Origin: Kordofan region, northeastern Africa (Sudan)
The watermelon (Citrullus lanatus) is a trailing annual vine of the gourd family, the Cucurbitaceae, and although its sweet red flesh has made it the very emblem of summer, it is a wholly distinct plant from the musk melon (Cucumis melo), the cantaloupe and honeydew with which it is so often confused. Its homeland is Africa, and the long search for the precise spot has lately narrowed to the arid savannah of the north-east of the continent. The genetic study published by Susanne Renner and colleagues in 2021, examining the genome of a Sudanese seed-and-flesh melon called the Kordofan melon, identified that plant as the closest living relative and probable wild progenitor of the cultivated watermelon, pointing to the Kordofan region of modern Sudan as the primary centre of origin, and corroborating the archaeological seeds long recovered across the region.
The wild fruit was nothing like the one we eat. It was small, pale, hard-fleshed, and commonly bitter with cucurbitacins, and it was valued not for sweetness at all but for water: in a landscape baked by drought, the watermelon is a living canteen, its flesh storing drinkable moisture through the dry season long after the rivers and wells have failed, so that foragers, herders, and wild animals alike have prized it as a reliable source of water in the desert for thousands of years. The first deliberate selection, in this seed-and-water tradition, was towards larger, sweeter, less bitter flesh and a softer texture, the slow human work that turned a bitter survival-gourd into a dessert fruit.
A second and entirely separate agricultural lineage grew up in West and Central Africa, where a closely related plant (Citrullus mucosospermus, the egusi melon) is cultivated not for its thin, often bitter flesh but for its large, flat, oil-rich seeds. Dried, roasted, and ground into a thick protein-dense paste, these seeds are the heart of egusi soup, one of the most widely eaten dishes of the continent. These two traditions, the sweet flesh of the north-east and the nourishing seed of the west, are the two parallel gifts of the Citrullus genus to African cooking, and both, carried by trade and by the forced migration of the African diaspora, have since travelled around the world.
From its homeland in north-eastern Africa the watermelon made one of the longest and most thoroughly documented journeys of any fruit, and the first stage of it was northward down the Nile. In ancient Egypt the sweet-fleshed melon was cultivated as a deliberate crop by the second millennium BCE, its seeds recovered from tombs, including the tomb of Tutankhamun, and the elongated green fruit depicted in tomb paintings amongst the offerings laid up for the journey into the afterlife, where its cargo of water would refresh the dead. From Egypt it passed into the ancient Near East along Canaanite and Phoenician trade routes, and its hold on the appetite is caught in one of the most human passages of the Old Testament, in which the Israelites wandering in the Sinai wilderness lament the watermelons, cucumbers, leeks, onions, and garlic they had eaten in Egypt and now sorely miss.
The physicians of Greece and Rome, Dioscorides, Pliny, and Columella among them, described the fruit with care, recommending it as a cooling, diuretic food for the heat of summer, and Roman cultivation carried it across North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Mediterranean islands. The decisive dispersal, however, was the work of the medieval Islamic world. Arab traders and agronomists of the Islamic Golden Age, the great distributors of crops and irrigation, spread the watermelon across the Maghreb, into Moorish al-Andalus, and eastward through Persia and Central Asia along the Silk Road, until it reached China, where it was so plainly a newcomer from the west that the Chinese named it xigua, the 'western melon', a name that records its foreign provenance to this day. Ottoman Turkey raised it into one of the world's great watermelon cultures, and China, where it had arrived last of all, would in time become by far its largest producer.
The final leg was the Atlantic crossing. European colonists carried watermelon seeds to the Americas in the sixteenth century, by way of the Canary Islands and the Caribbean, but its spread through the New World was bound up inseparably with the transatlantic slave trade: enslaved West Africans, drawn from cultures in which the melon and its seed-bearing cousin were long familiar foods, carried and planted it in the Caribbean, in Brazil, and in the American South, where it became a fixture of the provision grounds and, in time, an institution of the southern summer. From there its modern career has run to extremes, nowhere more so than in Japan, which has turned the watermelon into an object of luxury and spectacle, perfecting jet-black-rinded cultivars sold at auction for extraordinary sums.
The watermelon is the world's largest-volume fruit of summer by weight, a crop of well over a hundred million tonnes a year, and its production is dominated by a single country: China grows by some measures around two-thirds of the global supply, with Turkey, India, Iran, Brazil, Algeria, and the United States among the other leading producers. It is, at base, refreshment made edible, more than nine-tenths water by weight, low in calories, rich in the antioxidant lycopene that gives the red flesh its colour and in the amino acid citrulline that takes its very name from the genus Citrullus; the rind and seed, long discarded in the West, are eaten and valued elsewhere.
Culturally it remains, almost everywhere it grows, the taste of the hot season and a thing eaten in company out of doors. In Turkey and across the eastern Mediterranean the pairing of chilled watermelon with a soft white brine cheese, the Turkish beyaz peynir or the Greek and Levantine feta, is so elemental that it needs no recipe at all, the sweet flesh and the salty curd set against one another as they have been since the Egyptians first ate melon with cheese four thousand years ago; a wedge with a pinch of salt, a crumble of feta, or a few torn mint leaves is the ubiquitous refreshment of the afternoon. In West Africa the egusi seed remains the basis of one of the most widely eaten soups of the continent, a reminder that the genus feeds as well as cools. In the American South the outdoor ritual of cold salted watermelon and the thrifty, clove-spiced watermelon rind pickle persist as memories woven into the summer, even as the fruit there carries a painful freight of racial caricature alongside its pleasures. And in Japan the watermelon has become an object of luxury and play at once, the near-black Densuke of Hokkaido fetching well over a million yen for the first fruit of the season at auction, the cuboid melons grown to fit a refrigerator shelf, and the suikawari game splitting a melon blindfold on the summer beach.
Historical Journey of Watermelon
Kordofan, Sudan — c. 5000 BCE
The wild ancestor of watermelon (Citrullus lanatus var. lanatus) grows in the arid savannah of northeastern Africa, particularly in the Kordofan region of modern Sudan, where seeds recovered from archaeological sites have established this as the primary centre of origin for the species. The wild fruit is small, hard-fleshed, and bitter, valued not for eating directly but for its extraordinary ability to store fresh water in a desiccated landscape: during drought seasons, human foragers and animals prize the fruit as a reliable source of moisture when rivers and wells fail. The seeds of the wild watermelon are oil-rich and nutritious, eaten roasted or ground, and this seed-food tradition persists today in the separate egusi melon cultivation of West and Central Africa. The first act of deliberate selection towards sweeter flesh and softer texture is believed to have begun in this region, making watermelon one of the oldest deliberately cultivated crops in Africa.
Nile Valley, Ancient Egypt — c. 3000 BCE
Watermelon is first deliberately cultivated as a food crop in ancient Egypt, where seeds have been found in tombs dating to the 12th Dynasty and wall paintings in the Valley of the Kings depict the elongated green fruit as a tomb offering. The most celebrated archaeological evidence is the discovery of watermelon seeds in the tomb of Tutankhamun (c. 1323 BCE), placed there as sustenance for the pharaoh's journey into the afterlife. Ancient Egyptians ate watermelon flesh with salt and soft white cheese, a pairing that combines the fruit's cool sweetness with the mineral sharpness of Egyptian dairy. This combination, in one form or another, has endured for nearly four thousand years: it is still found across the eastern Mediterranean as watermelon with white brine cheese, fresh mint, and olive oil, one of the most durable flavour marriages in the human diet.
Niger Delta and the Guinea Coast, West Africa — c. 2000 BCE
Across West and Central Africa, a closely related subspecies (Citrullus mucosospermus, the egusi melon) is independently cultivated not for its watery flesh but for its large, oil-rich seeds: one of the oldest and most important protein sources in the West African diet. Egusi seeds, dried, roasted, and ground into a thick paste, are the foundation of egusi soup, one of the most widely consumed dishes in the Niger Delta, the Congo basin, and the Sahel, eaten across Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon, and beyond. The soup combines ground egusi paste with palm oil, leaf vegetables (bitterleaf, uziza, or ugwu leaves), dried fish or goat meat, and ground crayfish: a dense, nutritionally complete, one-pot meal that has sustained West African populations for four thousand years. This seed-food tradition is entirely distinct from the sweet-flesh eating tradition that developed in Egypt and the Mediterranean, and represents a separate and equally ancient relationship between West African cultures and the Citrullus plant.
Canaan and the Levantine Coast (modern Israel, Lebanon, and Syria) — c. 1500 BCE
The Book of Numbers records one of the most poignant food passages in the Old Testament: the Israelites wandering in the Sinai wilderness lament the foods of Egypt, naming watermelon specifically among the things they miss alongside cucumbers, leeks, onions, and garlic (Numbers 11:5). This passage places watermelon cultivation firmly in the Levantine world of the second millennium BCE and confirms that the fruit had travelled northward from Egypt along the Levantine coast. Canaanite and Phoenician traders carry watermelon seeds further through the eastern Mediterranean trade network. In the Levant, the pairing of chilled watermelon with crumbled white brine cheese and fresh mint becomes one of the region's defining summer combinations, served at tables from Beirut to Jerusalem across every subsequent civilisation that has inhabited the coast.
Classical Greece and the Roman Mediterranean — c. 200 BCE
Greek and Roman physicians and natural historians describe the watermelon with careful attention, distinguishing it from the musk melon and recommending it as a cooling, diuretic summer food suited to the heat of the Mediterranean summer. Dioscorides lists it in De materia medica; Pliny the Elder describes cultivation across North Africa and the coastal Mediterranean. The Roman writer Columella provides cultivation instructions for what he calls pepo in his agricultural treatise Res Rustica, and the fruit appears in Roman still-life mosaics and frescoes from Pompeii. Roman expansion distributes watermelon cultivation across North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Mediterranean islands, where it becomes a fixture of summer eating for two thousand years. The Roman preparation of watermelon dressed with honey, ground black pepper, and a splash of posca (vinegar diluted with water) transforms the cooling fruit into a flavoured refreshment.
Abbasid Caliphate (Baghdad and Mesopotamia) — c. 900 CE
Arab traders and horticulturalists, the great distributors of agricultural knowledge during the Islamic Golden Age, carry watermelon seeds throughout the Mediterranean world, across North Africa, into Moorish Spain, and eastward through Persia and Central Asia along the Silk Road. The Arab physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna) describes watermelon in detail in his Canon of Medicine, recommending it as a diuretic and fever-reducer. Arab texts document the watermelon's spread across the Maghreb, where it becomes a summer staple in the hot, arid climates of Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya: the Abbasid Caliphate functions as the great agricultural clearinghouse from which watermelon cultivation fans outward in every direction, both eastward along the Silk Road and westward across North Africa and into the Iberian Peninsula.
Song Dynasty China (Gansu, Shaanxi, and the Yellow River Basin) — c. 1000 CE
Watermelon enters China via the Silk Road during the Tang or early Song dynasty, and the Chinese character for it (xigua, meaning 'western melon') preserves in its name the memory of its exotic western provenance. First introduced to the Gansu and Shaanxi regions bordering the Silk Road trade routes, the watermelon spreads rapidly southward through the Yuan and Ming dynasties. China eventually becomes the world's largest watermelon producer by an extraordinary margin, with regional specialities including the white-fleshed watermelons of the Xinjiang oases and the small, intensely sweet varieties of Jiangsu. The Chinese tradition of serving chilled watermelon juice with fresh ginger and green tea reflects the Daoist dietary principle of cooling foods for summer heat, and watermelon stalls selling pressed juice over crushed ice become a fixture of Chinese summer street food culture.
Morocco, at the western terminus of the Arab agricultural distribution network, receives watermelon through the Islamic Golden Age expansion that carries new crops, irrigation techniques, and horticultural knowledge across the Maghreb. In the hot, dry summers of Fez and Marrakech, watermelon becomes one of the essential cooling foods of the Moroccan table. The Moroccan tradition develops a preparation entirely characteristic of the Maghrebi flavour palette: chilled watermelon dressed with orange blossom water, torn fresh spearmint, and a thread of argan oil. The distilled blossom water amplifies the melon's sweetness with a floral top note; the spearmint cuts through the heat; and the Berber argan oil, cold-pressed from the fruit of a tree found almost exclusively in the Sus Valley of southwestern Morocco, grounds the preparation in a distinctly North African register. This dish encodes in a single combination the landscape and flavour memory of the Moroccan summer.
Al-Andalus, the Moorish civilisation of the Iberian Peninsula, produced some of the most sophisticated agricultural science in the whole medieval world, and the watermelon travelled westward into Spain as one of the prizes of that science. The Arab agronomists who served the courts of Córdoba, Granada, and Seville brought with them the engineering to grow it, introducing qanat-style underground irrigation, the water-wheel, and the managed channels that turned the dry Iberian plain into productive garden, and alongside the watermelon they carried new varieties of citrus and rice, sugar cane, and cotton, transforming the landscape of Andalusia, Valencia, and the Guadalquivir valley into one of the most fertile cultivated regions of Europe. The watermelon took its place amongst the crops of the irrigated huerta gardens, cultivated as a cooling summer fruit of the Moorish courts and set down with care in the agronomic writings of Ibn al-'Awwam, the great Sevillian author whose treatise gathered the inherited learning of the Arab, Greek, and Persian worlds. From this Iberian foundation the fruit was poised for the next leg of its journey, for as Atlantic exploration quickened through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Moorish agricultural networks and the Castilian navigators who succeeded them carried the watermelon out to the Atlantic island stations that provisioned the westward voyages, the bridgeheads from which the African fruit would in time cross to the New World.
Ottoman Empire (Istanbul and Anatolia) — c. 1300 CE
The watermelon becomes so embedded in Ottoman summer culture that Turkey has been one of the world's most productive watermelon-growing nations for centuries, a position it holds today: Turkish watermelons, grown in the Aegean coastal districts of Izmir and Mugla and on the Anatolian plateau, are among the largest and sweetest in the world. The defining Ottoman summer preparation is its absolute simplicity: a wedge of chilled watermelon served alongside beyaz peynir (soft white brine cheese, similar to feta but milder), eaten in the shade of a plane tree with a glass of cold water and a piece of flatbread. The pairing of sweet melon and salty cheese, of cooling flesh and mineral dairy, is so elemental that it requires no recipe: it is simply one of the world's great composed encounters between two ingredients, and a preparation that has endured unchanged across seven centuries of Turkish summer.
The Canary Islands serve as the indispensable Atlantic staging post of Iberian expansion: every westward voyage, from Columbus onwards, stops in the Canaries to provision, repair, and take on fresh stores before crossing the open ocean. Spanish colonists establish productive market gardens on the islands, growing crops suited to the warm, semi-arid climate and suitable for carrying on long sea voyages. Watermelon, already cultivated in the hot lowlands of southern Spain and across North Africa, is among the crops grown in Canarian provision gardens. Columbus stops in the Canaries on all four of his outward Atlantic voyages; subsequent explorers and colonists carry watermelon seeds from these island gardens westward to the Caribbean and the Brazilian coast, making the Canaries the Atlantic bridge through which the fruit crosses to the New World.
Mughal Empire (Delhi and Agra, India) — c. 1500 CE
Watermelon finds its place in Mughal court culture alongside the musk melon and the mango as one of the three fruits most prized by the emperors. Ice-chilled watermelon, served in the scorching summers of Delhi and Agra, is listed in the Ain-i-Akbari among the standard offerings of the imperial table. The Mughal preparation of watermelon sherbet, blending pressed watermelon juice with rosewater, a thread of saffron, and crushed ice carried down from the Himalayan foothills by relay runners, is among the most luxurious cold drinks of the pre-refrigeration world, available only to those who could command the extraordinary logistics of highland ice delivery to a lowland palace in a June heatwave. Emperor Babur, who wrote with such emotional force about his homesickness for the melons of Central Asia, is also recorded in court chronicles as taking particular pleasure in watermelon, served on silver platters at the open window of his riverside palace at Agra.
Watermelon reaches the Americas through two parallel routes: Spanish colonists carry seeds from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean and New Spain in the 1530s, and Portuguese colonists bring them to Brazil from West Africa, where watermelon had been cultivated for millennia. The Brazilian introduction carries a particular historical significance: it is believed that many of the watermelon seeds entering the Americas arrived with enslaved West Africans, who carried seeds of their foodplants as a form of both sustenance and cultural memory during the Middle Passage, one of the most profound and terrible acts of displacement in human history. Brazil's northeastern coast, with its equatorial heat and Atlantic humidity, provides ideal watermelon-growing conditions, and the fruit integrates rapidly into Brazilian coastal food culture. The Brazilian preparation of watermelon blended with fresh lime juice and mint, frozen to a granita, is a direct descendant of the Arabic sherbet tradition via Portuguese intermediaries.
Jamaica, Barbados, and the English-speaking Caribbean — c. 1650 CE
Enslaved West Africans, transported across the Atlantic on slave ships, carry knowledge of watermelon cultivation and bring seeds to the plantation islands of the Caribbean. On Barbados, Jamaica, and the other English-speaking islands, the watermelon, already deeply familiar in West African food culture, spreads rapidly through the provision grounds where enslaved people grew supplementary food for their own survival. Caribbean preparations of watermelon develop a distinct New World character: the fruit is sliced and dressed with fresh lime juice, bird's-eye chilli, and flaked salt, or grilled briefly over charcoal until the edges caramelise, then dressed with scotch bonnet pepper sauce, a preparation that transposes the West African tradition of heat-and-sweetness flavour pairing to the island ingredient in its most direct form.
Georgia, the Carolinas, and the American South — c. 1700 CE
Watermelon becomes one of the most deeply rooted summer foods of the American South, cultivated across Georgia, the Carolinas, Florida, and Texas. The summer ritual of eating chilled watermelon outdoors, salting the flesh and spitting seeds, becomes embedded in the collective memory of the region as one of the fundamental pleasures of the American summer. The agricultural tradition of the South, built in large part on the knowledge of enslaved West Africans who carried watermelon cultivation across the Atlantic, produces the conditions for the fruit's cultural dominance. From this tradition emerges watermelon rind pickle: a sweet-sour preserve of the usually-discarded green rind, seasoned with cloves, cinnamon, ginger, and sugar vinegar, a product of the waste-nothing ethic of Southern rural cooking that transforms what is ordinarily thrown away into a condiment of considerable complexity.
Astrakhan and the Lower Volga Region, Russia — c. 1750 CE
The Lower Volga basin, particularly the region around Astrakhan where the river meets the Caspian Sea, becomes one of Russia's most important watermelon-producing regions following the fruit's introduction via Ottoman trade and the Persian cultural sphere. Tsar Peter the Great is recorded as having particularly enjoyed Astrakhan watermelons, and the region develops a strong cultivation identity that it holds to the present day. Russian folk tradition preserves the watermelon in salt brine (solony arbuz) for winter eating: whole small watermelons are packed into barrels with salt, garlic, dill, and horseradish and allowed to ferment for six to eight weeks, producing a savoury, refreshing pickle that bears almost no resemblance to the fresh summer fruit and has become a distinctive feature of Russian preserved vegetable culture, eaten with black bread and butter as a cold-weather relish.
Japan brings its characteristic precision and obsessive refinement to watermelon cultivation. The Densuke watermelon of Hokkaido, with its almost entirely black exterior rind and exceptionally dense, crisp, sweet red flesh, is produced in quantities of fewer than ten thousand fruits per year and sold at auction: the first Densuke of each season regularly sells for over one million yen. The spherical watermelons for which Japan is internationally known were originally developed not as an aesthetic conceit but from a practical necessity: spherical watermelons fit more efficiently in Japanese refrigerators and are easier to stack in market stalls. The summer custom of suikawari, in which participants are blindfolded, spun, and challenged to split a watermelon with a wooden bat, is one of Japan's most beloved summer traditions, combining the fruit's cultural centrality with the communal pleasure of outdoor summer play. Kakigori, Japanese shaved ice served with fresh watermelon syrup, brings the concentrated sweetness of the luxury watermelon to street level as one of the defining tastes of the Japanese summer.
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Journey Point Map Key
Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
c. 1900 CEHokkaido and Aichi Prefecture, Japan
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1900 CE
5000 BCE900 CE1450 CE1900 CE
Ingredient originBecame a culinary stapleTrade or transit routeColonial / trade control
Watermelon
Citrullus lanatus
FruitsCucurbitaceae (Gourd family)
🌍Origin
Kordofan region, northeastern Africa (Sudan) — c. 5000 BCE
🌱Domestication
The watermelon (Citrullus lanatus) is a trailing annual vine of the gourd family, the Cucurbitaceae, and although its sweet red flesh has made it the very emblem of summer, it is a wholly distinct plant from the musk melon (Cucumis melo), the cantaloupe and honeydew with which it is so often confused. Its homeland is Africa, and the long search for the precise spot has lately narrowed to the arid savannah of the north-east of the continent. The genetic study published by Susanne Renner and colleagues in 2021, examining the genome of a Sudanese seed-and-flesh melon called the Kordofan melon, identified that plant as the closest living relative and probable wild progenitor of the cultivated watermelon, pointing to the Kordofan region of modern Sudan as the primary centre of origin, and corroborating the archaeological seeds long recovered across the region.
The wild fruit was nothing like the one we eat. It was small, pale, hard-fleshed, and commonly bitter with cucurbitacins, and it was valued not for sweetness at all but for water: in a landscape baked by drought, the watermelon is a living canteen, its flesh storing drinkable moisture through the dry season long after the rivers and wells have failed, so that foragers, herders, and wild animals alike have prized it as a reliable source of water in the desert for thousands of years. The first deliberate selection, in this seed-and-water tradition, was towards larger, sweeter, less bitter flesh and a softer texture, the slow human work that turned a bitter survival-gourd into a dessert fruit.
A second and entirely separate agricultural lineage grew up in West and Central Africa, where a closely related plant (Citrullus mucosospermus, the egusi melon) is cultivated not for its thin, often bitter flesh but for its large, flat, oil-rich seeds. Dried, roasted, and ground into a thick protein-dense paste, these seeds are the heart of egusi soup, one of the most widely eaten dishes of the continent. These two traditions, the sweet flesh of the north-east and the nourishing seed of the west, are the two parallel gifts of the Citrullus genus to African cooking, and both, carried by trade and by the forced migration of the African diaspora, have since travelled around the world.
⛵Global Voyage
From its homeland in north-eastern Africa the watermelon made one of the longest and most thoroughly documented journeys of any fruit, and the first stage of it was northward down the Nile. In ancient Egypt the sweet-fleshed melon was cultivated as a deliberate crop by the second millennium BCE, its seeds recovered from tombs, including the tomb of Tutankhamun, and the elongated green fruit depicted in tomb paintings amongst the offerings laid up for the journey into the afterlife, where its cargo of water would refresh the dead. From Egypt it passed into the ancient Near East along Canaanite and Phoenician trade routes, and its hold on the appetite is caught in one of the most human passages of the Old Testament, in which the Israelites wandering in the Sinai wilderness lament the watermelons, cucumbers, leeks, onions, and garlic they had eaten in Egypt and now sorely miss.
The physicians of Greece and Rome, Dioscorides, Pliny, and Columella among them, described the fruit with care, recommending it as a cooling, diuretic food for the heat of summer, and Roman cultivation carried it across North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Mediterranean islands. The decisive dispersal, however, was the work of the medieval Islamic world. Arab traders and agronomists of the Islamic Golden Age, the great distributors of crops and irrigation, spread the watermelon across the Maghreb, into Moorish al-Andalus, and eastward through Persia and Central Asia along the Silk Road, until it reached China, where it was so plainly a newcomer from the west that the Chinese named it xigua, the 'western melon', a name that records its foreign provenance to this day. Ottoman Turkey raised it into one of the world's great watermelon cultures, and China, where it had arrived last of all, would in time become by far its largest producer.
The final leg was the Atlantic crossing. European colonists carried watermelon seeds to the Americas in the sixteenth century, by way of the Canary Islands and the Caribbean, but its spread through the New World was bound up inseparably with the transatlantic slave trade: enslaved West Africans, drawn from cultures in which the melon and its seed-bearing cousin were long familiar foods, carried and planted it in the Caribbean, in Brazil, and in the American South, where it became a fixture of the provision grounds and, in time, an institution of the southern summer. From there its modern career has run to extremes, nowhere more so than in Japan, which has turned the watermelon into an object of luxury and spectacle, perfecting jet-black-rinded cultivars sold at auction for extraordinary sums.
🍽Modern Culinary Role
The watermelon is the world's largest-volume fruit of summer by weight, a crop of well over a hundred million tonnes a year, and its production is dominated by a single country: China grows by some measures around two-thirds of the global supply, with Turkey, India, Iran, Brazil, Algeria, and the United States among the other leading producers. It is, at base, refreshment made edible, more than nine-tenths water by weight, low in calories, rich in the antioxidant lycopene that gives the red flesh its colour and in the amino acid citrulline that takes its very name from the genus Citrullus; the rind and seed, long discarded in the West, are eaten and valued elsewhere.
Culturally it remains, almost everywhere it grows, the taste of the hot season and a thing eaten in company out of doors. In Turkey and across the eastern Mediterranean the pairing of chilled watermelon with a soft white brine cheese, the Turkish beyaz peynir or the Greek and Levantine feta, is so elemental that it needs no recipe at all, the sweet flesh and the salty curd set against one another as they have been since the Egyptians first ate melon with cheese four thousand years ago; a wedge with a pinch of salt, a crumble of feta, or a few torn mint leaves is the ubiquitous refreshment of the afternoon. In West Africa the egusi seed remains the basis of one of the most widely eaten soups of the continent, a reminder that the genus feeds as well as cools. In the American South the outdoor ritual of cold salted watermelon and the thrifty, clove-spiced watermelon rind pickle persist as memories woven into the summer, even as the fruit there carries a painful freight of racial caricature alongside its pleasures. And in Japan the watermelon has become an object of luxury and play at once, the near-black Densuke of Hokkaido fetching well over a million yen for the first fruit of the season at auction, the cuboid melons grown to fit a refrigerator shelf, and the suikawari game splitting a melon blindfold on the summer beach.
