‘A boon apart.’ The history of Mississippi watermelon spans back centuries.

When is the only time you start on red and stop on green?

Answer: When you’re eating a slice of watermelon.

Question:What did the watermelon say to his honeydew?

Answer: I’m sorry, Baby, we just cantaloupe.

Ah, watermelon! The stuff of jokes and great cool-down summer eating.

Only deprived kids never had a watermelon seed spittin’ contest. Only the lucky among us have cut the perfect melon, perfect in redness, perfect in sweetness, perfect in juice to stream down our chins. After all, we can’t be melon-choly in summertime if we eat watermelon.

Life is a bit like a watermelon, don’t you think?

It’s juicy, sweet most of the time, sometimes imperfect in size and sometimes unappetizing when not fully developed. All its parts have a useful purpose.

Am I putting too much analogous meaning into a lowly fruit? Perhaps, but the fun of spotlighting watermelons is turning them into something much more than a big melon with a hard green skin and white rind, filled inside with luscious red pulp.

Consider this. Watermelon is low in calories (42 calories per cup of pulp) and has no fat. Its high water content provides nutrients like the carotenoid called lycopene, amino acids called citrulline and arginine, as well as rich in Vitamins A and C.

These nutrients are touted to lower cholesterol, boost heart health, reduce muscle soreness, decrease inflammation and burn body fat.

None of this health goodness, however, was known when humans first began harvesting watermelons 5,000 years ago. That’s when the tough, drought resistant ancestor of the big watermelons of today was first harvested in southern Africa, where it grew wild. The indigenous peoples of the Kalahari Desert region prized this early watermelon for its ability to store precious water in arid lands.

Once this melon found its way to the Egyptians, the taste and growth of the vining plant was deliberately improved, transforming it from a source of water to a delightful food. Watermelons became so important that the Israelites tithed them. Greeks and Romans touted the melon’s medicinal properties as a diuretic and to help with heat stroke recovery.

The watermelon vine eventually made its way to the warmer European countries and by the 1600s was widely cultivated. Both European colonists and African slaves brought the seeds with them to the New World, where they flourished in the warmer states.

National Geographic reports watermelons were growing in Florida as early as 1576, thanks to the Spanish, and in the Puritan’s Massachusetts colony by 1630. In the 20th century the U.S. Department of Agriculture funded a watermelon breeding project in Charleston, S.C., which gave rise to melons that were disease resistant and better tasting.

Then came the seedless varieties in the 1950s. Actually, the seedless varieties have small white soft edible seeds, but this development put a kink in the old watermelon joke: Why are watermelons such good entrepreneurs? Answer: They always have seed money.

The watermelon vine now trails across the world. There are at least 1,200 varieties in 96 countries, with more than 300 varieties grown in the Americas. The United States is #7 in worldwide production.

From Egyptian hieroglyphics to contemporary American writers, watermelon takes front and center in the vegetable and fruit world. As you might guess, botanists argue over whether watermelon is fruit or vegetable.

Both sides have plausible arguments. The National Watermelon Promotional Board explains that like the pepper, tomato and pumpkin, watermelon is botanically a fruit. But it is also a member of the cucurbitaceae plan family of gourds, and it’s related to cumbers, squash and pumpkin. NWPB says it’s all a matter of perspective.

Mark Twain, in his popular “Pudd’nhead Wilson, voted for fruit by saying that watermelon is “king by grace of God over all the fruits of the earth.”

Twain also mused that “the true Southern watermelon is a boon apart, and not to be mentioned with commoner things....When one has tasted it, he knows what the angels eat.”

While we Southerners do tend to think of watermelon as our own quintessential fruit, these hard-shelled, green stripped melons are enjoyed worldwide in warmer climates and also in colder U.S. states because of huge food transportation system.

The states of Florida, Georgia, Texas and California are the American leaders in production, but 100 years ago, Mississippi fought to join that group.

“All watermelons are a delight, but the Mississippi watermelon is an epicurean’s dream of paradise,” this newspaper crowed in July 1916 – 106 years ago.

“Storms may come and storms may go and with them all the cops upon the land in the old Magnolia State, but all will be well, provided the watermelon is left shining upon the vine.”

This declaration from a newspaper not known for its editorializing was instigated by an act of the U.S. Congress. It seems that Georgia sent a train-car load of its melons to Congress and legislators officially suspended the nation’s business to go into a committee room to eat their fill.

Mississippi farmers were in the midst of a fruit and vegetable boon as new farmland sprang from cut-over forestland in the southern half of the state. Mississippi’s garden bounty was being sent across the nation by railroad cars. Radishes, carrots and cabbages went out in the colder months; cucumbers, watermelon, cantaloupe and tomatoes in the warmer months.

“There are no other watermelons in the world the equal of Mississippi melons,” insisted the Herald. “Georgia, of course, has the reputation, but Mississippi has the watermelons.”

Farming took on a smaller role as seafood and other industries mushroomed, but there’s still little to beat a sun-ripened South Mississippi-grown watermelon. The flavor, I suspect, comes from the rich sandy soil and early hot, humid weather.

Sadly, Mississippi’s melon crop seems to be shrinking. If seeking a state-grown melon, the best bet now is from local farmer’s markets.

Did you know that every part of the watermelon is edible and nutritious? Americans tend to eat only the sweet fleshy center and toss the rest, but the big black and white seeds can be roasted for protein snacks and the white rind can be pickled like cucumbers or stir-fried like a vegetable. During the Civil War, hungry Southerners boiled watermelon rind to make sugar and molasses.

The pulp, in addition to eating it au naturale, can also be frozen into a sherbet, or backed into a cake or gelled into a pie.

When I recently looked for remedies for poison ivy, I discovered that mashed white rind can help the pain of that dastardly ivy rash. Phytochemicals in the rind ease skin inflammation.

Mostly, however, we Americans eat the pulp, an average of 17 pounds per person per year. That pulp is 92 percent water, thus the derivation of the watermelon name.

Question: Why did the cantaloupe jump into the pool?

Answer: It wanted to become a watermelon.

Kat Bergeron, a veteran reporter and feature writer specializing in Gulf Coast history and sense of place, is retired from the Sun Herald. She writes the Mississippi 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