Figs are in season and ready to be sliced onto charcuterie boards, mixed into jams, and tossed into fresh salads. But if you’re a fan of the fig, you may have heard a rumor that’s not so appetizing: that they’re full of dead wasps. And if you’re vegan, this may leave you questioning whether figs are actually vegan at all.
It is true that many trees that produce figs would go extinct without wasps, which are key pollinators that lay their eggs in the fruit of the trees. This relationship dates back to the time of the dinosaurs and is the source of the concern. Before you throw away your Fig Newtons out of fear you’re eating dead bugs, here’s what you should know about figs, wasps, and whether the fruit should be part of your vegan diet.
Why Do Figs Need Wasps?
There are hundreds of species of plants in the Ficus genus, from the fiddle leaf fig tree in your living room (Ficus lyrata) to the tree that grows the figs on your charcuterie board (Ficus carica). Here, we’ll only be talking about the figs we eat.
“In nature, if there were no fig wasps, Ficus species would be unable to reproduce and would be extinct,” said Mike Shanahan, biologist and author of Gods, Wasps and Stranglers: The Secret History and Redemptive Future of Fig Trees. “This relationship is among the tightest in nature and is around 80 million years old.” Hundreds of animals also rely on Ficus species for food, so it’s a vital plant.
While we think of figs as simply a fruit, they are technically inverted flowers—hollow structures filled with tiny blossoms that rely on fig wasps for pollination. This type of wasp is much smaller than the black and yellow wasps with vicious stingers.
Here’s how it works: A female wasp crawls into a small opening in the fig, pollinates the flowers inside, and lays eggs. The eggs hatch, and the babies mate. The male wasps dig a hole, allowing the females to escape with eggs and pollen and carry them to another fig tree. The mother wasp dies after laying eggs, which means she perishes inside the fig. But when you eat a fig, it’s not like you notice a crunchy, dead wasp. Enzymes in the fig digest the dead wasp before they’re packaged for the grocery store.
The Figs You Eat Probably Don’t Need Wasps
Aside from this, the figs you’re probably buying at the store don’t rely on wasps at all. “Over millennia, farmers have developed thousands of varieties of this species. Many of these do not need to be pollinated to produce tasty figs,” Shanahan explains.
Caprifigs, Smyrna, and San Pedro figs do rely on wasps for pollination. Meanwhile, the varieties of figs that don’t require pollination are Brown Turkey, Celeste, Mission, and the Calimyrna figs grown in California. According to the California Figs consortium, 99% of the figs produced in California are self-pollinating—and all the dried figs grown commercially in the U.S. and 98 percent of the country’s fresh figs come from California.
Are Figs Vegan?
Now, since dead wasps may be involved, you might wonder whether all figs are vegan. This ultimately depends on your definition of veganism.
According to the publication Treehugger, most vegans believe that fig pollination doesn’t involve animal exploitation because it’s a natural process in the wild that wouldn’t be changed simply by not eating figs. Those people would consider figs to be vegan. But others, the article explains, believe that figs are not vegan because the pollination process involves the death of wasps.
Ultimately, the important thing to note is that a vast majority of the figs we purchase at the store are self-pollinating. And either way, whether you enjoy biting into a fresh fig or prefer them in tapenade or homemade fig bars, know that the crunch isn’t coming from a wasp.
