I am a huge fan of roasted brussels sprouts, but there are few things nastier than eating those things frozen and boiled, like we did when I was a kid.
I love how beautiful this stuff is! I wish it was tastier. But it’s lovely in salads.
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Those are, uh , too pretty to eat. Yeah, that’s it.
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Heirlooms can be ugly but they still get the job done. Tomato varieties beyond the mass market varieties are ripe, harvested, and more nutritious, with green shoulders.
A lot of heirlooms of all produce types are frankly more difficult to grow and more susceptible to pests and ailments.
I find this fascinating since peppers are among the most actively crossbred from universities to hobbyists.
It’s an interesting time. Creating a new variety, or reviving one where a recessive trait that was thought to have disappeared shows up again, can be considered as “established” after only a few seasons (to prove it is replicable). Giant squash and hot peppers have been increasing in weight and heat ratings, respectively, every year or so for the past decade and a half.
Edit: forgot to mention, I am spiked by eggplant stems on the regular. Also, ancestral/wild cucumbers are even gnarlier. They can be seen from many a California hiking trail.
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Huh.
I would have said the opposite: that cultivation and selective breeding are not the same as evolution in an anthropological sense (hey! cultivate / culture = same etymological roots!), but that they are identical biological processes.
Both are an alteration of the genotype and phenotype due to external factors favouring the propogation of strains with some qualities over others. In a biological sense – that is, in terms of genetics and molecular biology that forms of the mechanism why which descent with modification is possible – what’s the difference?
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hmm, yes i think you’re right, your explanation is better.
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nope, and the answer is in the article:
“In the painting, the black seeds indicate that the fruit has reached maturity,” Wehner says. “If they had waited longer for harvest, the fruit would have continued to break down, the flesh would have gotten softer and stringier, and the sweetness and redness would not have improved much.” A melon that wasn’t ripe wouldn’t have those black seeds.
Presumably there’s a similar mechanism going on in both cases, but it used to be that this was the natural end state of a ripe watermelon.
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Do you ever feel like we’re not the authors of our own stories, or the drivers of our own lives, but rather, just part of the environment that watermelons are evolving in?
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Did someone say… GRASS?!
The modern versions were intended for the ‘gotta-be-spoon-fed-YT zomboids’ out there… and – considering that ilk – I wouldn’t feel too smug.
They look like little tomatoes. I want to go pop them all in my mouth… I wonder how hot they are?
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Doesn’t rule out water stress which I believe is the main cause of this patterning. Ancestral watermelons were bitter fruit no larger than 2 inch diameter.
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Would the seeds fully ripen if water-stressed?
Interesting historical tidbit:
The word “corn” means “the dominant cereal crop of a region”. So the corn of one place might be emmer, wheat or spelt, but the corn of the Americas is maize.
However language changes over time, and just as wrecking bars have become crowbars, corn is becoming maize due to American cultural dominance in the English-speaking world.
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They’re usually equivalent to a habanero, except these are small berry size.
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Oh! That would go nice in a spicy salad!
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likewise water stress causing this patterning in modern watermelons doesn’t rule out that patterning being normal during that past phase of cultivating the plant. stressors often bring out different genetic expression in hybrids from their past. corn will look more grass like and have fewer kernels, carrots will have more forks in the roots, etc.
i’d say the fact that we still see this patterning under stress makes it more likely that this was standard in the past. remember we rapidly expanded and bred for melon size that the plant would have taken multiple generations to adapt to the dramatic change in the resulting water requirements and energy put into fruit production.
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We understand that the ancestral watermelon was a small bitter fruit. Whatever the deal is with the fruit shown in the Stanchi painting it is a domesticated plant and not remotely a wild watermelon as the video suggests.
Additionally paintings contemporary to the Stanchi one, such as Giuseppe Recco’s ‘Still Life With Fruit’ (1634-1695), show watermelons without that whorling. Which suggests the one in the Stanchi painting was just poorly farmed/watered, rather than representing the state of watermelon breeding in that period.
More complete history here:
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btw, just for the disclaimer, i have a degree in botany, not evolutionary botany, but i did study it.
Do you really think that the watermelon went straight from the wild form to the current form? of course not. if you reread my reply i’m pointing out how it is incorrect to assume that the watermelon in the picture wasn’t common for mature properly tended fruit during that stage of the hybridization process, in fact it is very likely that it was. when you map modern variants backwards you clearly see that hybridization is an ongoing process and the plants have gone through multiple stages to get to their current forms.
If you read the article you linked to, it clearly says that we first hybridized watermelons for the seeds not the flesh, then later we hybridized them for their water content, again not the flesh, it was only later that we started hybridizing them for their flesh. Even once we started hybridizing them for their sweet flesh, they likely weren’t consistently solid until much later and ones that were solid were likely prize specimens that were selectively bred into todays versions. It is just as likely that the solid ones painted at the same time were the prize painting worthy versions, the exceptions, and that melons at that time more commonly had air pockets inside them as still often occurs in watermelon farming. we still haven’t bread that out 100% yet, even with how far we’ve bred them since then. Like you pointed out it still is expressed with water stressing, over fertilization, too much early heat, etc. We still get watermelons like that. It is pure folly to think we haven’t improved the average melon from then to now or that the painting was of anything other then a typical watermelon of the day. Anyone who works with plant hybridization knows that we didn’t get today’s consistency until very recently in most crops, and the cost of that consistency is mono cropping very genetically similar variants who have had the desired features fixed or genetic clones for crops who we haven’t fixed the desired traits for (like apples).
agreed. it is red, large, and has a lot of flesh, those are all aspects we selectively bred for. i do think it was a fairly typical watermelon for the time period though, which is my only contention. likely there were a number of varieties that were grown during that period all with various qualities. we used to appreciate diversity within our food products and used to select for a lot of different aspects like storage, taste, varied growing conditions, different harvest times, etc. that we seem to have mostly forgotten about in our rush to get perfectly uniform crops to our grocery displays.
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As a botanist, and a vegetarian, I approve of this post and the discussion.
Now, gimme something to eat.
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Stephen Jay Gould has a great essay on how the domestication of corn probably started with a mutation in a grass called teosinte that made it look more … corn-ish. People started cultivating the mutation because you could get more food out of it.
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