For many of us, watermelon is the favorite fruit, for example, as a dessert or a cool snack, but where is watermelon considered a vegetable?
Where is watermelon considered a vegetable? In the US state of Oklahoma.
Since strawberries were already the state fruit, Oklahoma made watermelon its official vegetable, according to Britannica.
Where is watermelon considered a vegetable?
Mark Twain stated that the taste of a watermelon is equivalent to “what angels eat”.
However, the angels would have had to refrain if they had tried the watermelon’s wild ancestor, a bitter fruit with hard, pale green flesh. Generations of selection and hybridization, carried out across several countries and cultures, produced the sweet, red fruit we now frequently see on picnic tables.
Researchers agree that the ancestor of the watermelon was cultivated in Africa before spreading north to the Mediterranean countries and later to other parts of Europe. But this is where the consensus ends. Did the ancestral watermelon originally grow in West Africa? In South Africa? In North East Africa? Theories are literally spread all over the map, notes National Geographic.
A distorted history
“History has been distorted from the beginning,” says Harry Paris, a horticulturist at the Israel Agricultural Research Organization, who blames generations of taxonomists, starting in the 18th century, who have made melon classification hopelessly complicated.
Even the name of the modern watermelon, Citrullus lanatusis wrong. Lanatus means “hairy” in Latin and was originally the name applied to the melon Bitter lemonwhich is covered with fluff. Bitter lemonwhich grows in southern Africa, is a popular candidate for the watermelon’s ancient ancestor. But Paris is skeptical. He found evidence that the Egyptians began cultivating melons about 4,000 years ago, long before agriculture began in southern Africa.
The second candidate is the egusi melon from West Africa. Again, Paris is skeptical. Egusi were not grown for their pulp, but for their edible seeds, the one part of the modern watermelon that no one wants.
Paris claims that the true ancestor of the modern watermelon is a native of Northeast Africa: Citrullus lanatus var. colocynthoidesknown as gurum in Sudan and gourma in Egypt.
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Source: www.descopera.ro
