Don't trash the best part of the melon (article teaser)
Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2019 12:22 pm
Don't trash the best part of the melon
When you throw out your honeydew and cantaloupe seeds, you're missing the best part
Keith A. Spencer
August 13, 2019 10:00PM (UTC)
Squash and melons do not seem like fast friends — at least, visually. The former is savory, chewy and often bumpy; the latter sweet and watery. While both squash and melons are generally bulbous, spherical fruits, few people think of a pumpkin or spaghetti squash as a "fruit." Our cultural understanding of the word fruit usually implies something sweet and rich-tasting, though fruit is a scientific term for the seed-bearing object formed from a fertilized flower in flowering plants. (That means that guacamole — being largely avocado, tomatoes, and lemon juice — is technically a fruit salad. Don't @ me.)
But back to melons and squash. These two castes of spherical fruits that grow like bocce balls rolling in the dirt are, it turns out, very closely related. To be taxonomically specific: the Cucurbitaceae family contains all the melons and all the squash under the rainbow, from pumpkins (genus cucurbita) to cucumbers and honeydew (cucumis sativus and cucumis melo, respectively).
Read the rest of this article: on Salon.com.
When you throw out your honeydew and cantaloupe seeds, you're missing the best part
Keith A. Spencer
August 13, 2019 10:00PM (UTC)
Squash and melons do not seem like fast friends — at least, visually. The former is savory, chewy and often bumpy; the latter sweet and watery. While both squash and melons are generally bulbous, spherical fruits, few people think of a pumpkin or spaghetti squash as a "fruit." Our cultural understanding of the word fruit usually implies something sweet and rich-tasting, though fruit is a scientific term for the seed-bearing object formed from a fertilized flower in flowering plants. (That means that guacamole — being largely avocado, tomatoes, and lemon juice — is technically a fruit salad. Don't @ me.)
But back to melons and squash. These two castes of spherical fruits that grow like bocce balls rolling in the dirt are, it turns out, very closely related. To be taxonomically specific: the Cucurbitaceae family contains all the melons and all the squash under the rainbow, from pumpkins (genus cucurbita) to cucumbers and honeydew (cucumis sativus and cucumis melo, respectively).
Read the rest of this article: on Salon.com.