If i swallow a watermelon seed a new watermelon will grow in my stomach, right?
Everyone knows that!
Good thing we have seedless watermelons!
Wait … if there’s no seeds, how do we make more of them?
These days, you see WAY more seedless fruits than seeded.
Seedless grapes, watermelons, oranges, come to mind, but natural bananas have seeds, so
do cucumbers!
Fruit is, by nature, a matured ovary around a seed, the flesh of a watermelon or apple
is part of that ovary!
So if it's not "natural," then what is seedless fruit?
Seedless plants have been around for millennia.
Some strains of grapes were documented in ancient Roman times that didn't produce seeds.
And in 1872, seedless navel oranges were brought to the US from Brazil.
They were sourced from a "clump of freak orange trees" according to a New York Times article
from 1902 and thanks to American farmers grow everywhere today.
FYI: seedless fruits are not genetically modified -- no one is tweaking their DNA to add or
remove genes; instead, they're selecting traits and breeding them naturally.
In botany, breeding seedless fruit is called parthenocarpy.
Parthenocarpic fruit can occur naturally due to mutations or problems with sperm and egg
fertilization or through specific hybrid breeding -- mixing plants with more or fewer chromosomes
to get a sterile offspring.
For example, bananas have an extra set of chromosomes, called triploid -- it's sort
of like the fruit version of a mule -- it's sterile.
Seedless plants are cultivated by farmers because consumers buy for convenience!
Nothing is more inconvenient than a seeded grape, amirite?
The National Watermelon Promotion Board says only 16 percent of watermelons sold have seeds!
But if the seed of a plant is how that plant reproduces, how do we perpetuate a seedless
plant?
There's no SEED TO PLANT!
But farmers know the answer to this one … through grafting.
Farmers and agribusinesses spend lots of capital to produce what they believe is the best fruit
for modern life.
Watermelon with thick rinds survive shipping and no seeds sell better; so why let nature
mess those perks up by allowing them to naturally breed?
Instead, they'll reproduce that seedless plant variety.
This is has been done since antiquity.
If a branch is sliced from a seedless tree it could (eventually) grow a whole new seedless
plant.
To increase the chances, farmers today use "rooting hormone;" a broad term for an antibacterial
agent which can be made at home from willow bark, honey, or a chemical called auxin -- which
is naturally produced by plant roots!
In fact, most of the fruit we eat in the U.S. today comes from cuttings; because it's an
easy way to propagate a single high-yield fruit tree into an orchard of high-yield trees
-- especially when they don't have seeds to grow their own offspring.
Farmers can also graft cuttings onto existing trees -- making it possible to have say an
orange and lemon growing on the same plant; again propagating without seeds.
There is an issue with this though, maybe you've spotted it, if farmers plant whole
orchards of seedless, high-yield trees based on the cuttings of an original tree they destroy
biodiversity.
All the trees are clones of that original seedless mutant!
If a disease strikes the plant, like in the case of the banana in the 1970s, or the cacao
problems in South America.
Seedless plants are so genetically similar, they're often struck by the same diseases
-- making it spread quickly.
Biodiversity is what keeps lineages of plants alive when drought, blight, or disease strikes;
some varieties die, but the species survives.
Seeds help propagate biodiversity and as an added bonus they're often super nutritious!
Heirloom plants may not look like fruits in the ads; they have a variety of colors, sizes
and shapes; but some stand up better to disease and some don't; some have BETTER flavors,
and some don't.
As a consumer, we have to use our best judgment, and buy not for the sake of seed, but for
what we really want
in our foods.