A melon of another color…

By Dan

wouldn’t taste as sweet?

Did you know that originally, watermelons were white-fleshed, hard and not nearly as delicious as what we’re used to? At the opposite end of the spectrum, the juicy, red watermelon that we all enjoy contains so much sugar that it’s off limits to most of the nation’s 20 million people with diabetes. Are they out of luck, or is there a happy medium?

Angela R. Davis is a melon geneticist (yep, there is such a thing) and she has been working on developing a low-sugar alternative to the usual melons one finds at the grocery store.

Davis found that there is a correlation between color and sugar content. Her team eventually found one melon with yellow flesh and little sugar. Seven generations of crossbreeding this melon led to two lines of fruit whose seeds now uniformly grow into pink, low-sugar melons. There’s even a redder line that produces melons with mid-level sugar content.

Upon further taste-testing, it was found that these new melons might not be sweet enough to satisfy everyone’s pallate but adding a dash of artificial sweetener usually does the trick! Some participants found that they liked this new sweetened melon better than regular watermelon.

Want to learn more? Davis’ group shares more information in a pair of papers slated to be published later this year in HortScience.