Coast Chronicles: Watermelon is no simple ‘fruit’

What percentage of a whole watermelon is actually water?

Hint: Think of a watermelon as a natural canteen, or Mother Nature’s portable water container.

Answer: 92 percent

With this being the first day of summer, nothing signifies the hot season in America more than an icy cold slice of juicy red, drip-down-your-wrists watermelon. It’s not as American as apple pie, but it’s right up there. Grocery stores and farmer’s markets now have bins of watermelons awaiting your pick.

Thump, thump. Heft, heft. Inspect, inspect. We all have our special, hard-earned methods of picking the perfect one.

Do you know there are over a thousand varieties of watermelon in this world, all linked through horticultural experiments to the momma of all watermelon growing wild in Africa thousands of years ago?

In this modern era, the National Watermelon Promotion Board – yes there’s such a thing based in Florida – ranks the U.S. as Number 7 in world production of watermelons, with Florida, Georgia, Texas and California leading American domestic production.

As for Mississippi, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA, lists watermelon production at 3.8 million pounds annually.

That’s only 1 percent of the nation’s crop, but it meant a lot of seed spittin’ contests when I was a kid before the seedless watermelon became so popular. In taste and crispness the store-bought was a paler version of what came from our own garden, vine-ripened in blazing Gulf Coast sun. Happily today, with so many improved varieties, even store-bought ones are mighty fine.

But have you noticed that not all watermelons are alike? Stripes, no stripes. Shades of green rinds. Varied sizes. Even a few odd flesh colors like orange and yellow.

The Watermelon Board reports warm-weather regions of the U.S. and South America grow over 300 varieties, the ones likely to show up at our local stores. Because these spread-out regions have “complementary” growing seasons, they can provide a year-round supply.

That’s just the regional picture. Across the world, there are more than 1,200 varieties of watermelon being grown, about 256 billion pounds a year, with China as the Number 1 commercial producer.

That fact comes from not the overload of Internet sites or AI claiming to be expert on everything, but on a research writer named Ellen Ficklen, who in the 1980s wrote a book simply titled “Watermelon” for the U.S. Library of Congress.

Ficklen maintains a website, watermelontimes.com, to keep us updated on all the new stuff about the melon, and surprisingly new info is dropping worldwide every year.

This includes the discovery of what is now believed to be the wild watermelon mamma of all modern-day domesticated watermelons. She was discovered in 2021 in Sudan, still vining in the wilds.

In earlier centuries, Africa’s Kalahari Desert was thought to be the watermelon’s origins, Ficklen tells us. Even the famous explorer Livingston wrote of the “surprising plant” found in the desert. Also, early versions of watermelon are found in ancient Egyptian engravings, including in King Tut’s tomb.

This makes sense. This water-dense plant provided liquid in the dry seasons, and some people carried the hulled fruit around in their travels like canteens. The original watermelons were not so sweet, but they were, more importantly, wet.

More recent researchers have confirmed Africa as the source, but not the Kalahari and southwest Africa. The origin is more likely northeast Africa, in places like Sudan where the wild watermelon mamma – called the Kordofan melon –was domesticated for food and water at least 4,000 years ago and still grows there.

Travelers carried the melon to other parts of Africa like we do today water bottles, and when the rind was discarded the seeds sprouted in new locations.

From Africa, it spread and became cultivated along the Mediterranean and trade routes, such as the Silk Road, where it was cherished for food and water. Then on to Asia and the Middle East into Europe, where it was cultivated into sweeter versions, but still genetically linked to Mamma Kordofan.

European explorers and settlers then brought the watermelon to the Americas. The first written record in this country was 1629 in Massachusetts, then soon in Virginia, where Thomas Jefferson eventually listed it among his plantings.A Jesuit priest reported American Indians growing watermelon in the Mississippi River Valley by 1673. Some seeds made it here via the transatlantic slave trade.

What followed was centuries of horticultural experiments in America and elsewhere for even better watermelon. Japan first created seedless ones in 1939, although they did not become widespread in this country until the 1990s. Frankly, I miss those black seeds and those silly contests.

Mark Twain, I suspect, gave one of the best descriptions of watermelon: “king by the grace of God over all fruits of the earth.”

But is it a fruit or a vegetable? Apparently, the answer is a matter of perspective.

USDA classes it as a vegetable because of the way it is grown. Because it is planted, harvested and cleared from cultivated fields USDA classifies watermelon, indeed all types of melons, as vegetable. Interestingly, in some places like China, the rind of the watermelon is stir-fried, stewed and pickled, like a vegetable. In the Deep South here, you’re also likely to find pickled watermelon.

But watermelon is most often popularly called a fruit. So...USDA also acknowledges that it is a fleshy, seed-bearing ovary of a flower, making it a true botanical fruit like a peach and apple.

To dig a bit more into this conundrum, the scientific name of watermelon is Citrus Landaus, and a member of the Exorbitance family, which makes it a cousin to cucumbers, pumpkins and squash. So you decide: fruit or veggie?

One fact is not up for debate: Watermelon is a healthy food.

It is nutritious and packed with vitamins. It is low in calories and high in antioxidants, non-protein amino acids and lycopene, the latter linked to healthy eyes, heart health and protection against certain cancers. Add carotids, flavonoids and alkaloids.

All that aside, watermelon is just a joy to eat. To quote another Twainism, “When one has tasted watermelon, he knows what the angels eat.”

Kat Bergeron, an award-winning veteran reporter and feature writer who specializes in Gulf Coast history and sense of place, is retired from the Sun Herald. She writes this Gulf Coast Chronicles column as a freelance correspondent. Reach her at:

BergeronKat@gmail.com

Or, at Southern Possum Tales, P.O. Box 33, Barboursville, VA 22923