Agrimag 4th of July 2017

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AgriMag

The Bad Seed: A Tale of the Woefully Neglected

by Melody Murphy Watermelons were an important part of my childhood summers. I have eaten ice-cold watermelon slices on porches all over the South on summer evenings, often surrounded by fireflies, as is proper.

A summer evening at its most correct smells like a blend of watermelon, freshly cut grass, gasoline from the lawnmower, kerosene from the grill, and rain on the horizon. Watermelon should be accompanied by the creak of a porch swing and the distant rumble of thunder. There should be a few flashes of watermelon-pink heat lightning in the sky and some blooming watermelon-pink crape myrtles in the yard, so that you can note the serendipity of color with satisfaction.

Watermelon in summer is more than a fruit. It is a tradition. A rite of passage. I almost don’t care if you don’t like it. Liking watermelon is not the point. You must have it at least once in the summer, like turkey on Thanksgiving. It is the American way. I have a friend who inexplicably does not like watermelon, but she knows, correctly, that she must have it on hand for her children in the summertime. She did not allow her biases to intrude upon their appropriate summer experience, which includes watermelon.

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AgriMag

You cannot properly get through a summer in the South without a watermelon, ideally purchased from an old man in overalls selling them out of the back of his beat-up pickup truck on a country road. They taste better this way. It is a fact and no one may dispute it.

But most important of all about the watermelons of my childhood: They had SEEDS. It is ridiculously hard today to find a watermelon with seeds. A normal, old-school watermelon, like the kind I grew up with. Striped green rind, rosy-pink flesh, black teardrop-shaped seeds.

The kind you see in country-style arts and crafts wares at small-town festivals. All the hand-painted wooden watermelon décor items in the world have seeds. Artists know: This is the correct way to depict a watermelon.

I insist on seeds for more than aesthetic reasons.

A watermelon with seeds tastes better. In my experience they are redder, juicier, and sweeter.

The texture of a seedless watermelon is so often mealy. They just look anemic. And those pale little slivers throughout are seeds, even if the melon is masquerading as seedless. They get in your teeth in a very irritating way.

I have read about blind taste tests in which seedless watermelons emerge triumphant, that the occasional stubborn preference for seeded watermelons is really just nostalgia-based. I will not go so far as to say this is a lie, but sometimes people who are wrong are so convinced that they’re right, they see it as truth.

The other important reason why the old-fashioned kind of watermelon is better is that you must have seeds to spit. You must spit them from your porch, in the blue-violet of the evening, into the dusky shadows. You cannot spit those pale little slivers any distance.

You can, however, spit an old-timey black watermelon seed. If you apply yourself and have been raised on seed-spitting, you can spit it remarkably far. The trick is that you must spit with gusto.

Spit like you mean it. There are even seed-spitting contests, for those who take great joy in the art of expectorating. Or there were, before seeded watermelons became so hard to find.

I’m not sure when the insidious seedlessness began. I just know that it is now a national blight.

More than 80% of watermelon shoppers actively seek the seedless variety. It’s them I blame.

The blight was created by chemically treating watermelons to alter their chromosomes, resulting in a sterile hybrid. Growers often use the analogy “It’s the watermelon version of a mule” to explain the phenomenon. This does not make me more

amenable to the aberration. I like mules, but I do not like seedless watermelons.

Oh, sure, it’s easier to go seedless when cutting up watermelons for fruit salad. You don’t always eat watermelon on a porch where you can spit and remain within the bounds of proper decorum. People don’t often spit at an indoor brunch.

Or if they do, they aren’t asked back again.

But a watermelon is not about ease. A fruit which requires a strong person to carry, a wide open space and a large sturdy knife to hack open, then which requires sawing into triangle-shaped wedges to serve (again, it is not about your personal preference, only what is proper and timehonored) – a fruit which is truly best prepared and eaten outdoors, as it creates a great mess of juice and pink pulp – is not something you should expect to eat easily. It is a fruit whose joys you must labor to acquire, and it tastes all the sweeter for having done such.

And so, when you sit down at last with your hard-won slice, I do not find it reasonable that you should expect an easy, seedless time of eating it. No: You are made of stronger stuff than that. Expect to expectorate: We should all be ready to spit.

Melody Murphy hopes to find a watermelon this summer with seeds she can spit, as she knows just the porch for it.

July 2017

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