In The Book of Salt, chapter 8 begins with a simple recipe: “Twenty-four figs, so ripe that their skins are split./A bottle of dry port wine./One duck./Twelve hours.” I decided to research into figs, which are soaked in the port in a jug (ch 8, sorry I have an ebook so I don’t know the page number). The fig has been represented in literature for a long time. In the the epic poem The Mahavamsa, the fig travels from the tree under which Budda “attained enlightenment,” to the Ganges River, to the Bay of Bengal, to Sri Lanka (Shanahan). This fig, however, was the F. religiousa fig of the 750+ fig species. The strangler fig species are spread by birds and animals that drop their seeds high on the forest canopy. Indonesia and Barbados both have the strangler fig on their coat of arms. Another species of fig is the Ficus benghalensis, or Indian banyan, which can grow extremely large with branches so thick that they look like the trunks of oak trees. Every species has its own different wasp pollinator species. Because the wellbeing of the wasp and the partner Ficus species are so linked, they have to make fruit year round. Figs are linked to the history of human evolution – their high source of nutritional energy allowed development of larger brains and some people theorize our hands developed the way they did to discern which figs were soft and ready to eat (Shanahan). The many types of figs mirror the different experiences with figs represented in The Book of Salt. The soft, fresh figs are a far cry from prior experience.
Shanahan, Mike. Earth – The Tree That Shaped Human History. 17 Jan. 2017, www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170116-the-tree-that-shaped-human-history.