The Most Dangerous Fruit in America

It's the epitome of summertime: there’s nothing like a cold, juicy slice of red watermelon on a swelteringly hot day. But, once upon a time, watermelons were neither red nor sweet—the wild watermelon has white flesh and a bitter taste. This episode, we scour Egyptian tombs, decaying DNA, and ancient literature in search of watermelon's origins. The quest for tasty watermelon continues into modern times, with the rediscovery of a lost (and legendarily sweet) varietal in South Carolina—and the Nigerian musical secret that might help you pick a ripe one. But the fruit's history has often been the opposite of sweet: watermelons have featured in some of the most ubiquitous anti-Black imagery in U. S. history. So how did the watermelon become the most dangerous—and racist—fruit in America? (encore) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Cynthia Graber?

  Summer in New England is my very favorite fruit season. Right about now, I'm eating peaches and cherries and blueberries and of course, lots and lots of watermelons.

• 0:11Nicola Twilley?

  Which made us think that it was time to revisit one of our favorite episodes, all about the watermelon. Make sure to listen all the way through for how to choose the best, most delicious specimen from your local farm stand.

• 0:24Cynthia Graber?

  Enjoy.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  It's watermelon weather, that summer kind of weather. When people get together and sing.

• 0:40Cynthia Graber?

  I mean, I don't know about you, but I'm happy to get together and sing, especially if it's singing about watermelons.

• 0:46Nicola Twilley?

  Yeah, but I'm sorry, Cynthia, are you 103? Perry Como? What about some Harry Styles?

• 1:01Cynthia Graber?

  Singing with a watermelon, frolicking on the beach with a watermelon. It's all good.

• 1:05Nicola Twilley?

  So, hey, listeners, guess what this episode is about?

• 1:08Cynthia Graber?

  No, not Harry Styles.

• 1:09Nicola Twilley?

  Or Perry Como. It's about the fruit that's bigger than both of them put together. The watermelon. It's kind of a big deal.

• 1:17Speaker 03

  A very big deal, very big deal in growing. So, the FAO Statistics Yearbook, the Food and Agriculture Organization Yearbook, says that the world produces something like 100 million tons.

• 1:32Speaker 04

  Interestingly, of all the vegetable crops, watermelons are grown on the largest land area in the world. They take up the most space of any crop in the world, of any vegetable crop. And yeah, so they are very important crops.

• 1:47Cynthia Graber?

  Important, delicious, and more fascinating than you might even imagine. When I told my partner, Tim, that we were making a watermelon episode, he was basically like, what is there to say about the watermelon?

• 1:57Nicola Twilley?

  Tim, your mind is about to be blown. This is Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history, or should I say, the podcast that specializes in extracting all the watermelon.

• 2:10Nicola Twilley?

  Watermelon's most fascinating secrets. I'm Nicola Twilley, watermelon lover.

• 2:14Cynthia Graber?

  And I'm Cynthia Graber, also a watermelon lover. And among the many mysteries that we will solve today, where did watermelons come from? How did they get so sweet and so red?

• 2:23Nicola Twilley?

  More importantly, how did the watermelon become the most dangerous fruit in America?

• 2:29Cynthia Graber?

  The most dangerous and the most racist fruit in America.

• 2:32Nicola Twilley?

  Plus, what everyone wonders while trying to figure out which watermelon to take home. How can you tell when they're ripe?

• 2:42Speaker 05

  Support for the show comes from TikTok. There is a scientifically documented correlation between listening to podcasts and curiosity. So since you're here, you probably enjoy discovering new things. One great place to indulge your curiosity is TikTok. Whether it's how to forecast volcanic eruptions, strange phenomena that the James Webb Space Telescope picked up near the beginning of time, or a literal deep dive on the ocean's deepest reefs. TikTok has a wealth of fascinating videos just waiting to be discovered. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 3:26Speaker 06

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• 4:00Nicola Twilley?

  To start our watermelon adventure, we called one of the world's great watermelon experts, Harry Paris. He has worked on watermelon science for years as part of Israel's Agricultural Research Service.

• 4:12Speaker 04

  Well, I think the first thing that comes are the first two syllables, water, right? This is a fruit vegetable.

• 4:20Speaker 04

  Which has a lot of water and which actually probably the first use by people of this particular natural product was to quench thirst.

• 4:31Cynthia Graber?

  I've spent summers in Israel and it is basically watermelon paradise. But that's not actually where Harry first fell in love with the watermelon. It all started when his dad grew watermelons in the backyard in their home in Brooklyn in the 1960s. Then Harry gave watermelon farming a try himself.

• 4:45Speaker 04

  I was 15 years old and there was a new variety called Crimson Sweet that came out and I planted a few seeds in the garden. And lo and behold, by the fall, we got one nice, big, sweet, high-quality watermelon fruit that we grew in the backyard in Brooklyn. And from then on, I was just hooked.

• 5:03Nicola Twilley?

  Harry was well ahead of the locavore hipster curve in Brooklyn.

• 5:07Cynthia Graber?

  But the watermelon is neither from Brooklyn nor from Israel.

• 5:10Nicola Twilley?

  In fact, its origins are a little bit of a mystery.

• 5:13Speaker 04

  One of the big headlines was back in the mid 19th century when the British explorer David Livingstone went to the southern African deserts and lo and behold, it was the year in which there was more rain than average and he found that large areas just covered with wild watermelons. These wild watermelons were hard, but as the name says, you have water, so you have to pound them and so on and so forth, but you could squeeze the water out of them.

• 5:40Cynthia Graber?

  David Livingstone was searching for the source of the Nile, but apparently he was also, as a side hustle, looking for other sources like the source of our sweet watermelons. And people thought he'd found it, the wild ancestor.

• 5:50Nicola Twilley?

  But Livingstone was wrong about the source of the Nile and as it turns out, now we know he was wrong about those wild watermelons too.

• 5:57Cynthia Graber?

  Now that scientists can examine the DNA of melons, they found that the Kalahari Desert wild melon that Livingstone came upon is not the ancestor of our sweet watermelon. But DNA is just one of the tools that scientists are using to try to figure out where and when the watermelon was domesticated.

• 6:13Speaker 04

  You can't just use one approach. You have to use an archaeology approach. You have to use plant science. You have to use linguistics. You have to go into literature, some of it old, some of it ancient. And even more than that, of course, with the latest that we know, genetics and genomics can assist us.

• 6:33Nicola Twilley?

  So first of all, the plant science. Livingston was at least on the right continent because there are wild watermelons of various different species all over Africa.

• 6:42Speaker 03

  So the wild relatives of watermelon, their fruits are smaller and rounder, not elongate. They have often perfectly rounded, small fruits. The outside looks like a watermelon, like, you know, little green and white. But inside, they all have this extremely bitter and usually white, whitish pulp.

• 7:03Nicola Twilley?

  Suzanne Renner is a professor of biology at the University of Munich, and she's another one of the world's watermelon experts. Suzanne says you could boil these super bitter watermelons for jam, or you could use them medicinally as kind of a purge to clean out your insides. Basically, the wild watermelon wasn't a tasty thing to eat raw at all.

• 7:22Speaker 04

  So where did the desert watermelon come from?

• 7:24Nicola Twilley?

  There are two things that have to happen to these bitter wild melons to turn them into the watermelons we love today. Two specific genetic mutations. The first one is a mutation that switches off the production of bitter chemicals.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  And so this mutation occurs in nature. It's bad for the plant because the plant, of course, has this bitterness to defend itself not to be eaten, so that the fruits would not be eaten. Yeah, for the plant, it's bad to lose the bitterness, but for us, it's good. And we can only imagine that native people, every once in a while, tried one of these melons, maybe for water, maybe, you know, hoping for something to chew on, and then found some that wasn't bitter.

• 8:02Nicola Twilley?

  Suzanne says scientists know what that mutation is and how to find it in a melon. They know just where to look. And the second mutation is the one that turned it red inside rather than white.

• 8:10Speaker 03

  The red color is also well understood. This is well studied, and it's a completely different set of genes.

• 8:16Nicola Twilley?

  So Suzanne and other scientists know exactly which two mutations they're looking for. Those mutations aren't common in wild melons. So when did they happen? When were watermelons domesticated? Harry says the place to look for those clues is archaeology. In ancient Egyptian tombs, archaeologists have found paintings of whole watermelons on a platter. They're oblong and striped like watermelons today, not round.

• 8:37Cynthia Graber?

  Like the wild bitter ones. But did those ancient Egyptian watermelons taste like the ones we eat? Did they have the mutations for sweetness and maybe for the red color?

• 8:46Nicola Twilley?

  The painting can't really tell you that. But fortunately, some other watermelon evidence has showed up in a 4,000 year old Egyptian tomb complex.

• 8:55Cynthia Graber?

  Some of those seeds and leaves from the tomb ended up at the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in England. Suzanne wanted to find out if those remains held any clues about whether the watermelon had already been domesticated by then.

• 9:05Nicola Twilley?

  So she wrote to Mark Nesbit, who coincidentally starred in our tonic episode and who runs the Economic Botany Collection at Kew. And she asked if she could borrow a watermelon leaf from the tomb.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  It was in a glass box, encased in a box. And he, Mark, opened it and he said it hadn't been opened since 1871 or whenever that thing was arrived there.

• 9:26Cynthia Graber?

  Suzanne and her colleagues analyzed the DNA in the leaf and at first they were thrilled. The watermelon leaf DNA did in fact have the mutations that would have made the fruit sweet and red.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  But then when we use C14 dating for this material that we had received from Mark Nesbit, it turned out it was much younger than we thought.

• 9:45Nicola Twilley?

  Yep, turns out the watermelon material in the tomb had been left there by a later visitor. Carbon dating showed it was from the late 1800s. Huge bummer.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  Okay, this is real disappointment.

• 9:56Cynthia Graber?

  Luckily, other archaeological sites have also been found to contain a few watermelon seeds. There's another tomb in Sudan and an even older one in Libya.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  Ah, this is a super interesting site. It has an impossible name. Uwan Muhuja is a super important site, apparently. They found a black mummy there. So it was not an Egyptian person. It was a North African person. Okay, it is perfectly preserved. It was embalmed in the most sophisticated way. And this is where the oldest watermelon seed is found, not inside that mummy, but near that mummy. Incredible, incredible.

• 10:31Nicola Twilley?

  Suzanne managed to get hold of these even older watermelon seeds and she sequenced them and the DNA showed.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  Cannot tell you yet because the DNA is much more decayed. You know, it's much older and now it's really, really old and it's really decayed. Yeah, we have not nailed any mutations yet.

• 10:48Nicola Twilley?

  Suzanne and her colleagues are still analyzing this ancient DNA, but it hasn't given up its secrets yet. She's still trying to figure out how long ago the watermelon turned sweet and red.

• 10:59Cynthia Graber?

  So then Harry turned to literature to try to find hints of sweet watermelons. It turns out that one of the first mentions of the watermelon is in the Bible, the Book of Numbers. That book seems to be not quite as old as the ancient tomb Suzanne is studying. So in the Book of Numbers, when the ancient Israelites left Egypt, they dreamed about five specific foods they'd left behind: leeks, onions, garlic, snake melons, which are like cucumbers, and watermelons.

• 11:22Speaker 04

  In my opinion, if they're associated with vegetables, it doesn't say that they were sweet. They were probably used just as the others. You could eat them raw, you could eat them cooked, you could eat them pickled.

• 11:31Cynthia Graber?

  To find proof that these ancient watermelons really were sweet, Harry looked at a slightly later piece of Jewish writing, a rabbinic ruling from around the second century. Watermelons are in a list with grapes, figs, and pomegranates. You don't have to give a 10% tithe from your harvest if you eat these foods straight from the field. And what do all these foods have in common? They're sweet.

• 11:50Speaker 04

  There you go. That's exactly what they would be. They would be watery or refreshing, and they would be sweet. That's why anybody who was out there in the hot sun picking them anyhow, that's why he would eat them. That's why you would want them. You can't do the same thing with a stalk of wheat.

• 12:06Nicola Twilley?

  Finally, a watermelon that we would recognize. But still, I hate to sound like Livingston, but where is the source?

• 12:13Cynthia Graber?

  No one can give an exact answer to that yet, but based on archaeology and seeds and tomb paintings and ancient writings and wild relatives, both Suzanne and Harry think that the watermelon was domesticated in northeastern Africa, in Sudan, or Egypt, or Libya, or maybe all of them, at a number of different locations.

• 12:29Nicola Twilley?

  Harry imagines a story where someone, or maybe different people at different times, they come across one of these melons that has the mutation, so it's not bitter, and he or she saves the seed. And over time, people come across mutations that are a little more tender, and maybe even a little sweeter, and one day even pinkish or orange. And they like those enough to save their seeds, too. It's a process that would have taken thousands of years.

• 12:53Cynthia Graber?

  By the time the process was complete, these delicious, sweet, refreshing fruits were a hit. They took off from northern Africa and spread across the Mediterranean. A few hundred years later, they reached India and after that China. And they stuck around nearly everywhere people could grow them.

• 13:07Nicola Twilley?

  One of the places they caught on was North America. But once again, the watermelon is a mysterious fruit and no one knows for sure how it got here.

• 13:15Cynthia Graber?

  Some people speculate that European settlers brought watermelons with them. And some think it was Africans transported on slave ships who carried seeds from home.

• 13:23Nicola Twilley?

  Adrian Miller, the Seoul Food Scholar you may remember from our mac and cheese episode, he thinks the Spanish were first on the scene with the watermelon.

• 13:31Speaker 07

  Because watermelons were growing all up and down the eastern seaboard because they had been embraced by Native Americans. So much so that people later thought that watermelons were natives to the American South because they had proliferated so much. So I think it was something that Spanish people brought over. And then Native Americans discovered it and experimented with it, grew it themselves. And then later, when enslaved Africans arrived, it was something that they embraced as well.

• 13:57Cynthia Graber?

  Because it was a fruit from home, as we just described. There had already been sweet watermelons in Africa for thousands of years.

• 14:03Speaker 07

  It was definitely part of the nourishment. And especially it was really important to the food culture of the Anabellum South because in many cases enslaved Africans and later enslaved African Americans were allowed to garden and grow their own food.

• 14:17Speaker 08

  And so watermelon became the symbol of independence and agency in ways that other fruits did not.

• 14:23Nicola Twilley?

  This is Shayna Klein. She's an art historian and author of a new book called Fruits of Empire.

• 14:28Speaker 08

  I'll also tell you that the watermelon, as a member of the gourd family, had larger meanings relating to freedom as well because the drinking gourd was a metaphor for the Big Dipper, the constellation that guided enslaved people north on the Underground Railroad. And so the watermelon had all of this really rich, empowering symbolism before the Civil War.

• 14:51Cynthia Graber?

  Shayna says it wasn't just enslaved Africans and Native Americans who loved watermelons. Everyone was eating them.

• 14:57Speaker 08

  The watermelon wasn't considered an exotic fruit. It really made its way south, north, Midwest and beyond, and was very accessible and cheap to most American consumers.

• 15:08Nicola Twilley?

  It was cheap, but not so cheap that the rich and famous didn't love it too.

• 15:12Speaker 08

  Yeah, so Jefferson loved the watermelon. He grew it at Monticello. Henry David Thoreau, he also had annual watermelon parties in Concord, Massachusetts. And then, of course, Mark Twain, famous American author, described watermelon as this beautiful fruit that angels eat. So it was very well-liked in early America, 19th century America and beyond.

• 15:34Cynthia Graber?

  Beautiful fruit that angels eat makes the watermelon sound quite delicate and ethereal, but most people didn't see the watermelon in quite that light.

• 15:42Speaker 08

  It became sort of assimilated and Americanized as this rowdy party fruit that you would eat during watermelon parties, seed spitting contests, also during July 4th parties. Watermelons were also used for imbibing alcohol. So you could take a chunk out of the watermelon and then inject it with alcohol. And this was a way of drinking watermelon wine, watermelon alcohol, which of course, temperance supporters hated and despised.

• 16:10Nicola Twilley?

  Ah, yes, the watermelon keg, beloved of frat boys to this day. But let's be honest, not exactly classy.

• 16:17Cynthia Graber?

  So some people in the 1800s, in the Victorian period, they tried to make watermelons a little more proper. They tried to kind of clean them up.

• 16:25Speaker 08

  And so you can read etiquette manual after etiquette manual, talking at length about how people should properly eat this messy watermelon. They were told when to eat it, in what room temperature, in what clothing. They were all trying to instruct Americans on how to eat this messy fruit with as much control as possible. They even invented specific utensils to eat the messy watermelon. So watermelon spoons, watermelon knives become invented in the Victorian silverware market.

• 16:54Nicola Twilley?

  Watermelons were not just unruly on the plate. David Shields is a professor at the University of South Carolina, as well as the Chair of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. And he says it was basically watermelons gone wild out in the field.

• 17:07Speaker 09

  One of the things which is interesting about watermelons was that it was very difficult to wrestle control over them in the early 1800s. Watermelons will cross with one another with promiscuous abandon. So you had all sorts of mongrel melons pop up. Some were mushy, some were hollow-hearted, some were crisp.

• 17:33Speaker 09

  And so through extraordinary effort, groups of breeders began isolating different melon types and cross breeding melons in order to create stable market melons.

• 17:47Nicola Twilley?

  The first really reliable, really good melon in America was called the Lawson. The seeds were brought from the West Indies by an American Revolutionary War officer called W. B. Lawson.

• 17:58Cynthia Graber?

  The Lawson watermelon wasn't particularly beautiful. David said it was dumpy looking and it wasn't all that prolific. But it was delicious, so much so that Mr. Lawson was pretty stingy about who he was willing to share the seeds with. He only sent them to breeders who could maybe improve the variety and wouldn't let them grow promiscuously in the field. He had to really deserve the Lawson seeds.

• 18:17Nicola Twilley?

  One of the breeders who was worthy of the Lawson seed was Nathaniel Napoleon Bradford of Sumter, South Carolina. And by the late 1840s, he had managed to breed the first truly legendary watermelon, which he modestly called the Bradford.

• 18:34Speaker 09

  There was a mineral element to the Bradford watermelon that was very appealing. It has a distinctly sweet and inviting flavor. And it has this one inch thick rind, which was used for pickling. Watermelon rind pickles remain one of the great sort of home pickles of the South.

• 18:59Cynthia Graber?

  After the Civil War, enterprising southerners sold those super delicious Bradford watermelons up north.

• 19:04Speaker 09

  The demand was so instantaneous and great that the watermelon crop of 1867 alone kickstarted truck farming from the South in the post-Civil War era.

• 19:17Nicola Twilley?

  Truck farming, if you haven't heard the term, doesn't necessarily involve trucks. It just means growing crops for a distant market.

• 19:24Speaker 09

  The entire vegetable production for northern markets was triggered by the enormous success of these watermelons getting into the New York and Philadelphia markets.

• 19:36Cynthia Graber?

  These watermelons were such a hot commodity that growers had to protect them from thieves.

• 19:40Speaker 09

  It was not unusual for people to be stationed with shotguns outside of watermelon patches. But even then, you had the problem of... Organized gangs of pillagers coming and just taking, overpowering the guards and taking the watermelons.

• 19:57Nicola Twilley?

  David says that thanks to the deliciousness of the Bradford and the temptation it posed to watermelon thieves, there were more people killed in watermelon patches than in any other agricultural setting in America, with the sole exception of cattle rustlers.

• 20:12Cynthia Graber?

  Now growers didn't necessarily want to stand guard with shotguns to protect their huge watermelon farms. So they came up with another idea.

• 20:20Speaker 09

  They had to resort to poisoning one of the melons and issuing a warning, you know, pick at your own risk, one of these watermelons is poisoned. The presumption was that, you know, the grower knew where it was. But sometimes they forgot.

• 20:36Nicola Twilley?

  Karma is such a bitch. You inject your watermelon with a cattle syringe full of arsenic. You rub your hands together, thinking, that'll show them. And then, oops, you forget which one you poisoned.

• 20:48Speaker 09

  Yeah, when I ran across the newspaper articles that described this, I was dumbfounded. They forgot where it was and they wound up eating it and poisoning their entire families.

• 21:00Cynthia Graber?

  To be fair, David said this wasn't a frequent occurrence. The fact that it was newsworthy to him means that it was pretty rare. Still, auto intoxication by watermelon? Kind of ridiculous.

• 21:10Nicola Twilley?

  Just you wait, Cynthia. Next up, watermelon electrocution.

• 21:15Speaker 09

  People would run wires out to watermelons. The electrification of America took place beginning in the 1880s. So this was at the end of the 19th century, when people ran wires off their house current to see if they could electrify the snatchers of a watermelon.

• 21:34Cynthia Graber?

  Electrocution and poisoning to protect their precious harvest? A fruit that spawned an entire industry? These Bradford watermelons sound too good to be true. Why haven't I tasted one yet?

• 21:44Nicola Twilley?

  It's a sad story. Coming up after the break.

• 21:49Speaker 05

  Support for the show comes from TikTok. There is a scientifically documented correlation between listening to podcasts and curiosity. So since you're here, you probably enjoy discovering new things. One great place to indulge your curiosity is TikTok. Whether it's how to forecast volcanic eruptions, strange phenomena that the James Webb Space Telescope picked up near the beginning of time, or a literal deep dive on the ocean's deepest reefs, TikTok has a wealth of fascinating videos just waiting to be discovered. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 22:32Speaker 05

  Support for the show comes from Google Gemini. You know that moment when curiosity strikes? You're exploring a new city with the family and a sculpture catches your daughter's eye. What is that? Who made it? With Gemini, you can snap a picture and get a fully interactive breakdown of its history, architecture, and even hidden secrets. Gemini is built for moments like that. Whether you're learning something new, solving a problem, or looking for your next favorite thing, Google Gemini is here to help. Download Gemini, Google's AI app, or visit gemini.google.com to learn more.

• 23:11Speaker 10

  From the creators of Zootopia and Frozen comes Disney's Hext. Welcome to Hext and enter the world of witches, where it was foretold that an ordinary girl would become an extraordinary witch and save the world of magic. Disney's Hext arrives in theaters this Thanksgiving.

• 23:31Speaker 09

  The Bradford has a very tender rind, and it can't be stacked more than too deep in a boxcar. So if you're shipping your entire year's worth of watermelons north, you aren't going to make a profit if 40% of them are crushed when they arrive at the station. So there was a great deal of despair.

• 23:54Nicola Twilley?

  Almost right away, breeders realized they needed to toughen up the Bradford. It was the perfect watermelon, except for that tender rind.

• 24:02Speaker 09

  And there was a melon that sort of surfaced in the early 1880s called the scaly bark watermelon that you could whack with a sledgehammer and wouldn't break the melon.

• 24:14Cynthia Graber?

  Breeders crossed the scaly bark watermelon with the Bradford and they came up with a baby.

• 24:18Speaker 09

  The cold's gem, you could stack five deep in a boxcar and it wouldn't bruise the melon. It didn't taste as good, but you know, hey, it's Yankees who are eating them. We got the good melon in our back patch. That's the attitude in the post-Civil War era.

• 24:34Nicola Twilley?

  Then, of course, because growers have fields full of a single crop, they start getting diseases and the breeders keep pushing for watermelons that are shippable and disease resistant and generally sturdy as heck.

• 24:45Cynthia Graber?

  And unsurprisingly, flavor takes a backseat.

• 24:48Speaker 09

  And you know, you can flip forward to 2020 when you have these small, round, seedless refrigerator melons, which have no complexity whatsoever, real high sugar content because, hey, Americans like sugar. No nuance of flavor, no rind to speak of, so you can't make pickles out of their hides. And you have the situation where a perfect industrial product has been created and the Bradford gets lost in the shuffle. The last crops are being grown in the 1920s.

• 25:24Cynthia Graber?

  One of David's main passions in life as head of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation is finding lost southern foods. And there was plenty of documentation about the Bradford from the 1800s. So David did some research and he wrote it up.

• 25:36Speaker 09

  The greatest flavored watermelon the South ever knew. Gone with the wind, you know, tears streaming out of my eyes on the page. Turns out that someone read this and Nat Bradford, who is the eighth generation descendant of the creator of the Bradford watermelon, wrote me an email at, I guess, 2:00 AM in the morning saying, "Well, I've got Bradford watermelons I'm growing in Sumter. These are my family's melons." And I'm wondering, you know, could this be the famous Bradford of the Civil War era?

• 26:13Nicola Twilley?

  Nat Bradford had wondered whether his melon might be the Bradford melon. But when he asked a breeder at Clemson University, the breeder dismissed the idea.

• 26:22Speaker 09

  So he had doubts, you know, instilled by some crop scientist. And it's only, you know, when we really put together the historical record that it became absolutely certain that this was the melon.

• 26:36Cynthia Graber?

  For David, this was the moment he dreamed of. He wasn't waiting any longer than he had to. As soon as it was harvest season, he was out there in the field with Nat.

• 26:44Speaker 09

  He handed me a slice. Actually, it was his father who was there who handed me a slice of melon. And I tasted it and it indeed was extraordinarily sumptuous, more complicated than most watermelon taste. It had a kind of body to it. And, you know, a lot of watermelon is sort of like sugar water when you eat it. But this one was something different. It had a kind of whiny quality to it. It tasted splendid, but it tasted completely different from my anticipations of what it tasted like.

• 27:23Nicola Twilley?

  Nat Bradford's original Bradford watermelons are now the hottest melons in town. He sells some to distillers who make a watermelon brandy, which is sold out. Yes, it was the first thing I checked.

• 27:34Cynthia Graber?

  He also makes watermelon molasses, which is a traditional recipe from boiled down juice of Bradford watermelons. It sounds delicious, but that too is sold out. I'll be keeping my eye on their website.

• 27:44Nicola Twilley?

  And if you want to buy a fresh Bradford watermelon, yeah, good luck with that.

• 27:49Speaker 09

  Three days ago, what is this? This is the 23rd of June here that I'm speaking. A notice was posted by Nat Bradford for pre-orders for the melon. And people come as far north as Massachusetts to pick up Bradford melon at his farm. They're all pre-sold. He does make deliveries to certain restaurants in Charlotte, Columbia, Savannah, and Charleston. But you have to be in the know in order to pick it up there.

• 28:21Cynthia Graber?

  Nat did release the seeds to a company in North Carolina called So True Seed, so you can try to grow some Bradford's at home if you want.

• 28:27Nicola Twilley?

  Listeners, I bought the seed, but watermelons take up a lot of space, so I may need to also buy a country estate. Stay tuned.

• 28:35Cynthia Graber?

  But here's the strange thing about the Bradford story, and actually about the whole watermelon story. Remember all those gangs that were stealing watermelons? David told us the gangs were mostly white Americans. But whenever there was a drawing, or painting, or any sort of depiction of watermelon theft, the thieves were always portrayed as black.

• 28:51Nicola Twilley?

  And Janice says, that's because the watermelon isn't all sweetness and pickles.

• 28:55Speaker 08

  There's kind of no more fruit attached so closely to racism than the watermelon.

• 29:01Nicola Twilley?

  What happened was, at the exact same moment that Northerners were getting their first taste of the wonders of the Bradford watermelon after the Civil War.

• 29:09Speaker 07

  At that time period, African-Americans had a modicum of some rights. Because thanks to the abolition of slavery and the Civil Rights Amendments that passed at the federal level, African-Americans had some social, economic, and political rights.

• 29:23Cynthia Graber?

  Of course, those rights weren't implemented everywhere or equally. But even just the idea that African-Americans might have these rights was terrifying to a lot of racist white people.

• 29:32Speaker 07

  So you see this propaganda emerge where essentially there's a cultural war against African-Americans by racist whites to say, hey, look, these people are different. They're inferior. They don't deserve these rights. And here's one example. Look at how they deal with the food, the way they cook it, the way they eat it. They're so childlike. They're bestial, you know, they did anything to take away from their humanity.

• 29:55Cynthia Graber?

  Adrian says watermelon became one of those toxic foods.

• 29:58Speaker 07

  So watermelon and fried chicken are probably the most toxic. But barbecue, catfish, all kinds of items were added to the list of foods used to ridicule African Americans. And so the goofiest part of all of this is that white people were eating and enjoying the same foods.

• 30:13Cynthia Graber?

  Shayna already told us that watermelons were considered rowdy. Remember how much the temperance folks hated watermelons? And the Victorians tried to tame them with special watermelon spoons because people were soaking them in alcohol, serving them at parties, using them as diuretics.

• 30:26Speaker 08

  And so the watermelon accumulated all of these meanings and reputations for being this fruit that maybe had a bit of lack of control, a kind of flooding of digestion, excess and indulgence. That's what makes the watermelon so terribly perfect for the most awful racial trope that emerges in the 19th century. A trope that shows African American people eating watermelon, drooling over the fruit, having this lustful and insatiable appetite for watermelon, and even stealing the fruit from watermelon patches.

• 31:00Cynthia Graber?

  Shayna has looked at hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of watermelon images from the period. Engravings in magazines, paintings, illustrated collectible cards, advertisements, even silverware. The watermelon had been used as a shorthand for slovenly, rowdy behavior before. Italians and Arabs had been called watermelon eaters as a way of saying they were lazy and childlike and irresponsible. But that slur was never as pernicious and lasting as the stereotype in America.

• 31:25Speaker 08

  I want to emphasize that there is no surface that the watermelon stereotype did not touch. And many people talk about it as this racist Southern practice. But in truth, the visual culture of the watermelon and its racism was a national exercise.

• 31:41Speaker 07

  This just did not only happen in the South. I mean, people outside of the South, newspaper editors, magazine editors, others were more than happy to recycle these images of African Americans and to use food as a way to say, you're different and you deserve to be marginalized in this society.

• 31:59Cynthia Graber?

  These racist images took a variety of forms. We mentioned the images of black men stealing watermelons. Other common ones reduced African Americans to base, almost inhuman caricatures.

• 32:09Speaker 08

  One I'm thinking of in particular is by the white American artist, Thomas Hovenden. So Hovenden depicts this depiction of a black boy who's holding a cut open watermelon. His lips are moist with watermelon juice. And he's holding this cut open watermelon with a post-coital smile, which many critics remarked upon, that there was this lustful, even sexual connotation to this painting.

• 32:33Nicola Twilley?

  "That's fine art," quote unquote. But in popular imagery, like the collectible trade cards, the racism is even more overt.

• 32:41Speaker 08

  A few in particular show African Americans not just lusting over the fruit or eating it, but literally morphing and transforming into the fruit. We see African American men whose heads have exploded into these watermelon rinds and watermelon meat. This is a very meaningful message to send, that African Americans are not even human on these trade cards, that they are so savage, so barbaric, that their minds, their physicality, literally becomes a watermelon.

• 33:14Cynthia Graber?

  As Shayna studied all these images, she noticed something. Almost none of the people depicted with watermelons were women.

• 33:20Speaker 08

  And that got me really thinking. Why am I seeing so many more black men in the context of this stereotype and not black women? And I think that it's because black men were much more of a threat in the late 19th century, since they, and not black women, were gaining privileges such as the right to vote and the right to own land with the Homestead Acts. There's a lot of anxiety also in the American North as black men are moving over the Great Migration and people are feeling that they are taking over white jobs.

• 33:51Nicola Twilley?

  So you might be thinking, well, sure, these are nasty images from a different time. But really, how big of a deal were they? But Shayna says you can't, and you really should not, underestimate their impact.

• 34:02Cynthia Graber?

  That's coming up after this word from our sponsors.

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• 35:23Speaker 08

  I mentioned that no surface was untouched by the watermelon stereotype, that it's so pervasive, and that it ends up seeping into the visual consciousness of Americans. And so that's what makes visual images so dangerous, because they help to naturalize and normalize these awful stereotypes. And to see these repeated over and over again in your trade card, in your dining room picture, in a print in a publication, to seep into the visual consciousness in this way makes these images so dangerous by making these stereotypes seem normal and seem like nonfiction. The goal of the watermelon trope was to constantly visualize black inferiority

• 36:06Speaker 08

  and to diminish the status of black people. Nothing is more relentless, in my mind, than some of these images of the watermelon trope.

• 36:13Speaker 07

  And so after decades of this campaign, what happens? Even though certain rights were created in the 1870s...

• 36:21Speaker 07

  By the time you get to 1895, the Supreme Court decides Plessy v. Ferguson, which legally sanctions Jim Crow segregation. So the culture war worked.

• 36:31Cynthia Graber?

  Adrian Miller has spent his career exploring food's role in the African-American community, and he says the watermelon racist trope was horrible and pervasive, but it was just one of the many aspects of the racist campaigns of the time.

• 36:42Speaker 07

  Because as much as those images proliferate, most of what I see, especially in periodicals of the time, in newspapers especially, is just a constant assault on black intelligence, the idea that black people are dangerous. So you see newspapers reporting all kinds of African-American crime. You know, we have no sense if it's commensurate to the white crime rate, and we see that even today. So I think it was just part of a culture campaign.

• 37:12Nicola Twilley?

  But the watermelon stuff was a powerful part of a powerful campaign, no doubt. Shayna says one way to gauge a trope's impact is to look at the resistance. So, for example, early African-American cookbook authors deliberately left any mention of watermelon out of their cookbooks.

• 37:29Cynthia Graber?

  And then in 1893, there was a super famous world fair held in Chicago. It was called the Colombian Exposition. There were hundreds of acres of buildings and exhibits. It was one of the most popular events of the year, maybe even the decade.

• 37:41Nicola Twilley?

  There wasn't an African-American exhibit at the exposition, and black Americans were only allowed to visit on one day, so-called Colored People's Day.

• 37:49Speaker 08

  And they fight to make it a no-watermelon day. This is a day when watermelons were supposed to be distributed for free at this event. And they violently, and rightly so, of course, protest this.

• 38:02Speaker 07

  We still see the momentum of that today. I know personally African-Americans who do not want to eat fried chicken and watermelon in the presence of whites, and definitely do not want to be photographed eating those foods. And just to show you the toxicity of this, even when African Americans plan a Black History Month event tied around food, if watermelon is on the menu, black students will protest against that event and get it canceled.

• 38:29Cynthia Graber?

  Adrian grew up regularly eating watermelon. He ate it at family gatherings, 4th of July, church events, Juneteenth celebrations. He says as a kid, he was never self-conscious about eating watermelon because he mostly ate it in a community of African Americans.

• 38:41Speaker 07

  I really experienced it more when I was in professional settings after college and law school, because in those situations, we African Americans were definitely the minority. And I guess there was just heightened consciousness about that. So I think the difference is being in a, in a black space and consuming these foods, knowing that there won't be judgment, and being in an interracial context where you never know what's in someone's heart. And we saw that play out with President Obama. I mean, there were several instances where he was eating certain foods. People posted it and made fun of him. And then when, when they got the condemnation, they just said, oh, I didn't know that was racist. And I was like, yeah, you did, because that's why you posted it.

• 39:21Nicola Twilley?

  There were cartoons of Obama featuring watermelon flavored toothpaste. There were images sent around of watermelon patches in front of the White House while he was in office. The watermelon is still an incredibly potent racist symbol.

• 39:35Speaker 07

  So I think the stigma and the toxicity of it still exists with us today. And I, in my work, I've been trying to do a lot to address the stigma and remove it because I believe the watermelon is delicious. So I hate to see that this stereotype lives. And I think in many ways, we are still giving it life by not taking it head on and just talking about the history of it and trying to reconcile with that and move on.

• 40:01Nicola Twilley?

  But given that toxic history, can the watermelon be redeemed?

• 40:05Cynthia Graber?

  Adrian thinks it can be, but he says it's going to take all the rest of us talking about this history and facing up to it. The burden for that cannot be on African Americans.

• 40:13Speaker 07

  Because my, my own feeling is when, when someone of color or someone in a marginalized community points out these things and argues about these things, I think for some people, they discount the argument or maybe dismiss it outright because it's so outside their own experience. But when a white peer or somebody they respect speaks to those issues, I think it resonates more deeply. So I think we have to, you know, figure out a way to sit down and talk about this.

• 40:39Nicola Twilley?

  Adrian still eats watermelon. He eats it deliberately and without shame. And Shayna eats watermelon too, but consciously.

• 40:47Speaker 08

  I still eat it regardless, but you know, I can't not think about the history when I eat it.

• 40:52Nicola Twilley?

  I'll never be able to eat a watermelon again without thinking of that myself.

• 40:56Cynthia Graber?

  But we will still be eating it. It's a complicated food, but it's also the taste of summer and we love it.

• 41:01Nicola Twilley?

  Even the icebox watermelons at the supermarket, which David says are nothing compared to the Bradford. I'll still take them. But if you want something a little better, even if it's not quite as good as the Bradford, David and Harry suggested looking out for some more farmer's market or homegrown varieties. The Crimson Sweet, the Amish Moon and Stars, the Charleston Gray and the Black Spanish.

• 41:23Cynthia Graber?

  But how do you choose one? You can't look inside a watermelon. You can't taste a watermelon. You aren't going to touch its flesh to see if it's soft like you might with a peach. How do you know if it's ripe?

• 41:31Speaker 13

  Definitely in Africa, in Nigeria, we actually get to know how watermelons are ripe by tapping them. If you tap a non-ripe watermelon, the tone seems to be flat. But if you tap a ripe watermelon, there's a sharp tone.

• 41:48Nicola Twilley?

  Phoning in all the way from Nigeria to answer your question, Cynthia, it's our next guest, Stephen Onwobi-Ko, who studies the acoustics of African musical instruments.

• 41:59Cynthia Graber?

  Stephen knew all about tapping watermelons to find the best one. They're popular year round in Nigeria. And he noticed that the sound of the watermelon reminded him of something else.

• 42:08Speaker 13

  If you listen to African music, you will definitely hear a tone where a slapping tone. When you listen to African drumming, it goes like this. Pa, pa.

• 42:21Speaker 13

  As a music listener, as an African Nigerian music listener, when you hear the drumming of an iba, you'll be able to identify the pitch of that iba to the pitch of the watermelon.

• 42:40Cynthia Graber?

  Stephen wanted to test this idea, so he made some recordings of people slapping ripe watermelons and of people slapping the traditional Iba drums. And he teamed up with Tracy Nielsen from Brigham Young University.

• 42:52Speaker 13

  Tracy is a physicist. Whilst I do the research and make the recordings, she puts it into a spectrograph that is able to analyze the pitch pattern of the watermelon and correlate it with a Nigerian drum.

• 43:04Cynthia Graber?

  Tracy found similarities in the beginning frequencies and the duration of the two recordings. And that means the ripe watermelon and the Iba drum sound kind of the same.

• 43:13Nicola Twilley?

  Stephen thinks that listening to traditional drumming can help familiarize people with the sound they should be listening for when they slap a melon.

• 43:20Speaker 13

  But the watermelon varies in size, so there'll be two now differences in each watermelon.

• 43:27Nicola Twilley?

  But even if you aren't steeped in the sound of traditional Nigerian drumming, you can definitely hear the difference between a ripe watermelon and an unripe one.

• 43:36Cynthia Graber?

  It's not watermelon season here yet, so we turned to the internet. And it turns out that a lot of people have made videos of tapping watermelons. This one is from the YouTube channel of Getty Stewart.

• 43:46Speaker 14

  This is the hollow knocking test.

• 43:47Nicola Twilley?

  OK, listen closely. Which one of these two watermelons is ripe? This is watermelon number one. And this is watermelon number two. OK, we'll play it again. Think carefully about this. It's the difference between deliciousness or basically a giant watery cucumber. Watermelon number one. Watermelon number two.

• 44:11Cynthia Graber?

  If you guessed the first one, you have a really sweet treat ahead of you. But if you don't feel like swatting at fruit as you decide which one to buy, there are other methods. One is to look for the pale spot where the watermelon rested on the ground. If it's cream colored, almost yellow, it means the watermelon had more time to ripen and should be sweeter. If that spot is small and white, the fruit might not be quite as sweet.

• 44:31Nicola Twilley?

  People also say that riper watermelons are less shiny. Their skin is duller and bumpier. My method, honestly, is to hold the watermelons. Heavier is definitely juicier, at least.

• 44:43Cynthia Graber?

  And I'm lucky that there's a farmer's market a short walk from where I live. So I just wait until the farmers tell me that the melons are ripe, and then I carry them home.

• 44:51Speaker 14

  I carried a watermelon.

• 44:58Speaker 14

  I carried a watermelon.

• 45:02Cynthia Graber?

  That ending clip might not be as funny for you as it is for me if you haven't watched Dirty Dancing many, many times, actually. So go see it. And then you two can walk around saying, I carried a watermelon?

• 45:14Speaker 05

  Thanks this episode to Suzanne Renner, Harry Paris, Shayna Klein, David Shields, Adrian Miller, and Steven on Woobico. We have so many super great links and images and video from them up on our website. Books, watermelon slapping, and more, all at gastropod.com.

• 45:31Cynthia Graber?

  If you are hungry for more watermelons and are wondering when and how the watermelon lost its seeds, that'll be in our special supporters newsletter, as well as the story of Japanese cube-shaped watermelons. gastropod.com/support.

• 45:44Speaker 05

  Thanks also to listener and scientist Lori Shapiro. She studies cucurbitz, and she suggested we do this episode. She also pointed us to the biblical connection. And a huge thanks to superstar summer fellow Sonia Swanson, who helped put this episode together.

• 45:58Cynthia Graber?

  Hope you enjoyed this encore presentation. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with a brand new episode. Till then.

• 46:06Speaker 05

  Support for the show comes from TikTok. There is a scientifically documented correlation between listening to podcasts and curiosity. So since you're here, you probably enjoy discovering new things. One great place to indulge your curiosity is TikTok. Whether it's how to forecast volcanic eruptions, strange phenomena that the James Webb Space Telescope picked up near the beginning of time, or a literal deep dive on the ocean's deepest reefs, TikTok has a wealth of fascinating videos just waiting to be discovered. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 46:50Speaker 10

  From the creators of Zootopia and Frozen comes Disney's Hext. Welcome to Hext and enter the world of witches, where it was foretold that an ordinary girl would become an extraordinary witch and save the world of magic. Disney's Hext arrives in theaters this Thanksgiving.