Honeydew, cantaloupe and snake melon are all one species, tamed four separate times
A smooth pale honeydew, a netted cantaloupe and a long, cucumber-flavoured snake melon look like three different crops. They all belong to Cucumis melo, a single species that people domesticated on four separate occasions: once in northeast Africa, twice in India, and once more in China.
Where the wild ancestor first grew is still argued over. Some botanists point to the Levant and Egypt, others to Persia, India or Central Asia, and several favour Africa, where wild melons still turn up in Ethiopia, Somalia and Tanzania. Seeds and rootstocks travelled as trade goods along ancient caravan routes, which muddies the trail further. Greeks and Romans ate melons, and scholars disagree over whether a fruit named in the Book of Numbers was a melon or a watermelon. Over the centuries Iran, India, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and China became major growing centres.
Rinds vary enormously: smooth, ribbed, wrinkled like a casaba, or netted like the American cantaloupe. Even the word muskmelon has no settled meaning, sometimes naming that netted fruit and sometimes any sweet variety. Plenty of forms are not sweet at all. The snake melon, also sold as Armenian cucumber, tastes and looks much like a cucumber and is grown from Turkey to Japan, with a strong following in Arab countries. Some African varieties are bitter and raised purely for their edible seeds, while others are grown only for their scent.
Despite family resemblances, melons will not cross with watermelon, cucumber, pumpkin or squash, though varieties inside the species interbreed freely. Its genome was first sequenced in 2012. The annual, trailing vine likes warm, fertile, well-drained ground and suffers from downy mildew and anthracnose; rotating fields with crops outside the gourd family lowers that risk. In American Samoa it pops up as a weed around newly built airports.
A 100-gram serving of raw cantaloupe holds 34 calories and a generous dose of vitamins A and C, with water making up 90% of the flesh. Melons are also dried, cooked, pressed into seed oil, and used to flavour the Japanese liqueur Midori. Tonga once grew it widely, calling it katiu, eating it as a snack and threading its flowers into leis, but it has since vanished from the islands.
Source: Cucumis melo
