Repost Sunday: Is My Watermelon Supposed To Be Brown?

I rerun some of my older posts on Sundays as a way to highlight stories that you may have missed. Just think of it as 'thought recycling' and a day off. This was originally posted July 27, 2006.


The United States Department of Agriculture is at it again. They have announced that watermelon is less nutritious when cold. It’s due to some scientific changing process type transformation thing that I’m too lazy to research or type out. Apparently a room temperature watermelon is a more nutritious watermelon. The best part of this groundbreaking discovery is how much room will be freed up in the fridge now that we can all remove the watermelon and place it on the counter. Of course now counter space will become a premium across the U.S.

Things must be pretty slow this time of year at the USDA when you see reports like this. Were two scientists sitting around bored when one bet the other that a cold watermelon is actually worse than a lukewarm room temperature one? Did everyone in the lab get excited and place bets as if it were the Super Bowl office pool? I’d always thought that a rotten watermelon would be pretty devoid of anything nutritious, but I guess I would have lost big if I’d been betting. Shouldn’t the USDA people be figuring out how to keep packaged meat looking nice and red for longer periods or how to remove the chicken bone from a drumstick?

As if the idea of warm watermelon wasn’t well, juicy enough check this out. Parts of Switzerland have been experiencing the same type of intense heat and high temperatures we have. The Zurich Zoo has decided to do something about it for their animals. Apparently they maintain better zoos than we do because U.S. zoos have been eerily quiet about what they’ve been doing for their animals in this hot weather.

Folks at the Zurich Zoo are feeding their larger animals ice cream. This ain’t your grandma’s homemade self-churned vanilla though. It’s a delicious mixture of frozen berries, meat and bones (we'll just leave where the meat and bones came form to our imaginations). If it works and the animals like it, maybe Ben and Jerry’s will introduce it here stateside. They could call it Cherry Chunky Carcass.