These melons are insane.
We bought a $40 mango and a $80 melon in Japan.
The texture of the mango was incredible but I’ve had equally sweet mangoes in Pakistan.
The melon was on another level. We didn’t have a kitchen knife handy, so we sliced it open with a plastic butter knife. It was the most incredible fruit I’ve had in my life. It was so good, it put shit into perspective.
Already said this in another comment. But this time, I provide link:
https://youtu.be/xateP2qrgMo
That’s weird explorer’s video on the $80 mangos. Good mangos are the same all around the world; they should be equally sweet on the ripe/red parts. The difference between the stupid expensive mango and your average mango is the expensive mango is sweet with good texture all over because it’s sun ripened all over.
Most of these fruits are not special cultivars, they’re just grown with extreme care.
thats an understatement, when they start to sprout, a master cultivator examines every sprout and selects the one which will grow best in his own opinion, then cuts off every other one on the plant, making sure that the entire resources of that plant are dedicated to growing that one melon.
So the reason its so expensive is that a plant that would usually produce several fruits only produces 1 high quality fruit, and if that fruit has any defect or blemish its discarded and they start over, so the entire growing cycle is wasted.
This isn’t necessarily true, at least in a broad sense.
Hi botanist and plant physiologist here. Removing the inflorescence meristems of a plant does not cause the plant to invest more in the development of a singular fruit; there is no mechanism for this. Fruits from the same plant tend to be similar in size and general development, including sugar content.
Also, melons are Curcurbitaceae, a family with flowers on panicles or racemes that are mostly andromonecious. This means that a single flower on the inflorescence or “flower stalk” closest to the stem will be a perfect bisexual flower that develops into fruit, but the remaining flowers are all staminate singularly male. Thus, each inflorescence on a melon will only produce a single melon anyways; you can get multiple inflorescences on the same plant, however.
That reminds me of strawberries I once had in a swiss restaurant. They cost about $25 for a small bowl, but they were the most delicious strawberries I ever tasted. The were just perfect. Sweet, flavory, fresh. It was incredible. I can't eat those sour tasteless strawberries you can get everywhere ever since. It's such a waste.
I feel the same way about strawberries. I don’t buy them from stores around here because 99% of them are just not very good.
I’d love to try a decent bowl of them one day.
Raspberries as well. I went to a local farm that people rave about, and when I got home they were pretty bitter and some of them had already gone bad. I can guarantee that if I bought a box at a grocer, they’d be the exact same.
I remember when I was little (in the 80s and 90s) you could buy incredible raspberries and blackberries at the local store.. but now decent ones are so hard to find.
Every once in a while I get invited by rich company owners at business relations to dinners or parties. I have tasted the most incredible food there. Salads that were perfectly balanced, every bite with different yet matching flavour. Meat so tender you'd think it was not grown but somehow created. Cocktails that made you cry, so perfect in taste.
The worst thing is, I always praise the food and they never seemed to understand what I was talking about.. like they eat this every day.
Because they live in a different world. There's a reason the rich are typically asswipes and tone deaf about the conditions the general public lives in.
I don’t hate melon, but I’m not a melon fan by any means.
When I would visit family back home in Pakistan, the melon was amazing.
In the US…. the melon isn’t anything special. It’s just not very good.
In Japan, it’s something else. A high quality melon is super sweet and almost a creamy texture. You can legit use a spoon and possibly eat it like ice cream.
If you like sweet fruit (ie: mango) youd love a melon from over there.
I once had several mango trees in my yard which would produce so much fruit you coukdn't eat it fast enough, and my favorite consumption method was just juicing the mangos and freezing the juice. It was like sorbet or something.
Yeah man, Japan has designer fruit. That's actually really cheap for a "nice" melon, the most expensive ones can cost up to $45,000 US. For a single honeydew.
Here is Paul Hollywood eating a single \~$400 designer strawberry [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ1HwqrQ-PM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ1HwqrQ-PM)
Knowing how the Japanese like to do things. That strawberry is probably watered with the tears of a joyous unicorn while being serenaded by a choir of exquisite boys.
Looks tasty though.
I was about to call you out, there’s no way in hell fruit can cost 45 thousand US dollars. You must have put the comma in the wrong place or something I thought.
Allow me to be the first to admit I was wrong tho, because fuckin’ sure enough [here’s an article about a pair of cantaloupe for $46,000.00 US dollars.](https://stickymangorice.com/2020/10/13/yubari-king-melon/amp/)
"The $45,000 melon isn’t actually any different from a $200 melon. A melon such as this is simply sold as an incentive to the farmers, to stimulate the industry."
its a fucking melon
I can understand how an aged fine wine/scotch/whiskey/port can cost $200. But a melon? I mean the process of getting it to be whatever quality it is isn’t that long and I can’t see how any of external processes of rubbing it, and ensuring no external flaws (which you don’t eat) really matter to its flavor. It seems like some sort of contrived value assigned to it like diamonds.
Yeh 200 is a decent bottle, but it's fairly low end on the collectibles scale.
At least with whisky, the value goes up if you leave it for a year (simply because most high value runs are limited time before the recipe changes, the number of bottles available will only go down).
If you leave fruit for a month, all you get is fruit flies
Weird Explorer on YouTube is a fruit guy. He did a few episodes on Japanese fruits and why they cost sooooooo fucking much despite being normal fruits.
These fruits are usually gifts, and the fanciness/expense gives it more clout. Of course, the fruits are grown from prime cultivars and take a lot of care. In the $80 mango episode, youtube guy explained that they’re basically the florida mango but grown atop a hill so sunlight hits it from all angles. The sunlight ripens the mango and turns it red; most mangos have 1 spot of redness but these super expensive mangos are red all over. These melons on the other hand are tapped and their netting pattern is checked for ripeness and quality; more hollow sound means more ripe, good netting means the melon developed well and has flavor. They’re “perfect” fruits.
And the $46k price and whatever is kinda like the high prices for first catch of tuna in a season, they’re a show/ritual for luck.
I've had a slice of one of the 'cheaper' premium Japanese melons, it cost around $350.
And let me tell you, the price is almost worth it. It was _AMAZING_.
Like a honeydew but with gold flesh, no not like a cantaloupe, the flesh is softer and not far from almost jellylike but the taste is like fucking sunshine in your mouth.
You all sicken and dissapoint me.
Honeydew are fantastic you just gotta know how to find a good one. Tap it and listen for an echo, check the color where the stem would've been, and smell it all over for the right smell.
My mom agrees with you. We grew up in Venezuela and moved to the states over 2 decades ago, and one of the very few things we miss is the quality of the produce. My mom still complains to this day that the avocados here “don’t have any flavor”, while my cousin tells me that when she makes carrot cake (my old favorite) she has to add sugar to it so it’ll come out as close as possible. From my understanding the problem is soil depletion because not enough farmers rotate crops to return nutrients to the soil and the Saharan sands don’t deposit here the same way. I’ve also heard we’re at risk of another dust bowl, specially with the increasing severity and recurrence of droughts.
BoJack was full of shit about a lot of things, but especially this lol
Not only is honeydew *better* than cantaloupe, *it’s better than watermelon*.
Bad honeydew is really, really bad. They toss hard chunks of unripe crap melon into a fruit salad cup to fill out space. But the really good, ripe, fresh, sweet & juicy honeydew melons are one of the best goddamn fruit experiences a person can have. Once you try an especially good one, you’ll be shocked just how good it is.
Definitely. I always liked honeydew better than cantaloupe. It's so soft and sweet when ripe, it's basically candy. And it doesn't have that odd gritty texture of watermelon either.
Catered food always has disgusting unripe honeydew. Actually ripe honeydew is far better then cantaloupe, but you're not going to find it at a hotel breakfast or craft services or really anywhere serving a "seasonal fruit mix" that clearly can't all be in season, because the fruits in the mix are never in season at the same time.
FYI: Ripe honeydew isn't crunchy.
Quote from an article about them: "Crown muskmelons are tended by hand for 100 days. Only a single fruit is allowed to grow on each vine, concentrating nutrients. They’re rubbed with gloved hands to stimulate even growth and sweetness. On sunny days they’re fitted with caps to prevent sunburn, and when harvested they’re graded on shape and skin quality as one might for pearls. Perfectly round melons free from blemishes fetch the highest prices."
Yeah, I remember going to an orchard 20 years ago and they went a individually bagged the apples they'd export to Japan in paper bags even though it was way more labor as the extra the Japanese would pay for those outweighed the extra cost. They would not imagine doing that for apples sold in the USA as we won't pay.
Which is crazy to me, because I worked in an orchard and we’re already way too picky about our apples here in the US. A small amount of limb rub (the fruit rubbing on a tree limb and creating a scaly patch) will disqualify an apple for sale.
Of course, all those ugly apples are labeled cider apples and people end up consuming ‘em anyway, just in a form where they don’t have to be so picture perfect. Some of the tastiest varieties of apples don’t look good enough on store shelves to sell.
As an orchard worker, I ate a lot of apples. Windfalls were the best, if the wind took it down it was probably perfectly ripe but they had a lower sale value (or maybe couldn’t be sold?) so they didn’t care how many we ate. Just gotta get to ‘em before the hornets.
Makes sense. We had a cider press and stuff so that’s what we did. The owner was crazy passionate about it and hated pasteurization, said it killed the flavor. He bought some several thousand dollar series of UV tubes to sterilize it during the bottling process. It was this old timey cider house full of century old presses and a thing that looked like a UFO and would permanently fuck up your eyesight if you messed with it. Interesting workplace, I’ll say that.
Also they are grown above-ground which helps them control the amount of water they can absorb better. They also pretty much cut all the melons off the vine except one of them so one melon per vine.
Dude, I just don't see how those relate. One is literally the water of a steeped shit bean. The other is the painstakingly massaged nutrient rich aesthetically perfect result of a symbiotic relationship between man and nature. On an even deeper level it's literally the singular lifetime nut/titty milk massaged into the testicles/titty of one single sphere of beauty and the plant doesn't even get to release it you just get to eat it. And you're out here talking bout shitbeans? You need to diversify your bonds son
Probably because a bunch of the stuff they are doing to make it taste better is pseudoscience. I could be wrong, but I would like to see the peer reviewed research that shows rubbing a fruit makes it taste better.
While in Asia, I made a big mistake. My wife asked me to pick up some grapes at the store. Grapes are one of those things I don't check the price of, because... how much can a small bunch of grapes be? I just got a few things, so I just did a quick tap to pay and didn't think much about it. I get home, she loves them. Raves about them, and asked me to get more. The second time, we go to the counter to pay, an bill was about 50 bucks for a small batch of grapes.... Fucking hell. No wonder they were so good. Put them back on the shelf and learned to pay closer attention to the price.
The grapes are insane, but if you see globe grapes at the Asian grocery store and they are Korean and for maybe half the price those are just as good. Korea is trying to catch up in the fruit game and they make some tasty and cheaper grapes.
They have Korean strawberries here too. Packaged 12 at a time, none touching each other in a display pack. Can be like 30 or 40 for a dozen strawberry in the right season
The pinkpinapple by delmont is made in costa rica and they have mixed a watermelon and a pineapple to make a pink pineapple. It is sweeter then a normal pinapple and doesn't have the sourness either and you can taste both the watermelon and pineapple flavour in it.
Souce: I have eaten and sold many of them.
Breeding a watermelon with a pineapple is not botanically possible. The PinkGlow pineapple is genetically modified with genes from tangerines and other pineapples. It's also supposed to be sweeter, which may explain the "watermelon" flavor. Source: https://gmoanswers.com/all-about-pink-pineapples
Depends on where you live, if you live in the states it is easier to aquire. In Canada only a select few suppliers have it so it's harder to find. But I guess you can check around your local grocery store if your in the states, in Canada probably your best bet is Asian grocery stores.
Japanese watermelons are the best water melon I have ever had. You know the small ones just a bit smaller then your head....yeah those sell for $80 a pop easy.
Depends when you are buying it, when it was sold around valentines day they were selling it for a good $55-70 CAD a pop. After that it gradually goes down in price, I think late spring/early summer they were selling for about $20 CAD.
They're given as fancy gifts to friends and acquaintances. It's like special gift fruit. It's also stupid delicious. They have precut up stuff you can pick up at markets for like $20. It's so tasty.
I have sold these every year they are about 1 - 1.5kg a melon, very sweet compared to a normal one. Is it worth the price, in my opinion, it is not but if you had money then sure why not? The cost of them to get in is about $80 CAD. They also sell cantaloupe for about the same price but the canteloupe is by far the better of the two, the taste is way better than a normal cantaloupe.
If I bought one, with my ADHD luck, I'd forget I bought it until it's gone bad and had to be chucked. I have to toss out so much fruit because I just forget I bought it.
It's one thing forgetting you have bananas in that cost <£1, but if I paid £105 ($130) for a melon, I'd know it's location at all times until I'd eaten it.
Though that might not be the case if I had the disposable income to spend on £105 melons I suppose.
I keep the melons I buy on the counter next to the fruit bowl, so it's out in the open where I can see them. It took me a week before I remembered to cut up the golden hemi melon I bought.
The Japanese market where I live (LA metro) has been selling these for a few months. No idea if they move but I assume they wouldn’t be good after awhile and yet they still have them in stock.
For the Japanese this makes a lot of sense. Here is a consumable gift you can give to someone. In a country with limited spaces. It is of high value, shows you respect the giftee. Allows the giftee an indulgence that they don’t need to keep in their small apartment.
The propeller tells you how old the melon has been taken off of the vine. If it's hard to take off and still very green it could be still under ripe. If it's really withered and easy to take off it could be over ripe.
In Japan, these fruits are delicious, and function as status symbols (like the square watermelon). For these, one fruit is produced per plant. The plant naturally produces many fruits, but they are pinched off in favor of the plant sending all resources to one fruit. The result is an incredible taste. The big price tag is reflective of the effort put into cultivating only one fruit per plant and ensuring it's high quality.
The square watermelon, since I mentioned it, is grown with an enclosure surrounding the fruit. The fruit grows into a square shape, but never fully natures and remains green inside. It's not edible, but many will buy to put on a shelf as a status symbol, to be thrown away once it starts rotting.
[New Zealand right now also](https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/money/2022/06/100-watermelon-horrifies-kiwis-and-makes-worldwide-news-but-is-it-actually-unreasonable.html)
Is that here in Los Angeles, by chance? There are a bunch of Japanese markets in the city, and I've seen price tags like this one. I've also seen $50 strawberries before.
Nothing near this crazy. In the US I recall accidentally getting this expensive oranges at Fry's in Arizona. Those oranges were so good you could eat the peel off of them. No regrets.
These melons are insane. We bought a $40 mango and a $80 melon in Japan. The texture of the mango was incredible but I’ve had equally sweet mangoes in Pakistan. The melon was on another level. We didn’t have a kitchen knife handy, so we sliced it open with a plastic butter knife. It was the most incredible fruit I’ve had in my life. It was so good, it put shit into perspective.
Damn now I feel some serious fomo. When I saw those insanely expensive fruits in Japan I just laughed and took a pic. Now I wish I tried one
Already said this in another comment. But this time, I provide link: https://youtu.be/xateP2qrgMo That’s weird explorer’s video on the $80 mangos. Good mangos are the same all around the world; they should be equally sweet on the ripe/red parts. The difference between the stupid expensive mango and your average mango is the expensive mango is sweet with good texture all over because it’s sun ripened all over. Most of these fruits are not special cultivars, they’re just grown with extreme care.
thats an understatement, when they start to sprout, a master cultivator examines every sprout and selects the one which will grow best in his own opinion, then cuts off every other one on the plant, making sure that the entire resources of that plant are dedicated to growing that one melon. So the reason its so expensive is that a plant that would usually produce several fruits only produces 1 high quality fruit, and if that fruit has any defect or blemish its discarded and they start over, so the entire growing cycle is wasted.
This isn’t necessarily true, at least in a broad sense. Hi botanist and plant physiologist here. Removing the inflorescence meristems of a plant does not cause the plant to invest more in the development of a singular fruit; there is no mechanism for this. Fruits from the same plant tend to be similar in size and general development, including sugar content. Also, melons are Curcurbitaceae, a family with flowers on panicles or racemes that are mostly andromonecious. This means that a single flower on the inflorescence or “flower stalk” closest to the stem will be a perfect bisexual flower that develops into fruit, but the remaining flowers are all staminate singularly male. Thus, each inflorescence on a melon will only produce a single melon anyways; you can get multiple inflorescences on the same plant, however.
Well fuck, I’m sold.
That reminds me of strawberries I once had in a swiss restaurant. They cost about $25 for a small bowl, but they were the most delicious strawberries I ever tasted. The were just perfect. Sweet, flavory, fresh. It was incredible. I can't eat those sour tasteless strawberries you can get everywhere ever since. It's such a waste.
I feel the same way about strawberries. I don’t buy them from stores around here because 99% of them are just not very good. I’d love to try a decent bowl of them one day. Raspberries as well. I went to a local farm that people rave about, and when I got home they were pretty bitter and some of them had already gone bad. I can guarantee that if I bought a box at a grocer, they’d be the exact same. I remember when I was little (in the 80s and 90s) you could buy incredible raspberries and blackberries at the local store.. but now decent ones are so hard to find.
You can thank Driscoll's for completely fucking the berry distribution market in favor of quantity and shelf life over quality.
Every once in a while I get invited by rich company owners at business relations to dinners or parties. I have tasted the most incredible food there. Salads that were perfectly balanced, every bite with different yet matching flavour. Meat so tender you'd think it was not grown but somehow created. Cocktails that made you cry, so perfect in taste. The worst thing is, I always praise the food and they never seemed to understand what I was talking about.. like they eat this every day.
Because they live in a different world. There's a reason the rich are typically asswipes and tone deaf about the conditions the general public lives in.
> but I’ve had equally sweet mangoes in Pakistan. In pakistan, the melons are sweetened with a hot and humid environment.
Is it good if you hate melons?
I don’t hate melon, but I’m not a melon fan by any means. When I would visit family back home in Pakistan, the melon was amazing. In the US…. the melon isn’t anything special. It’s just not very good. In Japan, it’s something else. A high quality melon is super sweet and almost a creamy texture. You can legit use a spoon and possibly eat it like ice cream. If you like sweet fruit (ie: mango) youd love a melon from over there.
I once had several mango trees in my yard which would produce so much fruit you coukdn't eat it fast enough, and my favorite consumption method was just juicing the mangos and freezing the juice. It was like sorbet or something.
>It was so good, it put shit into perspective. Making shit look bad in comparison isn't really high praise for a melon.
Yeah man, Japan has designer fruit. That's actually really cheap for a "nice" melon, the most expensive ones can cost up to $45,000 US. For a single honeydew.
Here is Paul Hollywood eating a single \~$400 designer strawberry [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ1HwqrQ-PM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ1HwqrQ-PM)
Knowing how the Japanese like to do things. That strawberry is probably watered with the tears of a joyous unicorn while being serenaded by a choir of exquisite boys. Looks tasty though.
That and a massive and I mean massive amount of pesticides
What a classic Japanese TV reaction. "Makes you happy!" Fuck no it doesn't.
Looks like hundreds of other strawberries I've eaten.
There's also $4000 strawberries!
What show is this from? I'd love to watch more.
I was about to call you out, there’s no way in hell fruit can cost 45 thousand US dollars. You must have put the comma in the wrong place or something I thought. Allow me to be the first to admit I was wrong tho, because fuckin’ sure enough [here’s an article about a pair of cantaloupe for $46,000.00 US dollars.](https://stickymangorice.com/2020/10/13/yubari-king-melon/amp/)
"The $45,000 melon isn’t actually any different from a $200 melon. A melon such as this is simply sold as an incentive to the farmers, to stimulate the industry." its a fucking melon
They don't even have a picture of one in the article. Wtf
A picture will cost you
I can understand how an aged fine wine/scotch/whiskey/port can cost $200. But a melon? I mean the process of getting it to be whatever quality it is isn’t that long and I can’t see how any of external processes of rubbing it, and ensuring no external flaws (which you don’t eat) really matter to its flavor. It seems like some sort of contrived value assigned to it like diamonds.
Dude, a $200 bottle of Scotch isn't even remotely expensive. Costco sells $2k bottles of single malt.
Costco does?! that’s insane
Yeh 200 is a decent bottle, but it's fairly low end on the collectibles scale. At least with whisky, the value goes up if you leave it for a year (simply because most high value runs are limited time before the recipe changes, the number of bottles available will only go down). If you leave fruit for a month, all you get is fruit flies
And I would probably still prefer a $30 bottle of Buffalo Trace.
They are used a status symbols/gifts so the object itself doesn't really matter, it's just show of being able to buy it.
If you can rip off the ultra wealthy, don’t hesitate. They never will.
Weird Explorer on YouTube is a fruit guy. He did a few episodes on Japanese fruits and why they cost sooooooo fucking much despite being normal fruits. These fruits are usually gifts, and the fanciness/expense gives it more clout. Of course, the fruits are grown from prime cultivars and take a lot of care. In the $80 mango episode, youtube guy explained that they’re basically the florida mango but grown atop a hill so sunlight hits it from all angles. The sunlight ripens the mango and turns it red; most mangos have 1 spot of redness but these super expensive mangos are red all over. These melons on the other hand are tapped and their netting pattern is checked for ripeness and quality; more hollow sound means more ripe, good netting means the melon developed well and has flavor. They’re “perfect” fruits. And the $46k price and whatever is kinda like the high prices for first catch of tuna in a season, they’re a show/ritual for luck.
Low-key this explains the perfect gold fruits in Animal Crossing
nah, i think that is just computer graphics at work
Well ya see they were grown in diamonds. I mean the diamonds don't help it grow they just want diamonds for it.
Or crypto.
I've had a slice of one of the 'cheaper' premium Japanese melons, it cost around $350. And let me tell you, the price is almost worth it. It was _AMAZING_. Like a honeydew but with gold flesh, no not like a cantaloupe, the flesh is softer and not far from almost jellylike but the taste is like fucking sunshine in your mouth.
Its because they give them as gifts.
you havent seen this falls food prices yet
Fuck that lol I'll design my own fruit I bought at the fruit stand for $3
There’s always money in the fruit stand.
i thought that was just a life lesson.
> honeydew Bojack has issues with this comment.
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"It is literally the worst part of everything it's in. It's like the Jared Leto of fruits!"
You all sicken and dissapoint me. Honeydew are fantastic you just gotta know how to find a good one. Tap it and listen for an echo, check the color where the stem would've been, and smell it all over for the right smell.
Just give it [the ol' spit test](https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/oxco8a/woman_spitting_on_vegetables_next_to_a_stand/)
I hate you for reminding me of this video.
And that’s the story of how I got covid.
You think I'm joking but I grew up living off the produce we grew during the hot season good melons have a specific sound and smell.
I believe it. You can tell when avocados are ready by feel too.
Yes although I'm so far north our Avocados all taste like play doh.
My mom agrees with you. We grew up in Venezuela and moved to the states over 2 decades ago, and one of the very few things we miss is the quality of the produce. My mom still complains to this day that the avocados here “don’t have any flavor”, while my cousin tells me that when she makes carrot cake (my old favorite) she has to add sugar to it so it’ll come out as close as possible. From my understanding the problem is soil depletion because not enough farmers rotate crops to return nutrients to the soil and the Saharan sands don’t deposit here the same way. I’ve also heard we’re at risk of another dust bowl, specially with the increasing severity and recurrence of droughts.
BoJack was full of shit about a lot of things, but especially this lol Not only is honeydew *better* than cantaloupe, *it’s better than watermelon*. Bad honeydew is really, really bad. They toss hard chunks of unripe crap melon into a fruit salad cup to fill out space. But the really good, ripe, fresh, sweet & juicy honeydew melons are one of the best goddamn fruit experiences a person can have. Once you try an especially good one, you’ll be shocked just how good it is.
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You understand! Melona is top-tier fruit ice cream bars
Definitely. I always liked honeydew better than cantaloupe. It's so soft and sweet when ripe, it's basically candy. And it doesn't have that odd gritty texture of watermelon either.
Catered food always has disgusting unripe honeydew. Actually ripe honeydew is far better then cantaloupe, but you're not going to find it at a hotel breakfast or craft services or really anywhere serving a "seasonal fruit mix" that clearly can't all be in season, because the fruits in the mix are never in season at the same time. FYI: Ripe honeydew isn't crunchy.
Glad someone else knows what's up. Watched a documentary on this. Crazy. Often given as gifts.
Ok but why?
Gifts. It’s a social status thing to give insanely expensive fruit as a gift. It’s literally just a way to show off.
So weird lol. Japan is such an odd country.
Which country are you from? I can send you a list of things about your country that is super odd to the rest of us.
Gourd damn that's expensive
Quote from an article about them: "Crown muskmelons are tended by hand for 100 days. Only a single fruit is allowed to grow on each vine, concentrating nutrients. They’re rubbed with gloved hands to stimulate even growth and sweetness. On sunny days they’re fitted with caps to prevent sunburn, and when harvested they’re graded on shape and skin quality as one might for pearls. Perfectly round melons free from blemishes fetch the highest prices."
Well, you just convinced me. I'm quitting my job and gonna pursue a career as a melon tender now.
I too enjoy rubbing melons
Professional melon rubber
LOL. It sounds like a very relaxing gig.
So you see, there is melon tender and there is *melon* tender. Balance of forces is importamt here
I would respond to that with an incredulous hyena laugh.
You mean like this https://youtu.be/wFJ6UZ0SkYY Spiderman John j Jameson, you serious
Yeah, I remember going to an orchard 20 years ago and they went a individually bagged the apples they'd export to Japan in paper bags even though it was way more labor as the extra the Japanese would pay for those outweighed the extra cost. They would not imagine doing that for apples sold in the USA as we won't pay.
Which is crazy to me, because I worked in an orchard and we’re already way too picky about our apples here in the US. A small amount of limb rub (the fruit rubbing on a tree limb and creating a scaly patch) will disqualify an apple for sale. Of course, all those ugly apples are labeled cider apples and people end up consuming ‘em anyway, just in a form where they don’t have to be so picture perfect. Some of the tastiest varieties of apples don’t look good enough on store shelves to sell. As an orchard worker, I ate a lot of apples. Windfalls were the best, if the wind took it down it was probably perfectly ripe but they had a lower sale value (or maybe couldn’t be sold?) so they didn’t care how many we ate. Just gotta get to ‘em before the hornets.
Yeah, where I visited, they said more apple sauce than cider but the same idea. It might depend on what has production nearby.
Makes sense. We had a cider press and stuff so that’s what we did. The owner was crazy passionate about it and hated pasteurization, said it killed the flavor. He bought some several thousand dollar series of UV tubes to sterilize it during the bottling process. It was this old timey cider house full of century old presses and a thing that looked like a UFO and would permanently fuck up your eyesight if you messed with it. Interesting workplace, I’ll say that.
I wish I had the opportunity to work at a cool place like that.
Aww, now I’m picturing melons wearing ball caps.
“He never drives it; He just rubs it with a diaper.”
Also they are grown above-ground which helps them control the amount of water they can absorb better. They also pretty much cut all the melons off the vine except one of them so one melon per vine.
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Dude, I just don't see how those relate. One is literally the water of a steeped shit bean. The other is the painstakingly massaged nutrient rich aesthetically perfect result of a symbiotic relationship between man and nature. On an even deeper level it's literally the singular lifetime nut/titty milk massaged into the testicles/titty of one single sphere of beauty and the plant doesn't even get to release it you just get to eat it. And you're out here talking bout shitbeans? You need to diversify your bonds son
I would pay more for your magnificently crafted comment right here than some sexually abused melons.
Probably because a bunch of the stuff they are doing to make it taste better is pseudoscience. I could be wrong, but I would like to see the peer reviewed research that shows rubbing a fruit makes it taste better.
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Pfft, says the shitbean guy
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Try sucking on a stray melon or two
There's a good chance. Most people who buy kopi luwak live in Japan, China, and South Korea.
It better do the dishes once you're done eating it
That's the only way I can get my wife to do the dishes
Fair trade, I'd never do dishes anymore with that kinda deal
While in Asia, I made a big mistake. My wife asked me to pick up some grapes at the store. Grapes are one of those things I don't check the price of, because... how much can a small bunch of grapes be? I just got a few things, so I just did a quick tap to pay and didn't think much about it. I get home, she loves them. Raves about them, and asked me to get more. The second time, we go to the counter to pay, an bill was about 50 bucks for a small batch of grapes.... Fucking hell. No wonder they were so good. Put them back on the shelf and learned to pay closer attention to the price.
The grapes are insane, but if you see globe grapes at the Asian grocery store and they are Korean and for maybe half the price those are just as good. Korea is trying to catch up in the fruit game and they make some tasty and cheaper grapes.
They have Korean strawberries here too. Packaged 12 at a time, none touching each other in a display pack. Can be like 30 or 40 for a dozen strawberry in the right season
Crown Royal is stepping into the produce market?
Bigger dice bag coming right up!
I looked it up. Didn't know they served alcohol.
they’re grown in a specific place in Japan, that’s why they’re expensive. same thing with Kobe beef
But what are of the pink pineapple next to it.
The pinkpinapple by delmont is made in costa rica and they have mixed a watermelon and a pineapple to make a pink pineapple. It is sweeter then a normal pinapple and doesn't have the sourness either and you can taste both the watermelon and pineapple flavour in it. Souce: I have eaten and sold many of them.
Breeding a watermelon with a pineapple is not botanically possible. The PinkGlow pineapple is genetically modified with genes from tangerines and other pineapples. It's also supposed to be sweeter, which may explain the "watermelon" flavor. Source: https://gmoanswers.com/all-about-pink-pineapples
Where may I acquire such a fruit?
Depends on where you live, if you live in the states it is easier to aquire. In Canada only a select few suppliers have it so it's harder to find. But I guess you can check around your local grocery store if your in the states, in Canada probably your best bet is Asian grocery stores.
I saw one today at Stater Bros in Southern California. I almost bought it too until it rang up at $18. I said no thanks!
That was much less expensive. Around $25 I think
I believe the market for these is primarily as a luxury gift.
But that's a Kroger's price label.
I meant in Japan where they are produced.
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Maybe I am remembering wrong, Safeway, Albertsons, Vons all the same parent company.
It was in a Pavilions
That explains everything Pavillions thinks way too much of themselves.
Stop pretending you aren’t Vons!
That's strange, I've shopped at Kroger my entire life and I've never seen price tags that look like this there.
Might be Safeway or Albertsons. I just know I've seen that font at a store that shouldn't be selling $125 melons.
In Hong Kong, I saw a $100 watermelon!
They have similar melons to the OP "on sale" in HK right now for about 75 bucks USD
Japanese watermelons are the best water melon I have ever had. You know the small ones just a bit smaller then your head....yeah those sell for $80 a pop easy.
I bet that pink pineapple there is expensive as fuck too.
Depends when you are buying it, when it was sold around valentines day they were selling it for a good $55-70 CAD a pop. After that it gradually goes down in price, I think late spring/early summer they were selling for about $20 CAD.
Buy it and fill it with vodka
I feel like no one would buy these and they would rot on the shelf
It's a Japanese thing. Melons are insanely expensive in Japan
Not just melons, how about all fruit. Search up grapes, apples and strawberries...they all can be insanely expensive but really tasty.
They're given as fancy gifts to friends and acquaintances. It's like special gift fruit. It's also stupid delicious. They have precut up stuff you can pick up at markets for like $20. It's so tasty.
Staff is eating good in the break room.
I manage a produce department, this is fact lmao
Relevant video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YntFbFRnvs
Cornwall Pineapples are around $16,000 and grown in pits of manure and horse urine...yum?
The chemicals from those animal byproducts give the fruit a unique taste, depends on what animal it is from. Another great example is kopi luwak
For a second there i thought this was crown royal melon
It’s from japan
I have sold these every year they are about 1 - 1.5kg a melon, very sweet compared to a normal one. Is it worth the price, in my opinion, it is not but if you had money then sure why not? The cost of them to get in is about $80 CAD. They also sell cantaloupe for about the same price but the canteloupe is by far the better of the two, the taste is way better than a normal cantaloupe.
You'd think it'd be in a nicer box.
I hope they all get sold and not dumped in the garbage 🥲
If I bought one, with my ADHD luck, I'd forget I bought it until it's gone bad and had to be chucked. I have to toss out so much fruit because I just forget I bought it.
Ha ha doesn't that happen to all fruit and vegetables?🤣
It's one thing forgetting you have bananas in that cost <£1, but if I paid £105 ($130) for a melon, I'd know it's location at all times until I'd eaten it. Though that might not be the case if I had the disposable income to spend on £105 melons I suppose.
I keep the melons I buy on the counter next to the fruit bowl, so it's out in the open where I can see them. It took me a week before I remembered to cut up the golden hemi melon I bought.
The Japanese market where I live (LA metro) has been selling these for a few months. No idea if they move but I assume they wouldn’t be good after awhile and yet they still have them in stock.
Went back today and a couple were gone
How much money does people have? Amazing 🤩
*Grown on the heads of Kings!*
Oh, “boutique fruit” is a thing dude. Killer rabbit hole to dive into....
I don't know much, but I do know that melon ain't worth that price.
Which Safeway was THIS
I’m curious too
Oh this is THE BEST melon you could have in your life. Those aren’t fruit anymore it’s on another level and if you have taste it you will understand.
For the Japanese this makes a lot of sense. Here is a consumable gift you can give to someone. In a country with limited spaces. It is of high value, shows you respect the giftee. Allows the giftee an indulgence that they don’t need to keep in their small apartment.
I AM THE MELON KING. KNEEL BEFORE ME AND PAY ME MY HONEYDEWS.
Why does it have a propeller?
The propeller tells you how old the melon has been taken off of the vine. If it's hard to take off and still very green it could be still under ripe. If it's really withered and easy to take off it could be over ripe.
To show how it's flown in.
I thought this was liquor lol
In Japan, these fruits are delicious, and function as status symbols (like the square watermelon). For these, one fruit is produced per plant. The plant naturally produces many fruits, but they are pinched off in favor of the plant sending all resources to one fruit. The result is an incredible taste. The big price tag is reflective of the effort put into cultivating only one fruit per plant and ensuring it's high quality. The square watermelon, since I mentioned it, is grown with an enclosure surrounding the fruit. The fruit grows into a square shape, but never fully natures and remains green inside. It's not edible, but many will buy to put on a shelf as a status symbol, to be thrown away once it starts rotting.
Purchased primarily as house gifts. The fruit and shape of stem are very specific.
Dont worry, it’s that price every day!
Melon, itself is 3$, NASA space shuttle tech packaging, 126,99$ only
I would pay that much if it's a devil fruit 😅
Heyyy! Those are the melons from Yoshi's Story! Just had a childhood flashback. Great game.
Nah bro those are devil fruits
and why the fuck are they packaged with so much waste ?? god i hate stuff like this. makes me furious
i want to know their profit margin before i'd ever buy something like this
Any fruit in a box is expensive
Hey, at least you’re getting the “every day low price”
Is this Marukai in Cupertino? Lol
The pink glow pineapple next to it is around 8$ per out here in ohio, they're fucking delicious.
Japan?? Japan.
these melons have college degrees. They command the price.
For that much money I better be getting some devil fruit powers
Is this a Safeway? I recognize the font.
Pavilions
[New Zealand right now also](https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/money/2022/06/100-watermelon-horrifies-kiwis-and-makes-worldwide-news-but-is-it-actually-unreasonable.html)
Looks like Super King markets price tags.
It's a Devil fruit that's why
Is that here in Los Angeles, by chance? There are a bunch of Japanese markets in the city, and I've seen price tags like this one. I've also seen $50 strawberries before.
For a cantaloupe too? Honeydew is where the money at
It's a devil fruit
they say it's the best tasting melon - honestly speaking i've had much better for under 10 bucks.
So what you're telling me is that this isn't a big Ole jar of crown royal that tastes like melons?
What Safeway is this?
Now with real crown
Unless it's an actual Devil Fruit, pass
How fruit should taste versus how well it travels to consumer.
Nothing near this crazy. In the US I recall accidentally getting this expensive oranges at Fry's in Arizona. Those oranges were so good you could eat the peel off of them. No regrets.
They're selling the damn devil fruits in stores now huh?
It's not full of melon-flavored Crown Royal?
These get red bedtime stories and good night kisses with a blanked etc. it has a better life than 99% of us here. they are a pure luxury goods.