THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 24, 1994 TAG: 9406240493
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
DATELINE: 940624 LENGTH: Medium
The watermelon with yellow flesh, coming out of a coastal research lab in Charleston, S.C., is practically seedless.
{REST} What in the name of Luther Burbank will they think of next?
One can't hang back from the fray when God's greatest gift to the garden is in jeopardy.
Watermelons are born to be red.
Few sights are more enthralling than, at the first cut into a green melon, the faint aura of red as the crevasse begins to creak open.
Then, as the melon flops into two halves, a vast red flaring bold as daybreak fills the room.
If watermelon, by some quirk of nature, had come up jaundiced yellow, restless hybridists would long ago have turned it jolly red.
Watermelon is a big ho-ho-ho of a fruit, merry Santa arriving in July.
But why need one defend the seeds?
Because there is the parable wrapped up in the watermelon.
The multitude of seeds, pesky adversities, makes you cherish the heart of the matter all the more.
The best things in life are won through hardship. Something is almost sinful about a seedless watermelon, removing the means by which the melon replicates.
And then you miss the fun, at a certain age, of spitting the seeds, either for distance or at a target, the fellow sitting across from you at the table, who suddenly slaps his cheek.
The watermelon is a slapstick of a fruit. If Laurel and Hardy never got around to eating a watermelon at a church social, it is a great loss to humanity.
``Families today are more interested in convenience,'' says William Watson of the National Watermelon Promotion Board. ``With both working, time off is more valuable, so they want items that are quick, easy, and efficient. They don't buy the watermelon for the seeds.''
They want melons that are cheaper, crisper, sweeter, drip less, fit in the refrigerator and bounce when they are dropped.
What they're looking for is not a watermelon but a basketball.
A Knight-Ridder dispatch by Mark Price reports that by adding an extra set of chromosomes, Clemson watermelon breeders Bill Rhodes and Xingping Zhang have developed a melon, the Triten, that meets those criteria.
It purports to be sweeter, has few seeds, weighs 14 to 16 pounds, and adds several weeks to the typical monthlong melon shelf life.
Why, in all my life, I never knew a watermelon that lasted longer than three days.
In the sort of sultry weather that's oppressing us now there would be, the day after the watermelon was bought, scarcely a slice left for breakfast.
by CNB