Left outside, just by the front doors, ready to be collected by the garbage truck, the white, semi-transparent, organic-waste bags these days have a familiar green bulge: watermelon rinds.
One look and you can make a shrewd guess which neighbours have enjoyed slices as dessert (the rinds are moon slivers) and which probably cut up a kilo of fruit into rectangles and squares, to be put into a bowl and nibbled casually, on visits to the fridge.
Everyone waits for the pop of the champagne bottle. Who, on cutting into a watermelon, does not wait for the sound the knife makes when thrust through the rind into the flesh?
Ears prick up for a snappy crack, followed by the fruit splitting apart on its own. It means vindication for whoever bought it, having tested the fruit with a sharp knuckle rap to test for hollowness.
A family can have the best techniques to pass on, yet still get it wrong. Unlike other fruit, watermelon can deceive. The flesh might turn out to be too watery or too dry.
In the 2003 Greek film by Tassos Boulmetis, A Touch of Spice, the Greek community of Istanbul prides itself on how to examine a watermelon at the market; the fact that so much is made of their quasi-mystical method of divination says something about everyone else’s failure rate.
If a watermelon is carved at table, then the ethos is one of immediate gratification and communal pleasure. The slices are passed round. First, the children bite in, enjoying the juices streaming down their chins, and the adults follow.
The eating isn’t over without commentary about how this watermelon, its sweetness and texture, compares with the last one.
If the carving is in the kitchen, with squarish slices for a bowl, then the pleasures of eating will be delayed and solitary. For once, eating straight from the fridge is not anti-social. The bowl is meant for raiding, although some take pride in leaving the bowl look untouched. It may have something to do with justifying having extra slices later.
Other vices and virtues are associated with the watermelon. Napoleon left Malta for Egypt in 1798, promising his soldiers they could each have a parcel of land. He told the Egyptians he came to rid them of Mamluk autocracy.
It turns out that the long trek to Cairo was through an arid zone. The army was sustained on its march by a diet of watermelons, which had been domesticated for some 4,000 years in Egypt. The fruit made possible persistence, resistance and dreams of quenching the thirst for conquest and riches.
The colours of the watermelon – red, green (outer rind), white (inner rind) and black (seed) – have long been noted by Palestinians to coincide with those of their national flag
It was 114 years later that Agostino Levanzin, a Maltese apostle of the health and mental benefits of fasting, visited the Nutrition Laboratory of the Carnegie Institute where he fasted for 31 days, losing about 20 per cent of his body weight but claiming to feel mentally sharper.
What is less well known is that Levanzin had practised by embarking on watermelon-only diets. To a great degree, he has been vindicated.
Apart from the water (92 per cent) and sugar (six per cent), the watermelon has vitamins (A, B6 and C), potassium and magnesium. Its antioxidants may help reduce muscle soreness, inflammation and, possibly, macular degeneration.
If you eat the rind – and it’s possible to pickle, stew or stir-fry it and make a curry – then you also ingest citrulline, an amino acid.
To the virtues of self-care, we could add patriotism and political resistance. The colours of the watermelon – red, green (outer rind), white (inner rind) and black (seed) – have long been noted by Palestinians to coincide with those of their national flag.
This June, 16 shared taxis in Tel Aviv had pictures of a watermelon slice plastered on them with the caption “This Is Not A Palestinian Flag”, a sign of nationalist defiance in a land where Palestinian flags, though not illegal, have sometimes been prohibited on grounds of public order.
In earlier periods of heightened tension, Palestinians left watermelon slices on windowsills or carried one around the streets.
In the late 1970s, when Muammar Gaddafi was ushering in the socialist period of his ‘revolution’, he insisted that his reforms were original and tailored to suit Libyan culture, rejecting both capitalism and communism in favour of his Green Book.
But the country’s most popular caricaturist made a sly, widely enjoyed comment in the controlled press: a watermelon whose green rind exposed a red interior.
The virtue of resistance and vice of stigma came together in the racist Deep South of the post-emancipation US. Former slaves grew the watermelon as a cash crop and began acquiring economic autonomy to add to their formal political status.
The reaction from the dominant culture was vicious: watermelon was associated with laziness and uncleanliness, with jibes against the watermelon-loving African Americans that, in places, are still blurted today.
It isn’t hard to understand why the watermelon has so many contrasting associations with morality, public and private.
Unusually, among fruit, it can be traced back thousands of years to literate cultures with a record of its use. Originating in Northeast Africa, it has since been transplanted all across the world. In 2020, its global production was over a million tonnes. It can grow in both tropical and moderate climates. One of its 1,200 variants is grown even in Siberia.
By Roman times it had spread around the Mediterranean. Thanks to Arab engineering, it spread further in Europe around 1,000 years ago. Europe exported it to the Americas. Nowadays, China accounts for 60-66 per cent of global production.
It can be eaten as a sweet dessert or an ice; its less sweet versions are served as appetiser in the eastern Mediterranean, usually with strained yoghurt or a cheese like halloumi. Unlike other fruit, there is no infallible test for sweetness and juiciness; the surface may deceive.
It’s no wonder that this fruit can find itself used as a metaphor for geopolitics, self-discipline, family lore and public and secret pleasures.
This fruit, whose weight can vary from a kilo to a record 153 kilos, looks like a planet and contains entire worlds within.