Stuff You Should Know - Watermelons: Nature's Gift to the World

Episode Date: April 5, 2022

Turns out most people love watermelons. Why? Because they're delicious. And they also have a pretty interesting history. Check it out.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and this is Chuck and this is Stuff You Should Know, featuring Jerry. And Livia. Yeah, Livia helped us with this one. Yeah, on watermelons.

I don't know. I think I just literally came up with this idea because I was eating watermelon and I was like, you know what? Watermelon's delicious, but I know there's a history there and I know there are square watermelons and like, I don't know if you're like me, but like 9-11 and like when Reagan was shot, I remember where I was the day that I saw my first square watermelon. Oh, really? Huh? Yeah, it was during House of Works. I think it might have even been you. I showed you a square watermelon? I mean, not in person, but they are expensive. You were like, hey, come here and look at this over my shoulder and I was like, what's going on? I opened up my trench coat and there was a square watermelon there. But yeah, I think the square

watermelon has enchanted me for years now. And I didn't even know that there were heart-shaped watermelons until two days ago. That's so cute. Are you bummed now that you understand how the watermelons get so square? Well, no, because I knew how they got square, but whoever told me about this at House of Works at our old job told me it was because in Japan they have small refrigerators and they make them to fit more easily in a Japanese refrigerator. But I don't think that that part is true, right? That I believe based on what I've read is a myth. That we're going to crumble? Yeah. Should we go in for square watermelons? Yeah, sure. Why not? So they were invented in Japan as pretty much all perfect things were.

And there was a guy named Tomoyuki Ono and he was an artist. He also happened to be a horticulturist and back in the 70s he figured out how to make square watermelons and created a patent on it. And they're so charming that within a year they were ready for sale. They went from an art gallery, like basically an art project to for sale in Tokyo within less than one year. That's right. And they are grown in Japan and they are grown in containers and it's sort of like a goldfish. They grow to fit their container, including the round ones and the pyramid shaped ones, which are really interesting looking. But they are not very good to eat and they cost about 100 bucks in Japan. And so I think that it is definitely a crumbled myth that they are grown

just to fit into Japanese refrigerators. Yeah, because nobody eats them. You don't eat them. So myth crumbled. And is a Japanese refrigerator small? That is probably true. Yes. I mean, most appliances in Japan are smaller than the ones you find in America. Well, I think America leads the way in humongous appliances, right? Yeah. And humongous portions and stuff like that. Humongous everything. We need humongous appliances. So yeah, I mean, if you haven't ever seen a square watermelon or a heart-shaped watermelon, especially a heart-shaped watermelon is cut open because that's the real money shot. Oh, I hadn't thought about that. It's really amazing looking and a little bit of a brain twister. Do you know I'm such a loser? I

didn't bother to look up what a heart-shaped watermelon looks like. You're like, I know what a heart looks like. I know what a watermelon looks like. Yeah, let's put it together. And then you said cut open. I'm like, cut open. Yes, you got to see that. Yeah. And the pyramid one, it looks more like a Hershey's kiss, like a giant Hershey's kiss. Oh, okay. I imagine pretty much a perfect rounded edge pyramid, but Hershey's kiss, I could take that. Which would be great for a fridge, because part of the problem with a watermelon in the fridge is the shape. Those things roll around in there, and they're huge. It is a big problem. But as we'll see, you shouldn't really be keeping in the fridge very much anyway. But let's talk watermelons and where they came from,

because they, it turns out, watermelons are beloved around the world. I mean, people love watermelons around the world. From what I read, Chuck, there's only livestock have more agricultural land dedicated to raising them than watermelons. They take up so much space, but people love them so much that they just go ahead and give the watermelons the space. And apparently by weight, it's the third most eaten fruit in the world. But really the second, because the tomato, come on. I know it's a fruit. I mean, it's like, but like, if you think fruit, I'm just going to go ahead and say the order is banana than watermelon as far as most eaten. I agree. I think calling a tomato a fruit is like saying coot a grass at a party or saying a brownie's a cookie. Right? Yeah.

What kind of a jerk would say something stupid like that, especially insist on it in a pedantic argument. That wouldn't even you. You were just, you were seeing stuff online, right? You didn't invent that. Yeah, I was misled by internet rumors. The watermelon, though, is a berry technically, which means it has the outer part is hard. It's got a fleshy middle. And then the inner part is softer and has the seeds. We'll get to the CD part later, of course, because we don't really have seeds in our watermelon melons anymore. And then if you want to talk more specific, it's called a pepo, P-E-P-O, which means as a thick rind, like a squash or a pumpkin. You're going with pepo? I'm, I don't care what it's called. It's pepo for me.

Okay. P-P-O, P-P-O, watermelon, P-P-O. Dude. I love it. Yeah. P-P-O. Okay. And it's a berry too. I mean, watermelon's just got twice as good to me. Yeah. I dare you to go to the grocery store next time and say, Hey, where do you keep the pepo berries? The square ones. Yeah. You got these square pepo berries? Security. So, uh, watermelons are also related to squash and pumpkin, but they're most closely related to cucumbers because they're part of the cucurbitacea family. And other melons are too, but I believe cucumbers and watermelons are pretty close together, even though you wouldn't necessarily know it to look at them. But specifically, watermelon species are citrullus lanatus. And all of the different kinds of watermelons that we have, from what I

understand, are varieties of that species. That's right. And we've known for a long, long time that watermelons came from Africa. Thank you, Africa, for this gift to the world. But it was more recently where they kind of zeroed in on exactly where there are a lot of melons in Africa that you could call a watermelon. They are different kinds of citrullus, citrullus, citrullus? Uh, either one. Okay. Species. But these are a little more pale. They're not like that deep, sweet red, and which means they're not going to be as sweet either in taste. So they're more bitter or more bland. Yeah. And they can be used over there. They still use these things. They'll mash up the seeds and using them to thicken a soup or maybe they'll just eat the seeds, roast them up

and eat them, or maybe they'll use them for water, just like clean water, because a watermelon is mostly water. Yeah. I think, oh, I can't remember the main character and the gods must be crazy's name. But he cuts open like something that I assume is a species of watermelon and drinks the water out of it. So yeah, there's a bunch of different kinds of species of watermelons, but none of them are like the ones that we commercially grow and produce, which are typically referred to as dessert watermelons to differentiate that they're sweet and tasty and not bitter. I've never heard of that. I like it. Yeah, I ran across it in this. I think it's a great little, almost like cellar door, dessert watermelon. Yeah, because you usually do hand it out after a meal.

It's a great American tradition. It's delicious. I have wonderful memories being a kid, eating watermelon with my granddad and spitting those seeds out back when they used to have seeds or I would put them in between my fingers because they're slippery and I would shoot them. Just great memories of watermelon and I still love it and my daughter just can eat ungodly amounts of watermelon. Is that right? Oh yeah, she loves it. That's cute. It's delicious. It's sweet. It's watery. Who doesn't like it? Apparently, there's somebody who ranked watermelon and said it's gross. It says that thing. Okay, the name of the fruit literally tells you that eating it is going to be the most boring experience of your life. It has the same bland

mediocre taste of all the melons, except the pleasantly chewy melon flesh is replaced by barely fruity flavored wet sand. What a fun, fun person to be around. Please corner me at the next party I'm at. Yeah, they probably say koo to gross. Give me all your opinions. So you said that eating watermelon is a great American tradition. Indeed, but Americans are relative newcomers compared to other countries that have long-standing traditions of enjoying watermelon too because like you said, they've kind of figured out that somewhere in Northeast Africa, perhaps Egypt, perhaps the area that's now Sudan where the Nubians used to run the show, they probably, speaking from recent genetic tests, are the

ones who domesticated the watermelon. Over many, many hundreds if not thousands of years of just selecting for sweeter and sweeter seeds. Then it spread starting probably with Egypt because Egypt traded with everybody in the Mediterranean pretty much everywhere. It reached across the Mediterranean by maybe 24 to 2500 years ago. It hit India strangely the 9th century CE, so not that long ago, China by the 10th century. So it's weird that it took that long, but it definitely spread. One of the reasons why it did spread is because it's fairly easy to grow and it grows just about anywhere. It's adapted from plants that can survive in semi-arid conditions. Do you know? Yeah. We have the Spanish to thank for bringing it to the Americas

and they introduced them to the Native Americans and they were like, hey, this grows like one of the three sisters, our beloved squash. We think we could grow this stuff and the Native Americans grew it in abundance, traded it in abundance such that by the end of the 17th century, there was watermelon all over what we now call the United States. When the Europeans arrived, they thought it was native to here because they were growing so much of it. Yeah. I guess as late as the 1980s, they were still debating whether it was of European origin or if the North Americans had it first, but they've definitively traced it back to Africa. What's still under debate, Chuck, is whether it was the Spanish that introduced it.

Or yeah, or whether it was some of the first enslaved people from West Africa that brought it over with them. That I think is still up for debate. Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. They'll get to the bottom of it someday. Livy does point out though that there are different words for watermelon that are completely unrelated in Arabic and Hebrew and Sanskrit and Greek and Spanish and that's a good indication that it is, if the words aren't like one another, that they have all had watermelon for a long, long time. Right. So watermelon's all over the world. It's been a longstanding part of the United States' history since before the United States was even a thing. And Thomas Jefferson apparently famously grew watermelons at Monticello and so that there

was nothing better than a Virginia watermelon. And he was kind of onto something because apparently, I don't know if it was after Jefferson or not, but yeah, it would have been after Jefferson because as the railroads came along and it was getting easier and easier to ship things like watermelons long distance, they developed a kind of watermelon that wasn't quite as good, but traveled a lot better and they would keep the good stuff to themselves in the south where the watermelon naturally grows and flourishes best. And they would send these other ones that didn't taste quite as good up north because they figured they didn't know any different. That's right. And there was a time in America after the Civil War when former enslaved people actually

could support themselves and sustain themselves outside the plantations by growing and selling watermelons and being farmers. But of course that got ruined because starting at about the Civil War, white people turned it into a racist trope of black people eating watermelons and it has been an everything from birth of a nation to yard art kind of supporting this racist trope over the years. Yeah. And what really sucks about it is that like it had its intended effect and that there are black Americans who report still being uncomfortable eating watermelon around other white Americans. Yeah. Which is it's just so maddening that that's still a thing. And I mean it is and it's going to be a thing until people just say like this is this ridiculous and hopefully learning about the

watermelon from us will help some people say this is ridiculous and stupid and it's always been. Because one other thing about it to Chuck is that at the time those same racist southerners and white people across the country who were associating watermelon, enjoying watermelon with black people were enjoying it themselves. Of course they were. They liked it just as much. Yeah. It was just because they could grow and sell watermelons and it represented freed black independence and that threatened them that they used watermelons as a trope and just very juvenily started equating it with all sorts of just dumb stuff. It's just I'm so sick of this stuff, Chuck. I know. All right. Well, let's take a break and I'm going to give you a little shoulder rub through the computer.

Thank you. Thanks. It'll be fantastic. It'll settle you down. And we're going to talk about the great Charleston Gray right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot,

sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikler and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and

pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay. I mentioned Charleston Gray. If you're like, who's Charleston Gray and why do I care?

It's a great hotel check-in name. Yeah, that is pretty good. That's the kind that they comp a free breakfast to. You know what I'm saying? That's that kind of name. Well, Mr. Gray, Dr. Gray, do you ever put any weird prefix when you're checking into stuff and signing up for stuff? Sometimes Esquire. All right. I'll do Esquire or Dr. usually. It's always fun. I don't know. Reverend occasionally, even though I technically am a reverend now. I would not want to be cornered on that one. So I've never, I've shied away. But yeah, you can be like, I've got the bonafides. So Charleston Gray was, is the name of, not a human being, but it's the name of a watermelon. The human's name was Charleston

and Charles Andrus of the USDA's Agricultural Research Service, the ARS, in the vegetable breeding laboratory there. And he created the Charleston Gray watermelon in 1954. And why do you care? It's because 95% of the watermelons grown all over the world now have a lineage tied to the Charleston Gray. Yeah. And so remember, we said that like all of the watermelons that you would ever come across or eat that you buy at a store, that's all just one species of watermelon. They're just different varieties. Yeah. 95% of those are related to the same variety. And that means that they came upon one that tastes really good, ships really well. That was a big one. It's also resistant to some diseases and pests, but it

also makes it extremely vulnerable. If there's ever a pest or a disease that can attack the Charleston Gray, it's going to wipe out all the watermelons because they're all very genetically similar. That's right. And that's why the ARS, not the Elanorhythm section. We're going to have us a champagne jam. All right. Here we go. ARS is still looking into how to make watermelons more hearty. And they're looking at wild watermelon species in Africa. They're looking at all kinds of varieties around the world and looking how to breed them with less pesticides. And so the big watermelon apocalypse never happens. So yeah, one thing they're doing, the reason that they're really looking at is there's something called I think methyl bromide, which was like a fog

pesticide and maybe fungicide. It killed a bunch of stuff that Charleston Grays are vulnerable to, but it also burns a hole in the ozone layer. So it got banned in Europe 10 years ago and it was recently banned here in the United States. And so they're really trying to figure this out. So they looked to Europe and said, hey, Europe, what'd you do when you couldn't use methyl bromide? And Europe said, we started using different rootstock. So they'll take the rooty part of the plant from squash plants apparently are really useful for this. And they graft a watermelon plant onto the top of it, the top part of the watermelon plant, stems and seeds and all that. And it grows together to create this super plant that has, it produces great watermelons,

but it's also resistant to these diseases and pests. Which goes back to the Native Americans being great at growing watermelons because squash is one of the three sisters. Exactly. And they had experience. It's really cool. I love that stuff. Maybe we should do a short stuff on the three sisters. That'd be cool. You know, it factored heavily into 1491. It pops up a bunch in that book. Oh, of course. Yeah. So we mentioned seedlessness because if you have eaten a watermelon in the past, oh, 30 something years, it's probably doesn't have seeds like they did when you were a kid. If you're an old timer like us, at least not those big mature black seeds that were great for spitting and flicking. They had those little undeveloped white seeds a little

bit. But the seedless watermelon was another invention by another Japanese geneticist. I think the other one was an artist and horticulturalist. But this is geneticist Hitoshi Kihara. And in 1939 invented this seedless watermelon that started being available in the 1950s. And what's remarkable about this is, is that it's basically a manual operation that's required to make seedless watermelons. Yeah, you use something called colchicine, which takes a regular diploid watermelon with two pairs of chromosomes, two copies of the chromosome, and turns it into a tetraploid, so that there's four copies of each chromosome. And you take the diploid and the tetraploid, and you pollinate them, you cross fertilize them. And what you produce is called a, I think,

a triploid. And a triploid plant, because it doesn't have an even number of copies of chromosomes, it's sterile. So it doesn't produce seeds. So that's how you get your seedless watermelon. And it's a real B word to raise seedless watermelons, because part of your crop has to be diploid, regular seeded watermelons to use to fertilize them. But, and at first, I guess, farmers are kind of like, I'm not doing all that. Who wants a seedless watermelon anyway? And there was a guy named Ori Eigste, great name. And in 1954, he's like, people are going to love this. And this guy just worked away at it, worked away at it, and kept perfecting the seedless watermelon. But it wasn't until the late 80s that he finally managed to get it to take off.

He partnered with a company called Sun World International, right? Yeah, his first company was American Seedless Watermelon Corp. And it took partnering with the giant, like a giant in the industry, a big agribusiness company to really have it take off. And it did. But, you know, like I said, it's amazing. I think a lot of people think it's a commodification. And that is not true. It's actually a manual process that, like you said, is a real pain in the butt to farmers. And they had to get on board with this, because the way they have to grow them and keep them separated, and it's really a lot of work. But they were, I guess, already was right on the money, because people do love

the seedless water. I kind of miss the seeds, but I have to admit the seedless are easier to work with. Yeah, I think 90% are seedless. And if you walk into a grocery store today, Chuck, and you ask for a watermelon with seeds, you're going to be hard pressed to find one, because they're just seedless or so prevalent. And it's so crazy to me. Like I realize that my niece, Mila, who stars as Jay in the 20th century Fox movie, No Exit, has was born into a world where there's never really been a seeded watermelon. She's never seen a seeded watermelon in her life. Yeah, like she wouldn't walk into a grocery store and say, can I have a square seeded peepaberry? You know, and they would say, hey, wait a minute,

aren't you the star of the Hulu hit motion picture? No, I was stars, such a relative term, isn't it? Where did they shoot that? Was that Atlanta? New Zealand. Oh, geez. Man, so she's really getting to live the life, huh? They shot it in New Zealand at the height of the pandemic when New Zealand had like zero cases. Yeah, that's where you want to be. Yeah, it was pretty neat, but they had to like quarantine and everything for 14 days on either side. And it was really something. But yeah, they, she, no, she went, it was a real, real shoot. All right, so eating watermelons, you think like it's such an American thing. We surely lead the world in watermelon consumption. And we eat a lot. We eat about 15 pounds per person per year here in America

to the tune of about five billion pounds of watermelon a year. But Jack, that ain't nothing compared to China. In 2018, Chinese residents ate more than 150 billion pounds of watermelon. Yeah, that's 50 kilograms per capita. So we in the US, 15 pounds per person a year, they eat 110 pounds of watermelon per person per year. I had no idea it was so big in China. Well, yeah, I mean, it's, and again, it's been there for over a thousand years. So they've, they've had a long time to really come to appreciate the watermelon and buddy, do they ever? Well, we grow about two thirds of our own watermelon here in the US. The rest generally comes from Mexico. You probably are eating Florida watermelon, maybe Georgia is number two,

followed by Texas and California. But Florida is great for growing those watermelons because of the weather, because watermelons don't do well in the cold. So you can kind of grow them year-round in Florida. Yeah, there's really nothing better than Florida weather this time of year in particular. So one of the things about the watermelons is that they're growing season takes a little while, I think a hundred days, right? Yeah, so you're not going to grow them up north, probably, unless you start them indoors. Yeah, I mean, you can grow them anywhere. Like one of the things they spread so far and wide among Native Americans that the Hurons of the Great Lakes in Canada were growing them. So you can grow them anywhere. It's just, you can grow them all year

around in Florida. You can grow them for a very limited window around the Great Lakes. But again, they'll grow just about anywhere. But one of the things about them too, Chuck, is that they need a lot of space. I saw on a University of Florida website, which I apologize for using that, but I did. It's become so much more normalized to me since moving to Florida, like dealing and seeing like University of Florida stuff. It doesn't trigger me at all anymore. Really? Yeah, not at all. Well, plus George's national champions in Florida. Right, so who cares? So a watermelon needs 18 to 24 square feet per plant to grow. That's a lot of space. Yeah, we thought about growing watermelons here. It's, again, like squash, they tend to really take over. So just, I mean, grow your

watermelon, but make sure you got the room and you don't mind being annoyed by how much they spread. Yeah, which really, I mean, are you going to be annoyed by some great watermelons growing in the background? Yeah, of course not. They also can rot. So you want to grow them on something that's going to keep them from rotting because they got to, they're going to connect with the ground. You can grow them on a trellis if your trellis is basically a steel crane. That's kind of what it takes. And I saw that it's tough to figure out when they're ripe. Some varieties will have the stripe darken, the contrasting greens, but I also saw in a few different places, if you pick up a watermelon, there's a bald spot on the bottom where it rested on the ground.

Yeah. If that bald spot is white or pale green, it's not ripe. If it's cream or yellowy, it's ripe. That's the best way to tell a watermelon's ripe. Yeah, my mom would always thump them in the store. I've read that doesn't actually tell you anything and that it might actually tell you that they're overripe. Yeah, that could see that being just sort of a thing that you do that you see other people do. Have you ever smelled a cantaloupe? No. That's an amazing smelling. That's a good way to tell whether a cantaloupe is ripe. It should be rather pungent. You can smell a cantaloupe from the outside that run. Yes. That's a really good way to tell it's ripe. Give a cantaloupe a

good smell and you'll smell it right through that. My deal is I don't like other melons that much. I love watermelon, but cantaloupe has always been a little too bitter for me. And what's the green one? Honeydew. Honeydew. That's the money melon. It's okay. I'm a watermelon guy though. I am not a melon guy of any kind really. Oh, not even watermelon, huh? No, I've got no problems with any of it. I'm not like you gross, but I also don't really crave it. And that fruit salad that you'll get with different kinds of melon and breakfast, I don't live for that or anything. What's your ideal fruit melange? Describe it. Fruit melange is probably pretty pedestrian. I have fruits that I maybe strawberries and blueberries together,

just eating them by the handful. Okay. So you don't do it like a fruit mix? No. All right. What's yours? Well, I mean, we'll have big weekends at the lake with lots of families and stuff. And that's always a really good thing to put out for breakfast if you don't want to cook a big breakfast, put out a bunch of pastries and things like that. And then mix together a big fruit melange. So I'll throw everything in there, strawberries, blueberries, cut up pineapple, grapes, any kind of melon is always good to add. Raspberry's don't hold up that well. They're pretty soft. So I try to put in things, chop up a banana, put that in there. I think all that stuff is really good mixed together.

I don't know, mixing a banana in there could get mushy real quick. Yeah, they can get a little mushy. And when a banana becomes discolored by other fruit juices, it's not as appealing looking. It's not as appealing. I genuinely thought that was funny. I've got one for you, Chuck. Have you ever had a Waldorf salad? Uh, sure. That's got grapes in it, right? Mayo and grapes and apples and walnuts maybe. Yeah, apple's good to put in there too. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I'm fine with all those. And I would basically eat them all individually. And I'd be like,

cheap bastard can get us some real breakfast. And just be mad for the rest of the morning. Could you fry me up some bacon or make some biscuits from scratch? Yeah. Would it kill you to make some cinnamon rolls? Uh, I'd do that too. Um, all right, should we take another break? All right, we'll take another break and we'll finish up with whether or not watermelons are even good for you after all, right after this. If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke,

but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. The situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck, chemistry and nutrition time. Are they good for you? Sure. I don't think they're particularly bad for you. Olivia says that a cup of watermelons has 46 calories, most of them coming from sugar.

Yeah, that's not great. A lot of water, but unfortunately, they also seem to have diuretic properties, which means that it would cause you to expel more water than you took in from it. That does have a little vitamin A, vitamin B6, vitamin C, some amino acids. I don't think it's bad for you. I don't know if it's a health food necessarily. Although, unless you cook it and you unleash the power of lycopene, right? Yes. Lycopene is that pigment that makes tomatoes red,

sort of related to beta carotene with the orange of the carrots. But watermelon, it actually has more lycopene than tomatoes do. And some people say, hey, a lot of antioxidants in there. So that's got to be good for you. But like you said, you have to cook the watermelon, which you can do. You can grill watermelon. It does very well on the grill, actually. You've done that before? I've never done that. I mean, I like it raw, but you can grill it up.

So it says that it causes the meat of the watermelon to be chewy. Does that happen? I haven't experienced super chewy, but I may not have left it on as long as you need to to reach that point, because I don't like chewy things, generally. So what about watermelon rind pickles? I've always been interested in eating this. And I don't think I've been in too many places where they were there. And I guess when I was, I was in the mood for them.

So have you ever had a pickled watermelon rind? No, because, you know, I'm not into pickled things, generally. Oh, that's right. That's right. Well, I'm going to try them for the both of us. Okay. All right. I did used to salt my watermelon a little bit when I was a kid. I don't do that anymore. Not for any real reason other than I just like the taste as is.

But some people put little, little chipotle pepper, little hot spice on there sometimes. You can juice them. You could make them in alcoholic beverages, drop a little watermelon ball in there. Yeah. You can also, so if you, like it's kind of akin to salting them, but it goes really well with salty and non-sweet tastes. Like you mean I had a watermelon salad years back

at a place called Harry's Pizza in Miami. Okay. They had chunks. It's very simple, but it was just an explosion of flavor. You had chunks of watermelon, okay? Snipped up mint, a little snipped up fresh thyme. Yeah. Mint is good with watermelon. Yes. It's amazing.

Stracciatella, which is like a very much waterier mozzarella, like a looser mozzarella, and then some chopped up kind of just pecans. And all of this in like minor amounts. You're not like making the Campbell's Chunky Soup version of this. It's all like just kind of sparse because it doesn't take much. Little bit of olive oil. Maybe you throw a couple of grains of salt on there, but you probably are getting enough from the stracciatella to do.

And it is, everything just works really, really well together. And it's really easy to make. Like you can get all of those ingredients at any grocery store, anywhere. And it's an amazing little treat. I strongly recommend that. That sounds delicious. Yeah. Maybe you'd have trouble finding the stracciatella. It just used like a buffalo mozzarella,

just some mozzarella that comes in like a water of some sort. Just use that. Yeah. And don't say mozzarella. No. No, cootie grass. The whole thing with watermelon and like you'll see it at, you know, a party sometimes someone will bore a hole in a watermelon and turn up a full bottle of vodka and stick it in there. Yeah. Good idea.

That's a thing. I've never tried it, but there, Livia points out there's a food writer for the Washington Post that said, that's a myth. There's so much liquid in there, their vodka has nowhere to go. Yeah. Just pulls up. But like, it does. Where does the vodka go though?

It goes somewhere. Right. It's not like a... The idea is it doesn't infuse all the watermelon. Right. I think it will come dribbling out after a while because the watermelon is, it's 92 or 96% water. Right? Yeah. So yeah, some of it will get sucked in.

It's not going to do what you want it to do, allegedly. I've never tried it either. But yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't either. So apparently the same food writer says you should scoop the watermelon out and then marinate it and I guess being exposed to air, it will dry out some and suck in whatever alcoholic marinade you're marinating it in. Okay. Well, that makes sense,

but that also brings up the idea of watermelon-flavored things like watermelon. Jolly Ranchers are chewing gum. It's, I think it's got a better track record than banana. I've come to appreciate banana my older age. Yeah, but it never tastes like banana. It tastes like whatever they do. I see your point. Banana flavoring, you know?

Yes, yes, totally. But watermelon kind of has that same wrap, which is like, there's nothing that truly tastes like watermelon, no kind of candy. And apparently there's a reason for that. It is because that flavor is probably a product of an organic compound called an aldehyde. Specifically, I don't even know how you'd read this, z comma z dash three, six, nonadienal aldehyde. Sure.

Okay. You enjoyed that, didn't you? Yeah, I did. But the flavor of that specific organic compound is green cucumber, Melanie, fatty and rindy with a hint of meat fat. I love it. But apparently that breaks down so fast that they can't, in the lab, they can't convert that flavor into something they can replicate very easily because they break down so quickly.

Right. So I mean, yeah, I just give them a break basically is the upshot of all that. They're trying. Yes. Now that you say that about banana flavor, I wonder how much of banana flavor seeming like, oh, it's banana flavor. The candy is from the yellow that's always associated with it. So like if you handed somebody just like a non-colored, like just gray piece of candy that had that same banana flavor and didn't tell them what it was supposed to be, like what chance would they have of actually identifying it as banana?

You should start a line of gray candy. Right. It's called who cares. Josh is famous, gray candy, parentheses, who cares? Yeah. No, I think with you. In fact, I think there's enough for a short stuff there. There's actually a lot of information about banana flavoring. Okay, cool. Let's do it. But apparently not one on a watermelon flavored short stuff.

No, I don't think so. So what else Chuck, you got anything else about watermelons? Not really. I mean, there are, you know, watermelon festivals and stuff like that all over the country, if you're into that kind of thing. Sure. It's sort of like anytime a town has a prized fruit or vegetable and it's in the sticks in the United States, they're probably going to have a parade about it. That's right.

Which can be a lot of fun, I'm sure. Why not? There's probably lots of watermelon and everybody loves watermelon, so it can't be all that bad, right? Right. Okay. Well, that's it for watermelon, everybody. If you want to know more about watermelon, go check out your local store and get started eating watermelon. And also shout out to a really great episode of Gastropod.

They covered the watermelon's social and natural history and that's worth checking out too. And since I said that's worth checking out too, that means it's time for Listener Mail. I've been waiting to read this for an episode that was a little shorter because this is a little baggy, but it's worth reading. And here we are with this email from Ian Bowers. Hey guys, been listening for the better part of a decade? Well, it might be the bane of some listener's existence. I love the off-the-wall tangents that you guys fall into.

You never know what's going to trigger a memory. Remind you of something that happened the other day. And at the beginning of 2021, I decided to keep a running tally of the best tangents went on throughout the year. Did you see this? No, I didn't. It's fantastic. I noticed many of them tend to be movie or music related, but here are a few of my favorites

and what episode they were from. You ready for this? I'm ready. This is great. So in the episode Space Weather, what's that? We had a tangent on John Mayer and the Grateful Dead, apparently. In the Hydra Power episode, we had a tangent on Butler's Chaps, John Belushi, and Steven Stills.

Okay. Is the free radical theory of aging wrong? We had a tangent on Justin Timberlake's attempt to revive my space. Yeah, I remember that. It sounds like you. In Space Junk Ahoy, we had a tangent on Lighting Farts. Yeah, I remember that too. That took me by surprise.

In the Havana Syndrome, we had one on Will Ferrell as Glenn Frey on SNL, Glenn Frye. Plus two more Eagle stories. Okay. And Hairloss the Pits, Colin the Pits. We had one on the smell of Pizza Hut, reminding Josh of Solid Gold. How corporate taxes work? Hubba Bubba versus Bubble Yum versus Bubbalicious. This is like a trip down memory lane about memory lanes.

It's pretty neat. On our live show on Coco the Gorilla. I didn't know he, of course, we have tangents there too. Sure. Huey Lewis is showing his wiener in a movie. Sounds like me. I'm always talking about Huey Lewis's wiener. I don't remember that one.

Yeah, he showed his penis in Shortcuts, the Robert Altman movie. Oh, that's right. Just taking a leak into a river. Okay. How reverse osmosis will save the world? Cypress Hill still stands up, is the quote. Okay. And then another short Cypress Hill tangent shows up during Heat Waves.

So we talked about them twice. Okay. On Short Stuff, Colin Chameleons, both of your favorite scenes in Beetlejuice. Yes. And there's a couple more here. The creepy legacy of the Cecil Hotel, mysterious bag of crystal beans, chuck in the middle of the night, and then a crystal food discussion. Yeah.

And then finally, the wars, somebody buying the science of the lamb's house and turning it to an air B&B. Yeah, that's right. So Ian says, keep up the great work. I think these things really let both of your personality shine. And I think that's why most dedicated listeners continue to tune in. After all the episodes you've released, I'm not going to keep track of tangents in 2022. But I happily welcome them. Ian, come on, buddy.

Keep it up. We'll do this once a year if you keep up with them. We should release Ian from his obligations. This is Ian's cross to bear. Ian can do it or not, but the offer stands, Ian. All right. No one else. Yeah.

There you go. I think that's fair. You know, if he wants to, cool. If he doesn't, we won't think any less of him. That's right. What's his last name? Tangent guy. Ian Tangent.

Ian Bowers. Are you sure it's not? Oh, okay. Ian Tangent Guy Bowers. Ian P for Bear. Tangent Guy's definitely his new nickname for sure. Well, thanks a lot, Ian. That was very nice of you to do that.

And yeah, if you want to do it again, we'll definitely read it next year. And if you want to get in touch with us and try to start an annual thing, take your best shot. You can try it via email at stuffpodcastsatihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio,

visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in major league baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject,

something completely unbelievable happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.