From Orwell to Pink Floyd: Animals & A Fig's Tale VL p.3

[ish mailian]

A little tale of the fig in Zoyd's yard.
Maybe you don't give a fig and maybe I don't shivagit if you do or
don't ... here, I've provided the link for the article by Karp and
I've excerpted for you if you would rather not.

I will examine the squadron of Blue Jays and the Carrier Pigeons and
the Dog next.

If this has been done, let me kow and I'll move on to the dress.


By DAVID KARP

AUG. 11, 1999 12 AM

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES, LA TIMES

“What fruit has the eye of a widow and the cloak of a beggar?” asks an
old Spanish riddle. Answer: a really ripe fig, revealing its honeyed
lusciousness by a teardrop of syrup at the bottom and a tattered skin.



For millenniums, voluptuous figs, fresh and dried, have inspired
aficionados to mania. So much of the story of figs seems mythic: the
miracle of caprification, in which a tiny, frustrated wasp plays Cupid
to figs; the breakthrough a century ago that harnessed this process
for California farmers; the saga of the Los Angeles promoter who
founded a Fresno fig empire with 660,000 blasts of dynamite.

[…]

Figs were introduced to California by Franciscan missionaries,
starting with the founding of Mission San Diego in 1769. The
dark-skinned, pink-fleshed Mission fig was the only kind grown here
until the 1850s, when settlers brought other varieties from the East
Coast and Europe.



In 1880, G.P. Rixford of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin imported
14,000 cuttings of this variety [the Smyrna fig, the “true fig of
commerce”]  from Turkey, which he distributed to subscribers. The
trees flourished, but, to everyone’s dismay, the figs dropped, unripe,
at walnut size.



The problem was that, although most figs (called common figs) bear
fruit to maturity on their own, Smyrna figs must be pollinated by
Blastophaga psenes, the fig wasp. This gnat-sized insect lives only in
dry, inedible wild figs, called caprifigs.



Since ancient times, Mediterranean growers have assisted this
pollination process, called caprification, by hanging branches of
caprifigs in Smyrna fig orchards as the female wasps emerge from the
caprifigs in the spring, coated with pollen. Searching for new
caprifigs in which to lay their eggs, they enter Smyrnas through the
eyes at the bottom, and dust the tiny flowers inside with their
pollen. The wasps die without laying their eggs, since the Smyrna fig
flowers are too long for their ovipositors, but the figs develop.



Although many American fruit experts considered caprification to be a
peasant superstition, growers repeatedly imported caprifigs; each
time, something went wrong, and the wasps didn’t take hold. Finally,
George Roeding of Fresno succeeded in establishing a colony, and in
August 1899 his orchard bore large, blond, plump Smyrna figs. After a
contest, Roeding re-christened the variety Calimyrna, for California
Smyrna.



California’s big fig boom began in 1910, when a Los Angeles real
estate developer named J.C. Forkner leased a swath of hog wallow
badlands northwest of Fresno. To this point, the area had served only
as pasture, because an adobe-like layer of hardpan lay a few feet
under the surface and the pockmarked terrain made irrigation
impossible.



But Forkner had a vision. He hired dozens of tractors, still novel in
those years, to level the ground, blasted 660,000 holes through the
hardpan so that trees could take root and planted figs on 12,000
acres. Next he blizzarded the nation with advertisements and brochures
promising, “Own your own Fig Garden, You’ll be rich! Five acres
produce $4,000 annual income.” Chasing this lure of profits in
paradise, hundreds of aspiring farmers, many from the East, bought
into Forkner’s Fig Gardens.



California fig cultivation peaked at 42,500 acres in 1927. Forkner
lost his land in the Depression, as did most of the Fig Garden
smallholders. He later recouped his holdings and died a wealthy man in
1969. After a boom during World War II the fig industry settled into a
long, slow decline, squeezed by increasing labor costs and cheaper
imports.



Business recovered somewhat and stabilized in the 1970s and ‘80s, but
as Fresno sprawled northward, development gobbled up much of the old
Fig Gardens. Most growers moved 25 miles north to cheaper land in the
Madera-Chowchilla area. Today, only about 1,500 acres of figs--less
than a tenth of the state’s 16,500 acres--remain in the former “Fig
Capital of America.”



Along California Highway 99, orchards lie abandoned, strewn with
discarded sofas and television sets, the weeds shoulder-high. Heedless
that the flanks are turned, the venerable, gnarled trees still bear
generous crops, but only squirrels and birds appreciate the soft,
sugary fruit.



Aggravating problems for fig growers, Nabisco, the dominant buyer of
dried figs, decided five years ago to pad out its Fig Newtons line
with products made from other fruit. This cannibalized sales of the
traditional cookies, and fig paste prices collapsed to $300 a ton from
$1,000 a ton. Growers had to adapt or face ruin.



Some decided to emphasize sales of fresh figs, which have grown by a
third to a half in the last five years. It’s a small, high-end market,
less than 5% of the fig crop by weight but lucrative for those who
master the tricky logistics of harvesting and shipping the delicate,
perishable fruits.



[…]

The chief problem is that the same fig wasps that pollinate the seeds,
giving Calimyrnas their distinctive nutty crunch, also introduce fungi
and smuts that spoil a high percentage of the crop. “Naturals,” large
perfect dried figs, are rare.



A researcher at the University of California Kearney station, Jim
Doyle, has spent nine years trying to breed the Holy Grail of fig
growers: a new variety with the flavor of Calimyrna that doesn’t
require caprification. Judging from a recent tasting of his most
promising selections, he’s tantalizingly close, but complete success
might be out of reach: Fertilized seeds seem essential to the
Calimyrna’s flavor.



The half-dozen leading varieties of figs are well suited to commercial
cultivation, but connoisseurs and collectors around the state claim
that some of the more unusual kinds offer far superior flavor.



https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-aug-11-fo-64820-story.html