This Honeymoon Ain't Over

Last week I bought what I thought was cantaloupe. It certainly looked like a cantaloupe, with the characteristic netted pattern on its skin. The fruit stand's sign called it a cantaloupe. The fruit stand vendor called it a cantaloupe. 

But when I cut the cantaloupe open, I discovered a surprise: green flesh!

Cantaloupe? Cantaloupe with honeydew characteristics? I happened to have  a honeydew on hand, so I figured I'd compare the two melons.

Round one: Unopened, the two melons didn't have much in common beyond their shared shape. The honeydew was significantly larger and had smooth, pale green skin. The new melon looked like a cantaloupe, with the netted skin and peachy undertones. 

Round two: interior appearance. The slice of the new melon was pale green. The honeydew was a slightly darker pale green, and its rind was thicker.

Round three, the most important round as far as I was concerned: taste. In the interest of science, I decided to hold a blind taste test, using diced melon, closed eyes and a plate that I spun around a few times so I couldn't memorize locations. I jazzed it up with a wild card, some "traditional" cantaloupe I had bought previously. 

Results:  The honeydew was sweet and mellow. The new melon was also sweet, a little milder in flavor, and extremely juicy. The cantaloupe was mediocre. I pronounced a tie between the honeydew and the new melon. I banished the cantaloupe to a fruit salad, where it could rest on other fruits' laurels.

I love both cantaloupe and honeydew. To me, honeydews are more consistently good - I have found most honeydew melons that I've bought are at least pretty good - but I enjoy an outstanding cantaloupe more than I do an outstanding honeydew. Let's hedge some bets by eating them both!

But what kind of melon exactly was this green flesh cantaloupe?

Over the years, I've had orange flesh honeydews, which I have not liked as much as regular honeydews. They looked like regular honeydews from the outside, except sometimes they had an orange-y glow to their skins. Inside, they looked like cantaloupes, albeit with thicker rinds. The mix of characteristics of both melons makes sense, since orange flesh honeydews are in fact a hybrid of honeydew and cantaloupe melons.

I also recalled seeing melons labeled  "Honeylopes" at Washington DC's Dupont Circle farmers' market. These were more more or less the reverse of orange flesh honeydews - they wore their cantaloupe ancestry on the outside.

Was my new melon a honeyloupe? 

Another possibility: It could be a galia melon, a small, sweet, cantalope-from-the-outside, honeydew-inside melon that is not as widely available as I'd like it to be. Fairway, a New York market, describes the galia as a cantaloupe-honeydew hybrid; Wikipedia's description is a more circumspect:  a "hybrid melon originating from a cross between the green flesh melon cultivar 'Ha-Ogen' and the netted rind melon culitvar 'Krimka'." (Do the Fairway guys lose credibility points when they mispronounce "galia"? It's GAHL-ya, rhyming with dahlia, not gah-lee-yuh." To avoid these pronunciation pitfalls, you could always opt to call the galia melon a passport melon, or a sarda melon, two seldom-heard names for the same melon.) 

I noticed that my melon had a trademark sticker that read "Honeymoon." "Honey" as in honeydew? "Honeymoon" as the occasion of a romantic engagement between a honeydew and a cantaloupe? Perhaps no meaning at all, just an easy-to-remember name chosen after 10 better names were already trademarked?

I did some research on-line.

According to this press release, Honeymoon melons are "a new cantaloupe" introduced in 2014 by Fresh Quest, a Florida-based produce company. Some further research  - one bit of produce is never enough - on Fresh Quest's website, however, revealed the use of the magic word, "galia," or the puzzling variation, "galia-type." 

So yes, the Honeymoon is a galia. One mystery solved.

Another mystery, however, emerged. What does it mean to be a trademarked melon? 

According to its press release, Fresh Quest was planning to introduce other trademarked melons, and I noticed some cantaloupes with stickers bearing another trademark, "MAG." MAG turns out to be a trademark of the agribusiness giant Del Monte, which has "strict guidelines for growing, harvesting, packing and transporting MAG melons...to ensure a high quality product. Melons must also meet a set of standards in terms of appearance, texture and taste in order to be marketed under the MAG melon name."

My recent foray into the world of apple breeding opened my eyes to the complicated world of produce cultivation and marketing. Interestingly enough, it turns out that like apples, melons began their journey as somewhat unpreposessing wild fruit, and modern breeding programs have  focused on making them ever-sweeter and hardier. As the website Fresh Food Central notes, 

It is almost certain that the melons grown then were not the ones we know now; the sweet, aromatic melons we eat were not around back then, and were probably more similar to the cucumber (and were indeed classified alongside cucumbers), and were really not that appetising, and in fact, unripe melons back then were noted to cause vomiting and nausea. 

On behalf of all melon enthusiasts, I'd like to say, Thank you, melon cultivators, for all your hard work since then!

My research also turned up information about a less formal breeding program that resulted in a cantaloupe - honeydew cross.  The program at Rachel's Tiny Farm : inadvertently planting the honeydew and cantaloupe really close together. Result: a honeydew with a surprise - orange flesh - and a taste "like a vanilla sugar cookie." 

Be on the lookout for OrangeVanillaSugarCookie (TM) honeydews (with large stickers, to fit that cumbersome name), coming soon to a market near you.

Washington DC Markets

The Lincoln Memorial.

The Air and Space Museum.

The Dupont Circle Farmers' Market.

Yes, it's a Produce Savant trip to Washington DC!

I hadn't been to DC for many years. On my last visit, I was so produce-starved I ended up buying a banana from an ice cream parlor. But things have changed since then.

I was delighted to find that farmers' markets have become popular and readily accessible since my last visit. When I asked the staff at our hotel about farmers' markets, I received some helpful and straightforward ideas, mercifully free of any good-thing-I'm-paid-to-deal-with-members-of-fringe-communities response.

But we found our first market serendipitously, while walking downtown. This market was held at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 

The USDA market offered a two-fer: vendors plus the opportunity to see produce growing in the surrounding gardens. The selection of farm stands was small, but offset by the friendly vibe and the extreme convenience of finding the market without going out of our way. 

The market's modest size showcased the courtly manners of the vendors. These manners, coupled with the prominence of certain vegetables like lima beans and okra - while our markets in New York do have them, they occupy less actual and mental real estate - gave the market a semi-Southern vibe, not inappropriate for this semi-Southern city.   

 


Would it be snarky to note that the USDA farm stand that attracted the longest lines featured King Corn? Yes, skip over the fairy eggplant, tomatoes and okra to get to the market's real attraction, kettle corn.

Of course, like all travelers, we had to keep it moving.

Our next destination was the Eastern Market, a public market in the Capitol Hill neighborhood that first opened in 1873 - about 20 years earlier than Philadelphia's wonderful Reading Terminal Market.  Its 19th century building was gutted in a fire in 2007 but renovated and re-opened in 2009. My carnivorous friends were very impressed by the market's butcher stand. For us herbivores, the market was a little small. We were ready for some destination produce markets.

Next stop: the market at 14th and U Streets. 

I enjoy exploring urban neighborhoods like U Street, which added to the fun. This market had a nice selection of farm stands.

Although the prices seemed a bit high by New York standards - more on this later - the vendors did have a more formal system of discounting small and bruised produce than is common in New York.

I have to admit my favorite vendor was not a farm stand but rather No 1 Sons, produce picklers. As a connoisseur not only of farmers' markets but also their signs, I was doubly wowed.

Our final market: the huge Dupont Circle farmers market. 







This one is operated by FreshFarm, which also runs conveniently located markets in neighborhoods such as Foggy Bottom, Union Market, downtown Silver Spring (Maryland) and "by the White House." 







FreshFarm restricts participation to "farmers/producers who sell what they grow, raise or produce on their own farm or facility." All farmers must hail from the Chesapeake Bay Watershed region, which by FreshFarm's reckoning includes a 200 mile radius of Washington DC and the states of Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia.


I enjoyed the extensive samples and some C-SPAN policy wonk celebrity sighting. I can't wait for the Us Magazine spread: "Celebrities are just like us - they shop at farmers' markets!" I'm just not sure that pundits count as celebrities.

I couldn't help but notice that the prices at the market - Dupont Circle especially - were steep, noticeably steeper than NYC's Union Square Greenmarket. I mentioned this to a FreshFarm staffer, and she responded matter-of-factly, "Oh, DC is much more expensive than New York in general." 

Huh!  This was news to me (and various chart-makers) - NYC's real estate costs are especially ridiculous - but we're happy to step aside. 

Lest you think the Produce Savant is a philistine with limited interests, I should add that I did visit many of Washington's great museums. Here are some highlights from the National Gallery of Art! 

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