[HN Gopher] A Renaissance painting reveals how breeding changed ...
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A Renaissance painting reveals how breeding changed watermelons
(2015)
Author : lelf
Score : 103 points
Date : 2020-06-24 22:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vox.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vox.com)
| zoomablemind wrote:
| 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.
| wondringaloud wrote:
| 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.
| jungletime wrote:
| 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.
| bserge wrote:
| 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.
| jungletime wrote:
| 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.
| fiblye wrote:
| 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.
| setr wrote:
| 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
| austincheney wrote:
| 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.
| Wohlf wrote:
| There's also other simple explanations. Maybe people
| preferred this watermelon, it was easier to grow, etc.
| vikramkr wrote:
| 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
| Vysero wrote:
| 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.
| ciguy wrote:
| 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.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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.
| jb775 wrote:
| 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?
| throwaway_USD wrote:
| 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.
| bmn__ wrote:
| > Corn may be shocking to people.
|
| It did shock me. That's an even more obscene enlargement than
| wild grass into polyploid wheat.
| robocat wrote:
| 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...
| helij wrote:
| White carrots are still around but they are kind of 'less'
| carrots and are used to feed the pigs.
| krisoft wrote:
| 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.
| deevolution wrote:
| I wonder what the nutrient composition was for watermelons before
| they were transformed into giant sugar orbs.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| 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...
| dhosek wrote:
| 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)
| paulgerhardt wrote:
| 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
| flir wrote:
| You might want to read the whole article. It's interesting.
| throwaway_98554 wrote:
| 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.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| 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...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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.
| luma wrote:
| 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.
| austincheney wrote:
| 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.
| jacksonpollock wrote:
| sugar melon is a great name
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| 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.
| stx wrote:
| 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
| SilasX wrote:
| >"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?
| vikramkr wrote:
| 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
| SilasX wrote:
| Right but it's phrased in the present tense.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| 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.
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