruit, even though it's still a bunch of flowers in a bulb with wasps. I mean, with the domestication of the fig, do they actually still need the wasps to pollinate them?

And that's an amazing fourth step where many of our favorite fig species do need wasps. And then we have generated a few parthenocarpic varieties of figs with no seeds and no wasp element. So like this fun fact about if you're eating figs, you're eating wasps is broadly very true, but it is not necessarily true of every fig. And you can look up whether the variety is parthenocarpic or wasp based. So if it's like a seedless fig, is that usually wasp free and then a fig with seeds would potentially have some fun little wasp mix-ins? Yeah, pretty much.

Yeah. And you're not, again, you're not like killing, if there's wasps in there, you're probably not killing them because probably the, I would assume that by then probably the mature wasps would have left it already and what's left behind is just the ones that would have died anyways. Yeah, yeah, the wasp kind, they're pretty much supposed to have wasps die in them. Like that's how the species work in both ends of it. Yeah.

So there's nothing weird going on. It's just a final wasp resting place that is also delicious. Yeah, that's right. And that human intervention is why it's confusing when we started farming these, because again, that study that thinks we might have farmed them for more than 11,000 years, that was a Harvard theme in 2006. They found this near the ancient city of Jericho in today's Palestine.

But what they found in that ancient house is specifically the Capra fig, the first kind. And so it's just very hard to prove whether that was farmed on purpose versus gathered, and whether that was even for eating, it might've been decoration or something. So because of what we did to making figs weird, and whether that was even for eating, it might have been decoration or something. Because of what we did to making figs do different things, if we find just the first thing, we

don't know whether that's farmed or not. We don't know the purpose. It's very confusing. Most of my sources said it's probably more likely that we only started farming them after wheat and rice and beans and stuff. Yeah. I could also see people collecting them because it's like, look at this cool, weird thing I found. They're cool, weird things. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. It's plausible, but ancient people and even some modern people will eat the green

figs or even the capra figs too. And so it's not totally provable either way. It's just sort of a mystery of the history of human civilization. Huh. Folks, that's many numbers and many takeaways, large and small. We're going to take a quick break and then return with the bizarre combination of figs with Christian food and culture. I'm a heathen, so I don't know. I don't know about figs. A folks quick reminder that members of Max Fun and supporters of this show get a bonus show every week. We have something new for you, something special for you every week if you contribute a little bit because we're donor supported and we depend on that to exist at all. In just the past few weeks we've talked about the Olympics and firebombing and anime significance of telephone poles in Tokyo.

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And there's two episodes out for you to listen to right now. We hope you will join us. Same bat time, same bat channel. For more fun. I see what you did there. Folks, we are back. and before our last big takeaway, there's a couple more numbers about figs in cultures because one of the numbers is around 700 BC.

Around 700 BC is when Homer composed the story of the Odyssey. And at one point in the story, a fig tree saves Odysseus' life. Whoa, was the fig tree like his defense attorney in the court where they're like, Odysseus, you killed a lot of people and the fig tree is like, I may be a humble fig tree from the Fertile Crescent, but... I'm a simple Mesopotamian food, but yeah.

But yeah, at one point there's a monster in the story called Charybdis, who's friends with Scylla. But Charybdis is sort of a big mouth in the ocean. Oh yeah. And Odysseus survives them once, but then later in the story he's alone on a raft and is drifting toward Charybdis again. And he grabs ahold of a convenient branch of a fig tree to climb away to safety and his raft gets eaten below him. I thought he was gonna like throw a fig at it and then this giant mouth was like, oh a fig and she's on that while Homer gets away. That's almost more plausible like num num num num num. It's not hungry anymore. Yummy figs. Better than some sweaty

Like num num num num num. It's not hungry anymore. Yeah, like, mm, yummy pigs. Better than some sweaty Grecian guy. He probably was gross. And yeah. I mean, I don't think they showered much on the Odyssey, to be frank. No, you can't.

When Cersei turned all those like sweaty sailors into like livestock and stuff, it's like smell probably improved. Yeah, pigs are relatively clean if you let them be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And many ficus species are capable of difficult and challenging kind of growth. A lot of these trees really thrive and are very hardy and in some places are even considered kind of invasive because of how well they do. I'm also going to link a picture from Atlas Obscuria of a fig tree in a Roman ruin near Naples, which sprouted from a hole in the top of a stone arch and grew upside down, like straight toward the ground. I know in Naples,

there's quite a few ruins. Do you know which ones these were? It's a place called Bacoli. Okay. Okay. Yeah. And it's just like fig trees are so good at this that it's actually weirdly plausible that there would be one straight out of a cliffside for Odysseus to grab that actually is kind of good writing. Yeah, yeah. And then he's got a snack while he's at it. He's like, little tiny wasps, go attack that mouth. Oh, well.

Go little wasps. They threaten your fig tree. Yeah. And figs are kind of all over a lot of world culture because it's a relatively global species. There's even two species of ficus tree and wasps that are in North America and were used by native people for stuff like paper from the bark and chewing gum from the sap. And then there's Buddhist traditions where the Buddha is under a fig tree specifically when he finds enlightenment. And there's also a big Jewish tradition that influenced Christian tradition

of a fig tree in the Garden of Eden. Ah, right. The classic fig leaf underpants. Yes, yeah. And the really fun number for all that is the years 1533 through 1541 AD. Almost a decade of the 1500s. Because that's when Michelangelo painted a humongous fig tree in that scene of Adam and Eve and being cast out. Was that the first appearance of the fig leaf underpants or was that later? It sort of sparked it because people were mad at Michelangelo.

What? Oh, because he, did he draw a wiener? He drew a lot of wieners and bulbous and everything. Yeah. But you know, I mean, that's, but they were naked. I thought that was the whole point. Well. I mean, but they were naked. I thought that was the whole point. Is they ate and they're like happy and naked and everything was flopping out and hanging out

and dangling around. And then some snake was like, eat this apple. So she ate this apple and she's like, uh-oh, I'm naked. And so they felt, then they felt ashamed of all the dangling and flopping about, the freeballing. Yeah, and that has led to a lot of angsty feelings across centuries of Christian culture, which is our last takeaway number four. One line of the biblical book of Genesis made figs a central fruit of Christian art

and culture for the past several centuries. The figs and fig tree leaves have become a very big thing because of one part of the book of Genesis, and then also a huge overreaction to various artistic trends. I thought it was because the fig leaves were large and fairly bikini shaped because they do do a very, look, I don't want to get too crass. So if you have a young child with you, cover their ears. If you are a young child, cover your own ears and go la la la la la. But the shape of the fig leaf does pretty much cover the testes and the penis. So that's why I assumed

like, hey, fig leaf, like, so you get full coverage. And then also on the, you know, for the labia, yeah, you still got full kind of bikini coverage. So I just thought it was a convenient shape for making sure there's no slip ups or oopsies with the privates. It is and apparently various Jewish and Christian theologians disagreed about how much we should emphasize figs in that story and other stories, like the leaves. Were figs too saucy? It's that they all agreed fig leaves were what Adam and Eve covered themselves with,

but then they disagreed about whether figs were the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Oh, I see. So it's like it's a fight between figs and apples. Yeah, it's like partly geography. Jewish tradition predates Christianity and is the foundation of the first several books of the Bible, including the book of Genesis and Adam and Eve. And in Jewish tradition, they felt pretty clear on the idea that the tree of knowledge and the fruit and the leaves that Adam and Eve covered themselves with were all figs and fig leaves and fig tree.

Partly because Jewish culture started in a place where figs grow really well in the Levant. Yeah, that seems to make sense. And do apple trees grow there much? They do, but not as well. I see. Apples do better in Northern Europe. And yeah, there's tons of versions of the text of the Christian Bible because of all the translations and recombinations of stuff. But most versions of the book of Genesis say that Adam and Eve ate a fruit of knowledge and then specifically covered themselves with fig leaves. And Christians, partly because they were maybe around more apple orchards and

less fig trees, they made the fruit look like an apple in a lot of art, but then still used fig tree leaves. So in that concept, they're running around between trees. I see. As they receive all of the knowledge of the universe. And yeah, so then you get this split that mostly matters for art. The Jewish and Christian traditions agree on the significance of the fruit and a lot of the other main elements of it. But also, Northern Europe starts to get more fig access because of trade and wars, especially toward the second millennium AD. David Sutton's book says that Muslim conquests of Spain and Portugal

brought a lot of that great Middle Eastern purple fig to a very Catholic place. And then that starts to bring figs into Christian culture more. Was it mostly just the leaves again that were incorporated into the culture or was the fig fruit itself incorporated into Christianity? the fig fruit itself incorporated into Christianity? A little of both, yeah. And also like back to Roman times and stuff, they had figs in general, but they mostly felt they should import them and it seemed like kind of a more outside of Europe fruit to them. And so then if figs are in art, it really jumped out to people.

And Michelangelo is kind of the peak issue of this because he featured a huge fig tree with clearly fig tree leaves. That was perceived to be a push against the apple that Christian theologians do in part of a broader push against all sort of conservative Christian doctrine of the time. He was a humanist, he was interested in Protestants' ideas. And he was also interested in the nudity of old Greek and Roman art, which the conservative end of 1500s Christianity found sinful. So it was one of his many transgressions as a painter. To be fair, there was a lot of sinful Greek and Roman art. There were sculptures of penises that have like little cat paws and wings on them.

Yeah, some fun characters. It got pretty wild. There's like a whole exhibit actually in Pompeii of Greek and Roman, both art, also mosaics and paintings that were banned for the public to see, but they were kept sort of, I think by some prominent papal guy. I forgot what his position was, but he like maybe a pope, but it was like his secret cabinet because he kept all these like weird wieners with wings and cat paws and then like paintings of basically pornography but funny. Like, oh, but the public couldn't handle this. It's too sinful, too sinful

for the public. Yeah, they were all angsty and wound up like that in the 1500s. Yeah. Yeah. And Michelangelo kind of forces the issue because he makes really the most significant and giant piece of Christian art ever made, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Yeah, but it's not just the ceiling. If you've been to the Sistine Chapel, all of the walls as well, and you've been there too, Alex. The walls are just completely crampacked, jam-packed even with art of biblical art, like the Garden of Eden. I think there's

even a representation of hell. Yes, with a lot of naked people being tortured. Yeah, there's martyrs, there's flayings and stuff. It's wild. It's really intense. It is. And the Catholic Church is upset about a few things later in the 1500s, and they decide to address things that people like Michelangelo and his contemporary Donatello were sculpting and painting and making. And also the other turtles. It really is very turtle-centric.

In 1563, shortly after completion of the Sistine Chapel, Catholic leaders hold an event called the Council of Trents because they say, hey, we're like 40 plus years into Protestants doing stuff that's bad. Secondarily, there's too much nudity in art. And they decide they can control the nudity more than the Protestantism. So they launch a campaign to use that one line of Genesis about figs in kind of the opposite way of Michelangelo and use fig leaves as a nudity blocker. Yeah. It's like a sensor bar. They kind of do the opposite of what he was doing. They say like,

what's more traditional as a nudity blocker than the first nudity blocker, the fig leaves, right? Like we're actually being very biblical and Christian. Did, okay, question about Christian theology. I get that Adam like covered his business with the fig leaf and Eve also covered her lower business with the fig leaf. But with Eve, did she also cover her upper business with the fig leaves? And if so, did Adam not think to cover his upper business like his nipples? I don't mean to be sacrilege, but I need details. From what I can find, the exact coverage has only been addressed by art,

and it's just fit whatever the norms are. Right. Like as a kid in Christian churches, if something depicted Eve, either she put additional leaves over her top or she just like covered it with her arms or there's a convenient bedroom scene of Austin Powers thing that gets in the way. Two doves in front of her. Yeah. A pair of melons she is holding. Right, right.

And then in old paintings, they weren't as worried about breasts. And so then that's usually just exposed and she just covers her bottom area. Yeah, like in Greek and Roman art, usually the breasts were out and about, flopping around. But usually with male genitals were actually sculpted in detail, whereas female genitals was just sort of like a smooth kind of kin, a smooth sort of kin doll situation. Whereas just like the implication of a mons pubis, but no detail, no pubic hair. Yeah. And like both those things, the council of Trent of the Catholic Church is like, we're going to crush this with fig leaves. This gets nicknamed the Fig Leaf Campaign. There's

two big waves of it in the 1500s, another in the 1700s. And they do a bunch of notorious adding fig leaves to all sorts of art. It's like that episode of The Simpsons where the group of concerned moms tries to put jeans on Michelangelo's David. That is almost exactly it. Yeah. Because the actual statue of Michelangelo's David, it was not even the first naked one. Donatello did a famous one first.

But Catholic authorities paid metal workers to cast a bronze garland of fig leaves and put this big metal belt of fig leaves on the statue for a long period of time. Here's the thing, guys, is that I feel like it's kinkier to put a big metal garland highlighting that area. Because I don't know, when I'm looking at Michelangelo, I'm not really like, you're not at eye level with the business. So I'm not drawn, like my, my gaze is not drawn down there. My gaze is drawn upwards of like, oh my God, this guy is big.

Look at him. He's looking at something. His arms are holding stuff, you know, like, yeah, to like put a big metal bikini on him, then I'm going to like look over there and be like, huh, you know, it just seems a little kinkier than just letting him be natural. Yeah, the Springfield moms had a better idea. That actually kind of tones it down. Yeah. Put him in jeans. The other notorious thing was that the Sistine Chapel itself got just fig leaves painted onto it. And a specific painter named Daniele da Volterra accepts a contract to just put fig leaves

all over various parts of Michelangelo's work. And other artists insultingly nicknamed him Il Bragatone, which means the breeches maker. Like, oh, pants boy is ruining more art. Pants man. This thinking has continued for a long time. There's two famous examples that are really embarrassing. One is involving Queen Victoria of England. Oh, yeah. Queen Victoria.

Yeah, because she she didn't get to have like the actual David, but she and her husband Albert set up an art museum that's named after them still around to this day. And they got a giant reproduction of Michelangelo's David at the actual size. And Queen Victoria was shocked by the exposed genitals. Ew heavens. And she.

Ew, no, I can't see. This is much too much. This is much too much. But buttocks, the buttocks. Oh, the buttocks. I'm getting the vapors from the buttocks. That's mesmerizing and yet my sweet Victorian heart can take it. Yeah, it's like the jokes and stereotypes of Queen Victoria, but it's real. And their solution was a sort of modernized version of the fig leaves from the Council of Trent. They commissioned an artist to make a big fig leaf and then they also designed it to attach to specialized hooks. And so the museum would attach it when Queen Victoria was going to come by and then remove

it again when she wasn't around. It was specifically her fig leaf. Everyone else got to see a giant artistic wiener, but not her. Yeah, she was able to command the museum to do an on and off fig leaf for her personal comfort. You know, I kind of respect that because she's not foisting her artistic compulsions on other people. Like, she lets other people see the lovingly crafted.

I mean, honestly, it really is not very pornographic because it's just like a little bit of, you know, there's a little bit of pubic hair and then you can see, you know, the wiener. But yeah, I do kind of respect that Queen Victoria is like, this is not my jam. I am not rocking with the wiener. So just for me, I know other people want to see it. I don't approve, but I can stop them. It's true. It's kind of open.

Yeah. You're like, that's for you folks. I'm out. Yeah. That dangling is not my thing. And this is so influential. The other weird example is from the 1990s, you know, like Michael Jordan times and stuff. They, the city of Florence. Michael Jordan times.

That's mainly how I see it. A.G., A.G., after Jordan. A.J., yeah. J, I can't spell, you know this. You know, Michael Gordon. And he was in Space Gam. It's so off-brand. Yeah.

It's got like cubist eyes or something. It's all weird. So the city of Florence, they tried to gift a copy of Michelangelo's David to the city of Jerusalem. And partly because David, you know, hung out in Jerusalem and stuff. Right? Hey guys. Jerusalem. And partly because David, you know, hung out in Jerusalem and stuff, right? Hey guys, what's up? Don't got pants, but I got this slingshot. Hope I don't need to use it. Oh damn.

That guy's big. And despite it being the 1990s, there was a firestorm of controversy in Jerusalem about the statue being too naked and allegedly pornographic. And so Jerusalem solves this by requesting a copy of a different artist's depiction of David, 1400 artist named Verrocchio, who happened to depict him with a clothed groin. And so like to this day, we are still trying to fig leaf in a way from that one line of the Bible that was turned into a censorship thing after also being an anti-conservative theology thing too.

Yeah. I think they should do a version of David where he's clearly trying to fire his slingshot, but he's scared. So he's like knock-kneed. So it's kind of like, you know, it's like the I'm holding it potty kind of thing, but he's scared. So you can't see anything. And he's like, oh no, it's the giant. I'm scared.

Yeah, exactly. And then no worries. You don't even need to put a fig leaf on there. He's just Yeah Modest due to his his potty like maybe he does have to go potty because I feel like if I saw a giant I might Feel the urge to go in the bathroom Out of out of fear a fear peepee Yeah, who wouldn't it's terrifying right? Yeah, can't handle that

It is I guess we just fixate on the genitals. And so the censorship is like overdoing it. And if you go to Florence, like any, I mean, any, a lot of places, right, have these kinds of souvenirs. But like if you go to Florence, there's a ton. Like you can just buy like a tote bag that has David's wiener on it. Like there's a lot of there's a lot of like tchkis that you can get that just highlight the wiener part. There's shorts you can get that you wear and then it has the wiener and the butt on it, which I think is kind of fun.

It's funny because Italy is still a predominantly Catholic country, but now it's like, hey man, we know you tourists want to see this wiener. Yeah, the more things change, the more figs. ["The New York Times"] Folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro, with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, Fig Newtons are named after the Boston area and recently dropped the fig part of the branding.

Mega takeaway number two, the botany and biology of fig trees could be our whole episode and then some. Mini takeaway number three, figs are only sort of fruits and are more like packages of inverted flowers plus probably wasps. Takeaway number four, one line of the biblical book of Genesis made figs a central fruit of Christian art and culture and censorship for the past several centuries. And then a ton of numbers about the entire history of Fig Newtons, the cultural role of figs in a lot of different ways, the variety of fig species and wasps

and everything else, and more. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more Secretly Incredibly Fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the peaks and valleys of U.S. fig popularity caused by California. Visit sifpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of 17 dozen other secretly incredibly

fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fun bonus shows. It's special audio, it's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximumfun.org. Key sources this week include the book Figs, a Global History by David Sutton. Wonderful digital resources from the US Forest Service, also from the Ecological Society of America. Also art museum resources from the publishing company Faden, from the Victoria and Albert Museum in England,

and digital writing from artsy.net, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, and more. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wapinjur people, as well as the Mohican people, Skatigok people, and others. Also Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here.

That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free CIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join that Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the discord and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 176 that's about the topic of lemons. You know, the fruit. Fun fact there, the growing of lemons on the island of Sicily accidentally kind of invented

the Sicilian mafia. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my cohost Katie Goldin's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unchaven by the Budo Spant. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to The Beacon Music Factory for taping support.

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