Produce

Watermelon

Seedless watermelon isn't genetically modified — it's produced through a traditional cross-breeding technique developed decades ago, manipulating chromosome counts to produce a sterile, seedless fruit through conventional plant breeding.

Watermelon rind is technically edible and used in some cuisines, pickled or stir-fried, though most US consumers discard it, treating only the sweet, red flesh as the edible portion.

Its exceptionally high water content, over 90%, makes it a genuinely hydrating snack, though that same water content is exactly why it has no meaningful freezer future — freezing ruptures its water-filled cells completely.

Watermelon likely originated in Africa, with genetic and historical evidence pointing to wild ancestors in the Kalahari region or more broadly across northeastern Africa, and it was cultivated in ancient Egypt long enough ago that watermelon seeds have been found in Egyptian tombs dating back thousands of years.

Seedless watermelon isn't genetically modified — it's produced through a decades-old conventional breeding technique that crosses a normal diploid watermelon plant with a chromosome-doubled tetraploid plant, yielding a sterile triploid offspring that develops the small white, edible seed traces found in seedless watermelon today rather than mature black seeds.

About 92% of a watermelon's total weight comes from water alone, a proportion so high it made the fruit historically valuable in hot desert and savanna climates as both a food source and a genuinely portable source of hydration, long before modern refrigeration and bottled water were widely available to travelers.

Fruit carving traditions in Southeast Asia, particularly in Thailand, have elevated watermelon into an elaborate decorative art form, with skilled carvers cutting intricate floral and figural designs directly into the rind for weddings, festivals, and competitions, a practice with roots stretching back centuries in Thai royal court cuisine.

Pickled watermelon rind, made from the white inner rind layer usually discarded after eating the red flesh, is a traditional preserve in the American South, reflecting an older, more waste-conscious approach to cooking that used nearly the whole fruit rather than treating the rind as pure kitchen scrap.

County and state fairs across the US, especially in the South, have long featured competitive watermelon seed-spitting contests as a lighthearted summer event, a tradition tied specifically to the older seeded varieties that gave contestants plenty of ammunition, one small cultural casualty of the seedless watermelon's rise in popularity.

Oklahoma's state legislature officially designated watermelon the state vegetable in 2007, a somewhat unusual move given that watermelon is botanically a fruit, but the designation followed the same technical logic that classifies squash and pumpkin as culinary vegetables despite their fruit-like botanical origin as the seed-bearing part of a flowering plant.

A ripe watermelon's dull-versus-shiny rind and the deep yellow "field spot" where it rested on the ground while growing are more reliable ripeness indicators than the old habit of thumping the rind and listening for a hollow sound, a folk method that offers a much less consistent read on ripeness than these visual cues do.