Why are figs so fragile, and why haven’t we engineered sturdier ones?

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Difficult to store and transport, and go bad quickly in the fridge. We have managed to make modern corn and bananas from their ancient predecessors and thousands of varieties of citrus and apples, but figs are still figs! What’s the deal?

EDIT: damn why y’all fig haters

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Figs are a relatively niche fruit (compared to hugely industrialized crops like corn or bananas) so they don’t attract that much attention/investment in something like hard core genetic modification.

Even if we toughened up them up, like we did to tomatoes, they’re still fruit without a tough peel (like banana or citrus) so you’re never going to get to the kind of durability you get with something like corn. And usually the processes of breeding for durability takes a hit on taste & texture (see tomatoes again), which is more the entire point of figs than most other fruits.