A Renaissance painting reveals how breeding changed watermelons (2015) | Hacker News Reader

A Renaissance painting reveals how breeding changed watermelons (2015)

vox.com

130 pointslelf49 comments

This article was from 2015 and debunked at the time. Both "starring" and "hollow heart" are known conditions in homegrown watermelons. This is what an under-pollinated watermelon looks like if you grow it yourself in non-ideal conditions: https://imgur.com/gallery/YPojgFh/ - watermelon flowers should be pollinated at least 8 times(!) per flower to grow a proper watermelon [1].

While not an expert, a quick search suggests that "starring" happens when the watermelon isn't exposed to enough pollen. "Hollow heart" may be due to excess water or nitrogen (though probably also pollen[2]). Both combinations seem possible and as a casual gardener I'm not even sure they're distinct. Commercial watermelon operations control for this. Google "starring watermelon" for dozens of examples.

As Reddit later pointed out other contemporaneous examples of watermelons look fairly modern: https://imgur.com/a/zN8Kv

edit: Apologies for not seeing Vox later issued a bad correction to the original article at the end. Reddit was divided into three camps saying these watermelon's were under-watered, under-pollinated, or underripe. The "correction" only addressed the "underripe" claim. Vox states Stanchi's watermelons are not underripe - while technically true - they don't address that they are not under-pollinated or under-watered.

[1] https://homeguides.sfgate.com/watermelons-need-pollinated-75...

[2] https://www.mashed.com/158254/the-false-watermelon-fact-you-...

[3] The more "webbing" a watermelon it has the more it was pollinated, the sweeter it is. That and more watermelon tips here: https://imgur.com/gallery/SN8jl

You might want to read the whole article. It's interesting.

I suppose you are referring to this part:

> "In the painting, the black seeds indicate that the fruit has reached maturity," Wehner says.

There's also the possibility the painter simply decided to add black seeds because it would look more like a mature fruit.

Yeah, that's a good point about artistic license. We can't take one artist's representation as gospel. Imagine a future where only cubist paintings survive. Will future humans think we looked like that going only by the paintings? I hope not...

I hope they would consider multiple credible sources corroborating the same thing. Is there a newspaper article from the time that describes watermelons as they are painted by Stanchi? Ads showing them as such? Is there a diary from a farmer that talks about how watermelons look and how they ripen, etc.?

Maybe there is, but the article sure isn't letting us know about it...

The update also notes that -- contrary to the major theme of the piece -- watermelons as depicted in the painting have not been lost. We don't grow them because we don't want them, not because we can't grow them anymore.

> "Museum paintings are an interesting method for studying old cultivars [varieties], and the one you indicated certainly shows the sort of watermelons that Europeans had to eat in the Middle Ages during their summer harvest season," Wehner says. "We have cultivars like that one in the painting available to us now from our germplasm collections [a sort of genetic sample library that includes many different varieties]."

> He notes that those samples, when grown today, have "large white areas, low sugar content, [and] frequent hollow heart." Hollow heart can cause a starring appearance somewhat similar to an unripe or underwatered melon.

So no, we don't need further corroboration from the 17th century, because we still have watermelons that look like that today.

That specific claim is covered and debunked in the article. Short version: the seeds in the painting are black, which means the fruit is ripe. This won't happen to "starred" melons.

Isn’t it also possible that the painter simply took some artistic license and decided to render the seeds in the nice glossy black that everyone is familiar with? This does not seem less plausible than the more elaborate hypothesis suggested in the article.

Seriously, it’s a painting now a photograph....

No matter whether or not we are actually looking at an extinct variety here, I found this article on an archeobotanist approach fascinating: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fruit-in-renaissance-a...

Essentially they look at old paintings for unknown fruit varieties and then try to find plants or seeds from the same area that still have those features and try to match paintings to fruits.

I'm left fairly confused -- the crux of the article is that the original watermelon was bred out of existence into the watermelon we know and love today -- but the article also has readers pointing out that the modern watermelon existed in the same time period.[0]

Which either implies it wasn't manipulated out of existence, but rather that two variants existed and one went extinct, or it implies that the process had occurred long before the paintings occurred, and after the paintings one went extinct.

That is, with the readers' additions, this really shouldn't be an article about breeding.. but about extinct varieties of fruits?

[0] http://imgur.com/a/zN8Kv

We still have white fleshed watermelons and all today. In the process of improving watermelon strains, different regions might have had different varieties developed, and the part red one was eventually bred into a full red one or abandoned. The part white one the particle is about isn't the "original" watermelon either. The original wild plant that was domesticated can still be found happily growing in Africa. Those look far far less like watermelons we know than what's in either of those paintings

A good comparison is the domestic cat. The domestic cat comes from the African wildcat. The two cats are genetically similar but distinguishable with the domestic cat containing a noticeably low degree of genetic diversity. The African wildcat is endangered for no other reason than being replaced in the wild by the genetically compatible domestic cat.

There's also other simple explanations. Maybe people preferred this watermelon, it was easier to grow, etc.

A similar thing is happening to salmon, due to genetic pressure from salmon farming.

Seems to me to have been a mistake or rather a wonderful display of the problems with not properly researching something before you write about it.

The "watermelon" in the image seems not to be a watermelon at all, but rather some other type of fruit.

There is an entire culture of Heirloom vegetables where many gardeners share seeds amongst themselves and attempt to preserve some of the agricultural diversity we had before modern monocropping took over. Obviously most of the varieties don't date back as far as this melon but many can be traced back to specific villages in Europe.

Heirloom tomatoes seem to be particularly popular probably because they look really interesting (Different colors, shapes and flavors) and are pretty easy to grow.

The article basically debunks itself with the correction at the end, but tries to hang on by claiming "Look! It has seeds!"

However, I don't see one mention of "artistic license" as a plausible explanation of why it may have seeds, or why it may be depicted as being more ripe.

Here is an article depicting a couple other fruits and vegetables pre/post domestication.

https://www.sciencealert.com/fruits-vegetables-before-domest...

My favorite was learning the carrots weren't originally orange but purple or white. Corn may be shocking to people. In my opinion the banana has many similarities to the watermelon in terms of the "holes" and filling out post domestication.

White carrots are still around but they are kind of 'less' carrots and are used to feed the pigs.

Interesting. Where I’m from white carrots are absolutely for human consumption. So much so that I can’t even imagine a proper Sunday chicken soup without some.

Its not that I haven't seen white or purple carrots, rather learning they were bred to be orange for royalty.

> Corn may be shocking to people.

It did shock me. That's an even more obscene enlargement than wild grass into polyploid wheat.

And about watermelon specifically, with a different painting (Giuseppe Recco's Still Life With Fruit 1634-1695) showing a modern melon:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/08/150821-water...

At least at the US West coast I've been frequently buying bundles of carrots that included purple, yellow and white (pale yellow?) carrots.

To be more precise all sugar melons are indigenous to various locations of Africa with the watermelon coming from South Africa. Conversely, the distantly related squashes, gourds, and pumpkins are indigenous to the area between southern Texas and northern Columbia.

sugar melon is a great name

Not entirely accurate, the calabash or bottle gourd is an Old World crop as well.

Some archaeologists think it may have even been carried across the Bering Strait! It was in any case endemic in the New World at the time of contact.

I would use "think" in the loosest possible sense, as we're pretty much certain it wasn't. Calabash can't be grown across much of that journey, and there's no archaeological or ethnographic evidence to support it. Additionally, the historic varieties are most closely related to African crops, not Asian varieties (with no evidence of founder effect). Furthermore, the seeds remain viable for years even in salt water, so oceanic transport is completely realistic.

Fun fact though, it's found in the earliest domestication deposits in the Americas, alongside squash.

Pro tip: try dipping watermelon in lime juice, but ONLY attempt this if you are okay with never going back to eating it unadorned again.

I wonder what the nutrient composition was for watermelons before they were transformed into giant sugar orbs.

Despite being giant sugar orbs, watermelons are apparently surprisingly high in micronutrients, moreso than cantaloupe or honeydew melons even. The small seedless watermelons that have appeared in recent years are the best source of these. (Source: Eating on the Wild Side by Jo Robinson http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316227943/donhosek)

There really isn't that much sugar in watermelon as far as fruits go.

The lowest sugar fruits are the berries - raspberries and strawberries are both ~4.5-5g sugar per 100g.

Watermelon is 6g/100g.

On the higher end, apples and oranges are both ~10g/100g, Bananas 12, and Grapes 16.

Wild watermelons are apparently pretty similar, but lack the massive sugar buildup and aren't as crunchy. Article pictures show how different they look to the painting though.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Maybe that's how watermelons grew in that specific yearly harvest? Or maybe he saw one like that in his lifetime and painted it like that since it's more aesthetically pleasing with the swirls?

Curious but confusing. The article begins with stating the breeding drastically changed watermelons of ole-days. Then after showing a very much similarly looking one from the present day and also a seeded w/melon we know now found in a painting from the same period as the one showing the "original" w/melon. Conclusion I make: nature's diversity is amazing, better eat these now before they morph into some cube or rindless-seedless-fleshless-all-year-round powder.

>"It's fun to go to art museums and see the still-life pictures, and see what our vegetables looked like 500 years ago," he told me. In many cases, it's our only chance to peer into the past, since we can't preserve vegetables for hundreds of years.

Um ... not even by saving the seeds?

If people did then yes that's obviously the best way to do that, but an awful lot of these are lost to history now. 500 years in the future we've got seed banks people can pull from

Right but it’s phrased in the present tense.

I'm sure in most cases the seeds are good enough, but I would also imagine the environment has some effect on vegetable appearance too: qualities of the soil, how they were planted and cared for, qualities of the sunlight, etc. As an extreme example, you can't get cube watermelons just by planting the seeds of another; you need the box to grow it in too.

Depends on the seed. Some seeds have been growen after 2000 years of storage (in what was close to ideal conditions for that seed), but others only last a few years in any storage possible 100 years ago.

Speaking of changed watermelons check out these Japanese square watermelons. I almost want to try doing this in my garden. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JNSpMhJLvg

Renaissance is 15th and 16th century, painting is said to be 17th.

And all those fruits: are they really ripe at the same time? Peaches, pears and grapes? Grapes are normally picked at the end of summer, and pears are early.

Wikipedia weighs in: In addition to the standard periodization, proponents of a long Renaissance put its beginning in the 14th century and its end in the 17th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance

my favorite story about intentionally bred plants: modern maize has a predecessor, whose identity was uncovered by some of the leaders in genetics in the 1950s (McClintock and Beadle). When they visited Mexico, they saw locals collecting grains from teosinte growing on the side of the road, near massive fields of modern maize.

Not only that, they found more recently maize that fixes nitrogen in the air instead of in the rhizomes below the soil.

Many things in the past were made to a higher standard then they are now. I'm sure freshly picked watermelon grown organically for royalty, was pretty awesome.

It's more like that was the higher standard. Peasants didn't even get to taste it (on that note, they could barely even get meat, because hunting was forbidden on royalty's lands, which was... everything).

You can trust me when I say organically grown (i.e. as nature intended, no breeding, no insecticides, no pesticides, etc) is not something to admire.

I have fully organic cherries (ruined from a week of rain), raspberries and strawberries (decent, but really small) and potatoes (frankly horrifying to the eye, but edible) in my garden.

Apples, pears, cherries, strawberries, raspberries, sweet melons, watermelons, yeah they taste good but not that great, and they look much worse.

I guess it's a tradeoff between taste and looks, if you don't like the occasional worm in a smaller than average fruit, you better just go with the "non-organic" stuff.

I'm not sure if you have ever been to Italy or California. The climate has a lot to do with the taste of Fruit. I've had some awesome tasting fruit from farmers markets in both places. Generally the stuff I'm able to get in the grocery store here in Canada is unripe, and very poor quality. Looks good, tastes bland 90% of the time. Has to do with the varieties being planted optimized for shipping, refrigeration, and so on.

A lot of fruits and vegetables have had hundreds if not thousands of years of selective breeding to maximize flavor. It’s also less likely to be ravaged by insects due to pesticides and mass extermination.

The average person can probably buy juicier, sweeter fruits than royalty was eating 500 years ago, but we might not perceive them as so sweet due to our sense of taste being warped by readily available sugary desserts.

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