Some insects I found inside dried Turkish figs from Trader Joe’s | Hacker News Reader

Some insects I found inside dried Turkish figs from Trader Joe’s

colinpurrington.com

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On a side note, try to keep eating figs in dried form at a moderate amount or avoid altogether if the source is "not reputable".

Dried figs are very susceptible to Aflatoxin B1(1) which is a very potent carcinogen from fungi. US food safety regulations allow 2-10 times more aflatoxin B1 in food compared to EU.

During my work, I had a chance to visit dried fig producers and saw even a couple of contaminated figs spreading to the rest of the stock like wildfire.

What you can do is to check your dried figs under UV light, and it should not shine. Here's an example image(2) I found.

Source: I have worked in the company as a machine vision engineer to develop aflatoxin detection systems with UV light.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aflatoxin_B1

2: https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/21073?page...

How does this look on a dried fig? I remember eating plenty when I was a child that had some whitishness on the outside.

They are not noticeable under visible light, so contaminated figs look totally normal except under UV and/or IR light. You can check out the link (2) above or this one:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Sample-photographs-taken...

well that's a cool application of machine vision, TIL

Would fresh figs be less likely to carry the aflatoxin generating fungus?

High concentrations of salt or sugar act as an universal preservative. A dried fig shouldn't have fungus grow unless harvested after rain, or in a non mature state, or stored for too long in humid conditions.

White powder in the surface of dried fruits is not bad necessarily. Is a common sign of accumulation of fructose crystals that ooze during the drying process. Dried persimmons have it also. This powdery coat is desirable and adds a delicious floral taste, so is an error to wash the fig before eating it. Unless the fruit has been treated with something and it smells like chemicals shouldn't be a problem at all.

Smyrna [1] type figs will always have remains of fig-wasps inside. You can't produce a Smyrna without fig wasps. They are known as the best tasting figs exactly by this. The fig wasp pollinates the fruit and the fig seeds add a very desired crunchy and almond flavored taste to the sugary flesh. Much better than the other types of figs by a mile. Wasps are a few millimeters only and don't taste line anything.

Smyrna figs can be cultured only in Mediterranean and hot climates. If you don't want wasps, can be easily avoided buying only the common varieties of figs that never had seeds inside. The origin of the product in a "cold" area will guarantee this.

[1] (Smyrna is a Turkish city famous by its figs that named an entire category, so lets assume that Turkish figs are "Smyrna" type and not "common" or "San Pedro").

> You can't produce a Smyrna without fig wasps.

You can actually just hand pollinate them, as long as you have a caprifig tree. There are lots of tutorials on YouTube. It’s starting to take off as a trend among cold weather growers in places like New England.

This is mentioned in the write-up actually near the end! The author notes on some fungus found and photographed.

Can you define a reputable source?

Say I want to test figs that I grow and dry myself; reading the article, it looks like all I need to do is get a 365nm light and throw out the ones that have green/yellow inflorescence. Is that correct? How many watts should the light be?

Here are better photographs of contaminated Figs I found on Research Gate[1].

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Sample-photographs-taken...

When I was young my grandma told me an interesting rule of thumb from her childhood in the old country:

If there are no bugs in the grain after it has been stored for a while, don't eat it.

The rationale was that if bugs didn't want to eat it (they didn't have tightly sealed packaging at that time), it was probably chemically contaminated.

That is one fantastic rule of thumb and a great perspective on the way we were that I’ve never heard before.

There's a story from the introduction of the potato into Germany. People would not eat the 'new' potatoes as dogs would not eat them.

>The things have neither smell nor taste, not even the dogs will eat them, so what use are they to us?

https://www.berlinexperiences.com/did-frederick-the-great-in...

Seems to me like a pretty unscientific way to conclude whether a food is edible (or good for you). But it makes sense of course, if you didn't have access to modern science due to poverty or era.

Even modern grain infrastructure relies on delcarations of chemical usage and not itemized testing. Real time testing equipment is prohibitively expensive and lab testing takes too long to do it before mixing a load of grain into a silo. On site tests are done but for indicators of moisture spoilage, protein deterioration and disease, but not chemical contaminants.

Haha reminds me of the time Tintin mixed in an anti-alcohol drug into the Picaros' meal, and they wouldn't eat it until snowy did.

Haha one of my favourite scenes, apart from Captain Haddock losing his taste for whisky at the start!!!

There is such a drug, sort of: Disulfiram. Though the effect isn't technically to make alcohol taste foul, it's to make consuming it give an almost instant, terrible hangover.

Some inkcap mushrooms which are otherwise edible have a mycotoxin with the same effect, coprine. There are persistent rumours that other mushrooms can contain some of it too, not verified as far as I know but there's enough poorly understood variation in mushrooms that I wouldn't dismiss the possibility.

Great read!

> One of the most oft-repeated stories about Frederick’s relationship with the potato concerns the ingenious tactic of reverse psychology the King embarked on to increase interest in potatoes: rebranding it as a ‘royal vegetable’. By ordering his soldiers to plant potatoes in royal fields and lightly guard the crops, allowing the locals to sneak in and pillage the vegetables – the Prussian king would conclude: what is worth guarding is also worth stealing.

This reminds me of Rory Sutherland's "Lessons from an ad man" where he tells this story, and then follows-up with another myth-like story about Ataturk wanting to modernize Turkey, but rather than ban head coverings for women, he required prostitutes to wear one.

full video (which is definitely worth a watch): https://youtu.be/audakxABYUc

3:20 is where the story starts: https://youtu.be/audakxABYUc?t=200

The story about lightly guarding potatoes seems to be common European trope, I've heard it in many countries. Variations include the one you mentioned, and one where potatoes were placed in a warehouse with increased security, in order to attract the attention of the peasants who were allowed to steal them.

I just came across the Frederick the Great story somewhere else this morning. That version also claimed he even told the guards to accept bribes from people trying to steal the potatoes.

That they could see that it was a plant in the nightshade family probably also didn't help matters.

Another really interesting one is about eggs. If you buy eggs from a supermarket in the US they will usually need to be refrigerated. But if you go buy eggs straight from a farm (or in many places outside the US) they'll be fine outside for weeks. When eggs are first laid they have a protective outer coating on them, called either the bloom or cuticle.

The external cleaning process mandated by the FDA results in the destruction of the bloom, which leaves the eggs vulnerable to all sorts of nasty stuff. Moving abroad one of the weirdest things was seeing eggs, on occasion a bit 'dirty', stacked at room temperature for days to weeks. Turns out it's perfectly safe!

It's one of the few foods that comes in its own super convenient packaging. Why wouldn't you take advantage of that?

Because it could be covered in salmonella and other things. Even just washing them might not be enough if you’re not careful to not cross contaminate. Washing them and keeping them cold works great.

As others have pointed out, just washing them is exactly the wrong thing to do. But if you don't wash them, you don't need to keep them cold. Not washing them works great too.

But they could be covered in poison. So we clean the poison off which has the side effect of requiring they be put in the fridge. They stay fresh longer too. I don't know why much of Europe is OK with having poisonous eggs. There are hundreds of Salmonella outbreaks in Europe because of eggs every year.

We just don't eat the egg shell. Poison on the outside doesn't matter much as long as it doesn't get in.

There are hundreds of salmonella outbreaks in Europe every year, but also in the US. Salmonella is mostly fought in the animals rather than in the eggs. But both the European and American way of handling eggs works.

It’s funny to me that elsewhere in this thread people are complaining about how Americans are less stringent with food safety, and yet here you are getting lambasted for defending an American food safety practice that objectively has a slight increase in safety, but at an arguably high cost.

Eggs stay fresher longer in the fridge. It's as simple as that. Whether you refrigerate them depends often on how long they are going to be hanging around.

yeah but they last way longer than necessary outside of the fridge anyway.

They'll last at least a month, some have even found eggs last in excess of 100 days, there have been rumours of a year but I've never seen it.

The problem with refridgerated eggs is that they don't tend to be as loose, this is fine for poached eggs but less fun for mayo or baking.

there's pretty good information here https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/09/11/336330502/wh...

from that page: shelf life of a room temp egg is 21 days; for a refrigerated one it's 50 days. Eggs are washed to control salmonella (eggs are also somewhat dirty when laid, having likely touched poop). US started washing eggs in 1970. Japan started in the 1990's after a salmonella outbreak. Scandinavia also washes. Countries that don't wash-and-refrigerate can require vaccinating chickens against salmonella. It is also commonly recommended to wash unwashed eggs before cracking them.

Why does the FDA mandate a process that destroys the bloom?

It has the potential to be contaminated with salmonella, and they felt mitigating that risk added enough value to counterbalance the loss of the bloom.

The major component missing here is why the US washes eggs, which is that they don't vaccinate against salmonella. The places you're observing that store eggs outside a fridge probably all have some kind of poultry vaccination program, for example, the red lion on UK eggs: https://www.egginfo.co.uk/british-lion-eggs

Here's the answer from the USDA themselves: https://tellus.ars.usda.gov/stories/articles/how-we-store-ou...

The USDA claims the only countries that wash/refrigerate their eggs are the US, Canada, Japan, and Scandiland. The whole argument against washing the eggs is to protect against bacteria, salmonella among them. The thing they focus on primarily for the reason we still wash/refrigerate them is freshness. They carried out a study and found washed/refrigerated eggs were fresher after 15 weeks than those stored using other methods.

I think the lack of refrigeration is mostly a convenience for supermarkets and transport, at least in the UK. I don't think I've ever encountered a household that didn't refrigerate their eggs after purchase, but they're almost always on regular shelves at sale.

Eggs are a major driver of salmonella incidence globally. Washing the eggs greatly reduces the incidence rate relative to not washing eggs. This can be seen clearly in the statistics when countries start washing eggs.

Statistically speaking, unwashed eggs are not "perfectly safe". It is the reason countries started washing eggs.

Which stats? Only 4 countries/regions wash/refrigerate their eggs (US, Canada, Japan, Scandinavia) and the reason the USDA gives for requiring such is freshness. [1]

[1] - https://tellus.ars.usda.gov/stories/articles/how-we-store-ou...

Don't expect a reply. He makes claims but rarely if ever backs them up.

The US washed its eggs to reduce rates of salmonella, it is literally in the article you linked to. That it was effective can be seen by incidence rates. The difference in salmonella rates between e.g. the US and many European countries is almost perfectly accounted for by the difference in handling eggs. With a little googling you can find plenty of papers on the subject.

The OECD and other sources rate the US, Canada, and Scandinavia has having the highest food quality and safety in the world. It goes beyond salmonella, they apply the same zealous cleanliness requirements to many other food products. This isn’t controversial, it is on the OECD website among many others.

Famously, many EU food products could not be imported into the US unless they were processed in Scandinavian food processing facilities, because other European countries had facilities that did not meet US standards. It was good business for countries like Denmark for a long time.

You failed to provide a single reference, continue making grand unsupported claims, and also are making imaginary claims about the article referenced above.

There is a lot of truth in that. If no other mammals are eating those bright red berries in the woods, you probably don’t want to either.

If mature rodents are unsure about a food source they’ll wait for some young go-getter to have a bite then watch to see what happens to them. I put poison packs everywhere in my apartment but after the first couple died none of the other mice would touch them.

There are a few exceptions to this rule however. For example saponins. One of the most common plant poisons in the natural world that might kill your dog. If you ever read an ethnobotany piece and it mentions that a certain plant is used to kill fish in a pond, it's likely a saponin-rich plant (which also means it's likely to be good to make soap out of). But since these compounds are so common humans have evolved specific enzymes to break this down and they leave us mostly unaffected (indeed some have even been turned into important drugs).

It's kinda like lignin. When wood first evolved, there was nothing that could break it down. And for thousands of years the world was "littered" with wood from dead trees until fungi finally learned how to break it down. I'd say plastics might be the next lignin as we see more and more organisms already learning to break it down, but there are too many different types of plastics that I doubt all of them could be broken down

I think the point I'm trying to make is that the "toxicity" of a chemical or compound is often in proportion to how much time the rest of the ecosystem has had to evolve a way to deal with it

I like this theory very much!

But there was also thread here on news.ycombinator about a paper which says that this theory is not entirely true.

I can't recall the paper. I think, paper said "the lignin breakdown by fungi" was already invented. The abundance of dead wood (which became coal) is described by existence of wast marshes.

I'm sorry without link is my text not valid very much. Maybe someone could find the paper and link it here.

> A widely accepted explanation for this peak in coal production is a temporal lag between the evolution of abundant lignin production in woody plants and the subsequent evolution of lignin-degrading Agaricomycetes fungi, resulting in a period when vast amounts of lignin-rich plant material accumulated. Here, we reject this evolutionary lag hypothesis, based on assessment of phylogenomic, geochemical, paleontological, and stratigraphic evidence.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517943113#:~:text=The...

Very interesting, thanks so much for the link!

It is a very cool long-term view of our current environmental degradation, whether or not it plays out.

I just love the idea of a Earth in the far future, where the huge pile of plastic rubbish left by humans is rotting like an old log.

We might have inadvertently created an enormous pile of fertilizer for a new world :-)

Wonder if it'll degrade to something oil like? :)

Right but our entire infrastructure has been built to resist that. Most likely it'll happen at a slow enough pace that we could adapt, but just imagine if soil fungi could suddenly eat PVC pipes

Most traditional architectural techniques didn't try to resist rot so much as plan around it. I.e. have the structural integrity so that you could take out and replace parts of the building without the whole thing coming down. It's why Japanese temples are the oldest standing buildings around today

I imagine we'll have to relearn some of those lessons at some point

I think a lot about this. How on a geological timescale, most of our rubbish will be compressed down to a layer of oil with a bunch of increasingly heavy metals and radioactive isotopes towards the bottom. It'll be a rich vein for building a civilization for whoever comes along in half a billion years. (My bet is on the octopus).

I must have had especially stupid rodent problems, because they sure weren't smart enough to avoid traps. Not even the rats.

Darwin agrees. I've watched live how this goes with a young family of rats. The first 2 got caught in the trap and the others were already pretty scared off by the closing mechanism kicking in. Left it like that for a couple of minutes, then I put the caught ones somewhere else then reinstalled the trap. The next 3 nor the mother came anywhere near the trap. Not even after moving it to a different location, nor with different types of food inside, nor with a different trap with a somewhat different shape.

On the odd occasion they’d get mice in the house, my parents living in Melbourne had difficulty would have difficulty getting rid of them.

Five years ago I moved out into a tiny rural town, and saw and heard mice very regularly (the house’s previous owner had only been around every couple of weeks). But I haven’t had the slightest difficulty in slaying them: I put a couple of traps in areas I’d seen mice traversing, and was catching them within hours, occasionally as much as a day or two, from hearing or seeing evidence of the mouse. (And if I saw one, I’d give it a verbal warning to flee for its life. Don’t know if any heeded it.) Within a few days I stopped even bothering with bait. In that first year, I lost count somewhere around fifty. Each year the number has dropped. This year, I’ve had only one since last autumn (it’s now mid-summer), slain before I even saw or heard it.

Anyway, we decided (lightheartedly) that it must be the difference between town mouse and country mouse.¹

¹ See Aesop’s fables, if you’re not familiar with the expression.

I grew up in a hot country. The peaches that were bird-bitten were always the best

I expect she was describing something else. Bugs, especially things like weevils [1] tend to lay microsized eggs in grains of all sort. Even when hermetically sealed they'll be able to hatch and thrive. I tend to buy relatively large quantities of things like rice, flour, etc and finding bugs in hermetically sealed bags after some lengthy time is not uncommon.

It's not bugs getting into your food from the outside, but being packaged into your food! If you don't have bugs it means they've been killed in some way, and one of the easiest to do that is chemical. Incidentally, weevils (the most common) are harmless and tasteless to consume. It just means a bit of extra protein in your food!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weevil

I think that's exactly what OP was describing

Is it extra protein, if they lived only off the rice in the bag? Presumably all the protein inside of them came from rice that would have otherwise been there.

I guess it helps digest and synthesize some of the proteins for you.

We eat grazing animals because they turn grass into muscles (proteins). It's similar for insects. That said, I don't know how the protein amount in one insect compares to the protein amount in rice.

> weevils (the most common) are harmless and tasteless to consume

So chances are good of eating the lesser of two weevils!

Mom tells me the same thing about mint and other herbs. If it doesn't have holes in it made by worms, then it's been doused by pesticides.

Similar idea about corn. Select the corn with insects - they are your taste testers. Of course, remove the critters before boiling your corn-on-the-cob.

I got the exact advice from my parents, too. If bugs eat that then it's mean it's safe to eat.

This is nasty but these wasps and the fig trees that are their home are the subject of one of the best nature documentaries I've ever seen, The Queen of Trees:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy86ak2fQJM

If you can locate a good HD copy it's worth waiting and watching that. Ian Holm narrates the stories of a bunch of different animals, from fig wasps to other bugs and larger creatures like bats, monkeys and even humans that rely on the tree. It has some of the most horrifying but also incredible imagery I've seen in a nature show and some real groaner lines from Holm to boot. My friends and I watch it every year or two and it never fails to amaze me.

The ending was superb.

"She will be alone in the garden, for the gate is closing. Others arrive too late."

Looks like Apple has it for $12.99: https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/the-queen-of-trees/umc.cmc.2i7...

ed2k link: https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=The_queen_of_trees

I've only found one wasp in my figs. I wonder how many eggs were in the fig when I ate it.

The fig wasp is tiny, like a millimeter. Actually the absolute majority of all wasps are - we think of a sizeable hornet when we hear "wasp" but those are the mythical giants of that world.

Unless you go really looking for it, you wouldn't even see the fig wasp. If there was a visible wasp it's likely something that was simply feeding on it.

The wasp was definitely of the normal wasp style like the supposed beetle predator in the article.

Fig wasp cannot lay eggs in the female figs (those that we eat). They reproduce only in the male figs (caprifigs). But they cannot differentiate them so they enter the female figs, pollinating while entering. After they enter they hardly can escape, as their wings are lost when trying to enter the tiny hole.

The wasp was definitely of the normal wasp style like the supposed beetle predator in the article.

Thanks for the recommendation. I've found a free HD version here:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x68r4b5

Thanks so much for posting this. We just watched it with great pleasure.

Was going to suggest this - incredible documentary but be warned it can get quite gruesome.

Try telling your friends you had nightmares about fig wasps...

Thanks for the warning. I had put it in my "watch with kids" bookmark folder.

Gruesome in what way? Like insect on insect violence zoomed in kinda way?

This reminds me that figs are extremely controversial in the vegan community for this exact reason. To me it seems a little silly given the inevitable consumption of insects in food, but to each their own I guess.

Why figs specifically? Are other fruits less likely to come packed with unintended protein?

Yes. Figs are basically the most likely, as you see here. The fruit can't even be produced without the help of a fig wasp, and they often end up dead inside it. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fresh-figs-and-b...

That’s not really true. You only need the wasps to pollinate. But the tree will fruit without being pollinated.

Depends on the variety. Most of the US ones don’t even need the wasps but the Calimyrna does.

Store bought varieties of the common fig are likely a self-pollinating variety but the wild variety of the common fig, as well as most of the rest of the 800+ species of figs, are not self-pollinating

The conflict regards eating meat right, not relying on other organisms for their production? Because then a lot of fruits or other types of plants can't be eaten if they rely on pollination, right?

It’s the exploitation of animals. So chicken eggs aren’t vegan but eggs are unfertilised.

California's almond industry is notorious for the devastating effects it has on honeybees and the diseases it spreads. By that definition, California almonds are also not vegan

If that's the case, then a lot of foods can be considered not vegan by that definition. That includes some trees that are fertilized by dead animals, inadvertently, or by petroleum based fertilizers. Death of wasps by a very natural process is similar in spirit to the latter two. Not just eating meat (which eggs can sort of be considered, same for drinking milk).

I wouldn't say a wasp that died in a fig was exploited intentionally by any human, at least, unless the wasps are introduced to figs in order for them to pollinate them. If the absence of action also is considered exploitation, then eating fruit from a tree that a rat has died under could be considered exploitation of animals by that criteria.

Yes, this is a bit of a reductio ad absurdum, but a dead wasp in a fig is already a bit down that road. There is certainly a difference between drinking milk from a cow and a (likely) accidentally dead wasp in a fig.

I’m not a vegan, but I think this take is way off. If you purposely exploit an animal for food, especially in unfavourable conditions, like putting chickens in cages and harvesting their eggs, farming animals for meat, that’s not vegan.

If you are out in the woods and eat the fruit of a tree that an animal died under and fertilised, that’s fine. It probably also doesn’t extend to animals that were dead long enough to turn into oil.

Then I suppose you think that the article under question is in fact vegan and the "controversy" about it is overblown.

Interesting. We had a fig tree growing up, and I must have eaten hundreds or thousands of them as a kid. I never remember seeing wasps, and I'm pretty sure I would have noticed!

These wasps are tiny

They also dissolve by the time you eat the fruit

The article is evidence that they do not.

It seems that normal fig wasps do dissolve with how long it takes to grow the fruit after pollination, but the wasps they found were separate from the normal ones and may have entered later

It's quite possible you've eaten wasps even from store-bought figs. The wasps are very tiny

Mind you that the fig wasp looks nothing like the insect we see of when we think of a wasp.

That's because there weren't any wasps. Only some fig varieties depend on them. Parthenocarpic cultivars don't (however the resulting fruits are sterile I think).

Many figs are pollinated by fig wasps which die inside the fruit.

https://www.bonappetit.com/story/figs-and-wasps

It's a bit more remarkable than you're making it out to be. There are 855 species of Ficus (figs) and almost every one of them has a corresponding species of fig wasp. A wasp that pollinates basically only that species of fig

The figs you buy at a supermarket are of a self-fertile variety of the common fig (Ficus carica), but even the wild variety of this species is not self-fertile

Wasps put their eggs in figs so it is a closer collaboration than most pollinators.

Yes figs are pollinated by a species of wasp that literally dies inside of it. There are a few varieties of the common fig that self-pollinate so if you don't have a dead wasp in your fig that's actually rather uncommon. To be fair though the males are the ones that die and they're rather small so you likely wouldn't notice it. Just a small protein boost

It's actually quite a striking example of coevolution. There are hundreds (855 according to the Catalog of Life) of different species of figs and almost just as many corresponding species of fig wasps for each species.

Makes me wonder if we should think of the fig wasp more like an organ of the fig than a separate individual. Just like we do with mitochondria which at some point were a separate living organism and still maintains a separate set of DNA

But as the article points out, there's a lot more in there than just fig wasps. So can I also expect these sort of bugs in my apple, plum or banana?

TIL: https://www.catalogueoflife.org/

Edit: Only took 10 minutes to find Home sapiens

> figs are pollinated by a species of wasp that literally dies inside of it

Are figs like other fruits in that a flower is pollinated and then the fruit grows out of it?

I bought a house 2 years ago and have a fig tree in the back yard. The first summer, the tree produced only about a dozen or two figs, but I never got any as they disappeared as soon as they started turning color (wildlife). This summer, the tree produced nearly 100 little figs but none of them ever matured/ripened and none were taken by wildlife. I didn't notice that many bees/wasps in the area of that tree (though all the other fruiting plants in my yard did extremely well - and I got to eat almost 1/3 of it!).

I'm just wondering if the tree produces the fig regardless of pollination but that pollination is required for ripening. Or if pollination is required to produce the fig at all (like how most fruiting plants work).

You got what is called Smyrna type fig - the type that needs pollination by the fig wasp in order to ripen. Since you seem to not have such a colony of wasps around, the figs won't ripen. If you want to grow and eat really good figs that doesn't require pollination, there're varieties plenty to choose from. You need to look and buy from a reputable nursery, not from generic store or nursery. Check with the community at ourfigs.com

I appreciate the response!

Now that I know this, I will probably remove the tree - eventually. It's near the deck and I don't want wasps around. Additionally, there's a big snake that likes to sun itself around the tree. Not that I mind so much, but a lot of visitors get really nervous!

One of these years, I'll get a better variety and plant it further up the hill, and move the stones that hold the heat that the snake likes so he can go hang out up there :)

> It's near the deck and I don't want wasps around.

To be clear - the wasps that pollinate figs are very, very small, and have no stinger.

They are roughly 1.5mm (2 to 4 times smaller than a mosquito) and you will almost certainly not notice them.

Like most wasps! Wasps get a bad reputation unfairly.

> ourfigs.com

Wow what a great community, thanks for sharing. Got any other similar communities? There's also:

* www.bananas.org/

* tropicalfruitforum.com/

* permies.com/forums

I'm keeping a list because I find it difficult to find actual human stories about their experiences with certain plants and I'd like to some day build something to parse online plant-centric communities like these. Especially if they're this niche!

Figs are not even remotely controversial in the vegan community. As far as I can tell, it's a fringe topic and the vast majority of vegans don't consider figs to be non-vegan.

As others have stated, the common fig does not require a wasp for pollination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fig#Habitat.

In my opinion, in order for this to actually be a controversial topic amongst vegans, the following would need to be true:

1. The variety of fig that you're most likely to eat would require wasps to pollinate them. 2. Fig farmers would need to directly breed, control, or otherwise manipulate/exploit fig wasps in order to ensure that their trees would be pollinated.

My research tells me that neither of these are true.

Food grown using manure is much less vegan and even that isn't widely discussed in the vegan community.

Which portion of the vegan community are you referring to?

A Jain may choose not eat a fig under different ethical judgements than other vegans.

I wouldn't refer to a Jain as vegan. Sure there's some overlap.

This is correct. Veganism is not a requirement in Jainism, and the vast majority of Jains are not vegan.

My experience with vegans is that they're pretty pragmatic and apparently the "controversial" topics (figs, honey) are usually brought up by meat-eaters who want to paint them as hypocrites or make fun of them.

I should say, sometimes it’s meat eaters who are just innocently curious and want to know where they draw the line :-)

I think honey is more controversial among vegans. You're profiting off the labor from the backs of honeybees!

Don’t know what vegan communities you’re a part of, but none of the ones I’ve been in care about fig wasps, or the other incidental insects that inevitably get eaten accidentally due to eating lots of vegetables.

So, I have a touchy stomach as most Americans, but I am also a pacific islander and have gutted fish many times while in Palau. I once dated someone who found eating shrimp with a head difficult as it "had eyes looking back at me." It definitely is good we have an FDA (and the equivalent in many countries) that keep food clean, but people need to remember and realize the food they eat was alive, interacted with other living things, and like figs, even grew because of them.

I'm not sure if there is a remedy (or really, if it's such a bad reaction many including myself have that it requires any remedy), I guess it's just good to be aware.

Pretty sure that if it convenience stores started hanging the head of the animal you are buying body parts of just over those (e.g. by law) the amount of vegetarians would increase 10 times or more, some of those people who would likely convert know this, for them anything that helps them avoid thinking about meat as recently living beings is a feature not a bug.

I think it's mostly habit, I remember seeing lamb's heads at the butcher when I was a kid[0] and found it a bit unsettling but that did not prevent me from enjoying lamb chops.

The more we become detached from thinking of meat as animals the harder the impact of realizing it again could be, but if it became normalized people would just stop being shocked quickly.

[0] human child not goat

Beef is cow, lamb is sheep, etc. are there languages that have the same word for the food and the mammal?

German.

Romanian also.

Languages that didn't have a Norman invasion.

Almost all of them. English doesn’t because the word for the animal is Germanic from Old English (pig, cow, sheep) and the word for the meat is from Norman French (pork from porc, beef from boeuf, mutton from mouton).

Japanese.

While this is the case for almost all animals and their meat in Japanese, oddly enough lamb meat is ラム肉 ramu-niku, where ramu is loaned from English "lamb". The animal is 羊 hitsuji, but while 羊肉 youniku is possible, you'd rarely if ever use that in speech (and I had to look up the onyomi reading!).

That said, lamb is quite rare in Japan, it's eaten primarily up north in Hokkaido.

I know that 'beef' is derived from the french word 'boef', but isn't lamb simply the juvenile form of a sheep? I was under the impression that 'lamb' meat was from a juvenile sheep, and 'sheep meat' would be from an adult animal, or is 'lamb' the general term for sheep meat in english?

Here in Australia we have more sheep than many.

Lamb is meat from a young sheep - raised to be eaten young.

Mutton is meat from an older sheep, generally from sheep no longer good for wool production, too old to bear lambs, etc.

Mutton is a relative rarity outside the farm gate in shops and city butchers .. in an economic sense as soon as a sheep is big enough and well fed enough to be sold on to super market chains, why invest further time in that animal?

Unless, of course, wool production and| lamb production (ie. older ewes and some rams).

Thanks for the clarification!

Mutton is the term for meat from a mature sheep, but it is rarely sold outside of halal and speciality butchers in the UK these days, which is a pity as it's better for stews.

Hogget is between lamb and mutton in age.

I thought it was this way in English because the wealthy aristocrats (Norman invaders) spoke French, so they used the French words for the meat on their plates (beef, lamb, pork, etc) while the poor peasants who raised the animals called them by their Anglo-Saxon Germanic names (cow, sheep, pig, etc.)

Hungarian

So "Mary had a little lamb" actually means she only had a bite of food for dinner? I never knew.

The Far Side addressed this very issue https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d2/f6/cf/d2f6cfcd435e55742b19...

Chinese is simple like that: beef is "cow meat," pork is "pig meat," etc.

Or maybe we would just get used to it? Asians have.

I wouldn't count of it, the cultural and historical context is pretty different with Asians (if this experiment was done in America), and even pretty different in general; I don't think it would reduce more than 50% of meat eaters but close, we have seen strong graphics work in other context like cigarette boxes so it's not rare to be unable to "get use to it".

This does not apply to large swaths of Asia, which comprises the majority of the world’s population. Which societies, cultures, or regions do you mean, exactly?

Pretty common practice in butcher shops in the Middle East, Central Asia, Iran, China, South East Asia and Japan. India is an exception, although some places in meatloving states such as the Southern states still do that.

There is no beter sign that the meat you buy is fresh so. And, in thay regard, propably better for everyone involved, including the animal, than meat sold pre-packed in supermarkets, where the animals led short, miserable lives in some agro-industrial "farm".

> the amount of vegetarians would increase 10 times or more

Nope.

Never been in a farmer market?

Pig head, ears, legs are a quite common thing to see there. Sometimes a cow head, tongue.

> if it convenience stores started hanging the head of the animal you are buying body parts of just over those (e.g. by law) the amount of vegetarians would increase 10 times

If Apple store started hanging pictures of mine workers who produced the rare earth materials that went into the phone and living conditions of the minimum wage factory workers in Vietnam who assembled the phone their sales would go down alot.

I don't think so. Pictures of destroyed lungs on cigarette boxes didn't make a huge impact on smokers either, since it's not their lungs pictured.

Most people are already aware of those things, but choose to ignore it.

Not because of empathy though, people know that and don’t give a single one. It would be simply a bad advertisement, as if Apple started talking about sshfs, open source and other geeky topics in their presentations. It would simply become unluxury.

For a similar reason people prefer packaged meat and frozen fish at a supermarket and avoid non-ventilated rooms with piles of meat and fish, because the smell is undelicate and associates with lower standards.

Pretty sure top CEOs would feel irritated as well if they had to watch and listen about their wagies’ unembellished life conditions for an hour everyday.

We are much more selfish than ignorant. I’d say most people aren’t ignorant at all. They are just okay with it as long as it stays away.

Shops in my Indian hometown and in England regularly do this with buffalo heads, ox heads, goat heads, etc. People buy those at a premium to make specific delicacies.

Results may vary in America though.

I don't know where you are from, but that's not abnormal in butchers in many countries.

Not in the Balkans, people love spit roasted lamb, the spits goes through the mouth, you can even get the head served on a plate. Living in the country side, nothing gets wasted, my folks would eat beef tongue, chicken soup would have chicken feet in it, and so on.

Ever been to Vietnam or any other country in SE Asia? They literally hang livestock (usually a goat or pieces of cow) out on the open road as an advertisement to come eat at a restaurant or buy meat from a vendor. Go to any wet market and you'll see every kind of animal laid out in pieces on tables covered in flies and whatever else...

Maybe this [1] would’ve comforted your date.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyestalk_ablation

Ah for God's sake. I am an inveterate carnivore, but every day I learn how badly we torture animals in the name of mass production. I certainly dislike buying meat and fish from a supermarket, instead of the small family farms I usually get it from.

> Eyestalk ablation is currently prohibited in Europe for organic production.

At least there's that.

I believe you should buy the most ethically raised/sourced meat you can afford and to not judge those who can’t afford the price of such high standards for raising livestock.

There was no judgment towards the meat buyer in my comment at all. The issue I have is with big factory farming, optimising for cost over every other metric.

Access to healthy and ethical food consumption does have a economic/class line drawn around it but that doesn't mean that a person who is decrying what should be considered substandard sourcing and production of food is mocking the plight of those who can't afford it (and often don't even have access to it).

Seems to have been hugged out of image bandwidth, cache at https://archive.is/5X83X

Somewhere, in a mountain fortress, Klaus Schwab is rubbing his hands, chuckling, and whispering "excellent - you vill eat ze bugs and be happy, yes?"

I don't mean to be squeamish about this, but I'm glad I'm not a fig eater. I know fig wasps are totally normal, but I assumed they'd be completely dissolved or at least unrecognisable. Finding not only recognisable wasps but also many other insects is a bit of a shock to me.

But the article says it's not uncommon to find insects in stored food. So what other insects have I been eating? My fruit consumption is mostly limited to bananas, apples, grapes, and the occasional strawberry or plum. I do know that fruit flies like a banana, and we've had enough drosophila infestations that I'm under no illusions about my accidental consumption of them.

If you are in the US, here is a Food and Drug Administration Food Defect Levels Handbook that gives the standard for contamination.

From the handbook:

> Chocolate and Chocolate Liquor

> Insect filth

> (AOAC 965.38)

> Average is 60 or more insect fragments per 100 grams when 6 100-gram subsamples are examined

> OR

> Any 1 subsample contains 90 or more insect fragments

> Macaroni and Noodle Products

> Insect filth

> (AOAC 969.41)

> Average of 225 insect fragments or more per 225 grams in 6 or more subsamples

Source: https://www.fda.gov/food/ingredients-additives-gras-packagin...

Excuse my naive question, but is this something I should worry about at all in buying figs? I don’t mind the idea of eating insects but I’m trying to understand how noticeable this would be from a textural/visual/taste perspective.

As the author said, the insects probably aren’t a concern, but the fungus on the other hand… maybe?

And we all know what happens when you ingest flour that has been contaminated with cordyceps.

Really? How concerned should I be, I just ate some cordyceps yesterday, what problem would that cause?

There is a new documentary about this on hbo

It's a joke about the plot of The Last of Us, which pins the zombie outbreak on a fictional cordyceps variant that zombifies people (inspired by ones infecting ants or spiders).

I know, I was also joking, and I mistakenly assumed that would be obvious because who would write, "oh no I just ate some cordyceps!!" but then I looked it up, and I guess you can in fact eat those, and people do, so the joke is on me.

Cordiceps is sometimes used as a supplement as it is one of the few natural substances that increase the maximal oxygen consumption (VO2max).

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27408987/

The figs you generally buy at a supermarket are usually of a self-fertile variety of the common fig (or are sprayed with a specific hormone to induce fruiting) but almost all of the 800+ other species of figs have their own corresponding species of fig wasps that pollinate just that one species of fig. Luckily for you these wasps are tiny and you're very unlikely to notice them. Just a minor protein boost to your fruit

With fresh figs, you're supposed to turn them inside out when you eat them. If you really wanted, I guess you could pick out the wasp if it's still noticeably intact.

The wasp will most likely be already dissolved. But it's still a good idea to open the fig before eating it, to check for mold.

Yes, but you probably don't want the tiny stinger in your digestive tract.

fig wasps (and most wasps) don't have stingers

What about the caterpillars and beetles the author found?

Decent YouTube video on the wasps that pollinate the figs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRBiY65N2gk

Adam Ragusea, I knew it...

I guess I should have given a warning.

I'm Turkish and fresh figs are readily available in season in Turkey. My dad has thought me to always turn a fresh fig inside out and use my eyeballs to check for bugs before I devour one. It's more common than you think.

FDA has limits to how many maggots, say, can be in food.

Orange Juice, Fruits, Etc.

https://www.cbsnews.com/gooddaysacramento/news/bugs-rodent-h...

Though I have to say it's pretty awesome(terrible?) that they mix SI units with english units. (milligrams per pound)

There's a fantastic book, called the secret life of groceries by Benjamin Lorr. In it, he mentions that at the FDA they call Trader Joe's "Recall Joe's" for their disturbingly high number of recalls

Last year, Consumer Reports did a study on spices contaminated with chemicals (cadmium, etc). And Trader Joe's wasn't immune from it.

Certain third world countries would grow them in contaminated areas and then sell them back to the west.

BTW, I appreciate your username. There's an episode of The Good Fight that talks about it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

Thanks for pointing it out. TIL

I read it in a book and thought it explained a lot of what our corporate, and media driven society has become. There are agendas and you can almost track their movement, and how the window of what is socially acceptable has moved. I think everyone should know and study the overton window concept.

> at the FDA they call Trader Joe's "Recall Joe's" for their disturbingly high number of recalls

Doesn't seem to be that many recalls in comparison to other US chains. FDA's search returns 11 recalls[1] for the last 3 years.

[1] https://www.fda.gov/search?s=trader%20joe&items_per_page=100...

More details from the book: https://blog.rayberger.org/the-secret-life-of-groceries

It seems to be before Aldi Nord bought Trader's joes, which happened in the 70s.

I remember more the products they have discontinued.

Let’s hope my wife never sees this article or she might stop eating altogether.

I know there is all sorts of insect stuff in food but as long as it’s measured in parts per million then ok just don’t think about it. There is a lot about food that it helps to not think about. ;)

Believe it or not but before Gordon Ramsey was making a name for himself as a professional a-hole he had a really great show in the UK called F-Word which tried to educate people about where their food came from, and it would often follow various food animals from birth to slaughter to being prepared for a meal. It was very informative and one of the best things he has ever done, it’s a real shame it doesn’t translate well to US audiences.

(And probably most US audiences would be horrified how food animals are raised over here - no green pastures nor doting farmers tending their herds and flocks)

Figs are pollinated by fig wasps that die in the fruit. So I think figs are a pretty unique case and not indicative of something you have to worry about in most other fruit

To be fair most fruit has pests in them unless they aren't treated with pesticides.

E.g. if you have a cherry tree the cherries on it will end up full of worms if you let them ripen on the tree.

A few figs are. Most are not.

There are 855 species of figs and almost every single one of them has a corresponding species of fig wasp that pollinates only that fig

"Most are not" only applies to figs you buy at the grocery store that are a variety of the Ficus carica species. This variety is sometimes able to fruit without pollination (sometimes requiring application of a fruiting hormone).

But the vast majority of figs are not the common fig and not this specific variety of the common fig

On Dutch television they showed that sun-dried tomatoes often contain insect parts. When drying in the sun (in Turkey) they attract insects and washing does not remove everything. No reason to worry was the message.

Interesting reply in the original post by Jason:

> This reminds me of what I read somewhere about how, when vegetarian Indians started living in England in large numbers they would often have dietary deficiences. The story was that traditional processing left a lot of insects, and the much needed nutrients they contained, in their diets. Industrial processing of the same foods did not.

> Source: “in the mid-1970s it was found that orthodox Hindus who had been quite healthy on a vegan diet in their native India began to suffer from a high incidence of metaloblastic anemia after living for some time in England consuming the same diet. The cause was traced to vitamin B-12 deficiency, which in India was prevented by insect contamination of grains.” (pp. 168-169, “An orchard invisible : a natural history of seeds” by Jonathan W. Silvertown.)

Oh hey it is Collin Purrington, whose conference poster templates I regularly used at conferences during PhD- https://colinpurrington.com/tips/poster-design/

Did that site just crumble under the weight of new visitors? It’s completely broken on my end

Oh, I've tried the portrait-orientation template, it left everyone around confused.

I always reccomend his lab notebook post [0], although I think he has edited it through the years. The testing of different writing tools against different solvents is just great.

[0] https://colinpurrington.com/tips/lab-notebooks/

I've purchased many different brands of dried figs and 90% are coming from Turkey, which all have bugs, bug poo or mold in them. The fresh figs I purchased were from either the US or Brazil and didn't have this problem but were extremely expensive.

I don't know which grade is imported by which brand, but we eat a lot of dried figs here (in Turkey), and I know no one felt sick after eating, even considerable amount of these things.

Fresh figs are so expensive because they're extremely delicate and have extremely short shelf life if produced naturally.

Human body is much more resilient than it looks and our food contains much more than meets the eye. Somebody noted FDA's limits about bugs, so I'll not reiterate it here.

I've had a absolutely phenomenal dry figs from Turkey... Truly one of nature's treasures :-)

The wasps are how figs pollinate. They're meant to die there. So if you're eating figs that lack a dead wasp it's likely because it's had a hormone applied to it to induce fruiting despite not being pollinated

That's a myth that does not apply to all fig trees.

It applies to almost every single one of the 855 recognized species of figs. There are cultivars and techniques to make the common fig fruit without being pollinated, but I wouldn't characterize it as a "myth"

Oh holy shit I eat a lot of that same Trader Joe’s fig brand. I am horrified…

You only wish you knew after you already know :)

You'll find the same in pretty much all figs, no matter the brand. It's a thing.

Many figs will have wasps, natural figs that is. If you don't see wasps, you likely aren't looking at a real-world fig that has been polinated.

It's going to be okay, the human system can cope with a lot (both physically and mentally). This amount of unexpected stuff in the food is considered normal, in fact, even encouraged. The immune system in particular suffers when people are placed in an overly sterile environment.

Lovely pics of the fungi.

Ever had your breads start growing blue stuff, while sitting out on the counter? Ever stop to think that those things were growing there for a couple days, before they got big enough to see?

The similar thought that stuck with me was regarding the human immune system. The thought that there's a myriad of things constantly happening in the human body, a continuous contest of different lifeforms, and that the immune system is the things that tries to keep on top of it all. Sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing. It really makes me think just how complex, interconnected, ever-changing everything is.

When I was working in a bacteria research lab I often thought about how cool/terrible it would be to have magic glasses to actually see the invisible, biologically thriving worlds that are present on basically every surface of this planet, in the style of the movie 'they live'. [1] It would be either terrifyingly fascinating or fascinatingly terrifying.

This invisible world is even on all of the surfaces in and around our bodies, right now! We are all each host to a personalized ecosystem of microbial organisms. Something like 1-3 percent of 'your' body mass actually belongs to other organisms that we can't see.

P.S. all reading this pls stay up to date on the tetanus vaccine! It's not just in rusty nails, it's pretty much everywhere.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live

There are infinite parallel universes. We co-exist with many of them, able to affect them only in the grossest, most indirect ways. Often we can only observe them with special tools and by inference and detection of signals subject to much other noise.

I can rant about the interconnection of our microbiomes to the larger macro-biome (made up of the microbiomes of everything else around you) and how that makes things like living in the woods with hounds a better lifestyle than city life... but thats close to preaching :)

I do like the woods and the hounds but I'm willing to roll the dice in the name of hedonism. I'm down to be a party/war barge for my little microbiological amigos. No harm no foul, game recognize game etc. Jeez, I am so high right now.

Let's not forget Mimolette... we were staying in Paris, hungry; I hit up a local bodega (or whatever all-night store is in French) and bought a package of what looked to me like nice aged Cheddar.

Back in the hotel, we are pigging out on this delicious french cheese when my son (14 yrs old, knows everything) mentions that the cheese we are enjoying almost surely was infested with live mites.

Hilarity ensued

Old mimolette it’s possible yes. But Artisou cheese from Auvergne (center of France), most definitely : https://www.bienmanger.com/2F37902_Margeride_Artisou_Farmhou...

Bodegas are big in France. Big bagpipes. https://www.cornemusesoccitanes.com/bodega/

Tsk. This is in line with the new regulations allowing for insects(or products thereof, like powder) in your food.

Enjoy your proteines! :->

Would someone with a severe allergy to wasp venom go into anaphylactic shock from eating this? I know a guy who works in a vineyard and has to take some pretty nasty wasp venom shots every couple months in case he gets stung.

Venom != poison. Typically venom only acts by being injected straight into you, eating it may have little or no effect.

As a curious kid I was given an invaluable piece advice from my dad:

“Don’t look at your food.”

Now I want to slice up some fig newtons to see what might be found.

figs are pollinated by those wasps = kill wasps = no figs...

not all figs are pollinated that way, but yes point taken. we should not just arbitrarily kill off anything that offends our sensibilities.

One thing people don’t always know is that all figs have _at least_ one dead wasp inside. That’s how they get pollinated.

Id love to know which other organic fruits or veggies are prone to having "free riders" mixed in with the produce

grapes often have whole web orbs inside them with a spider inside the orb.

You mean the spider is chilling inside of the grape? Why would the spider do that, wouldn’t that make catching bugs harder?

there's a web inside the bunch, in the space between the grapes. not in the grape itself.

Raspberry would often have insects (including what I guess are stinky bug larvae), salads, persimmons, grapes, abricots, plums, chestnuts to name a few fruits that often carry either worms in the fruit or over.

I once found a caterpillar in a (non-organic) ear of corn from Walmart

Not exactly free riders. As other comments have mentioned, the figs pollinate via the wasps. You are meant to eat ze bugs, and be happy.

I used to buy and eat organic brussel sprouts from Trader Joe's. Then one day, for some reason, I decided to take a closer look, and found a little green worm crawling about. After removing it, I found another, and another, until I lost both the count and my appetite.

I read that it's normal for brussel sprouts to have these kinds of worms in them, so I must have eaten lots and lots of them. Shrugs, but I can't stand the sight of the worms, so I have never bought brussel sprouts, anywhere, ever since.

I still eat them at restaurants. But only if they're fried or grilled, because that decreases the chances that I'll see a worm.

Unfortunately thanks to this article I'll probably avoid dried figs now because I can't disassociate the visuals.

I know they are safe to eat, but now I never want to eat a fig again! I was never that fond of them in the first place...

I wonder how Muslims and Turks reconcile insects being haram and dried figs containing them. Anyone care to explain?

Not a Muslim but eating insects isn’t considered haram and some are halal even.

It seems like insects are halal only if they have a "clean" diet. So things like cockroaches are haram but locusts and fig-inhabiting insects are halal because they feast on what humans feast.

From time to time I buy dried figs, apricots, plums etc from Costco. Next time I'll be sure to check haha

If you do find a wasp, then it's a good sign you're getting quality fruit. Figs are dependent on fig wasps to pollinate so if your fig doesn't have one it was either sprayed with a specific hormone to induce fruiting or is of a variety specifically bred to be self-fertile

> variety specifically bred to be self-fertile

What does this have to do with some sense of quality? There are a myriad of fruits and vegetables that are bred for things that we consume.

An old saying: worse than finding a bug inside a fruit while eating it, is to find only the half of the bug.

.. a neighbours 6 yr old daughter had to be rushed to the ER and was sourced back to the figs she ate minutes before. She had to be intubated, that's how serious her esophageal constriction and anaphylactic shock was. While rare, those with growing/compromised immune systems should be aware, esp. Organic since no chemicals are used.

That means these figs are edible.

“inadvertent consumption of arthropods isn’t going to harm you”

I got figs from Trader Joe's with black mold in them.

wasps are normal, not mold

oh oh, I love these figs and I eat them a lot!

Disgusting. I stopped eating figs years ago

truly organic

Just ate one these 5 mins ago...

Extra protein

are you sure its not an greek fig?

Never again

alfatoxin is a also a (much bigger) issue for peanut butter

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9489356/#:~:tex...).

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