Bending Nature to Our Will

• Posted on July 14, 2011
• by Karen Fayeth
• 14 Comments

So if you were to, say, go to Google Images and put in the word “square” you’ll end up with a screen full of images of this:

Square watermelons.

Why, you might ask? Well. The story goes that in Japan (you knew this had to be from Japan, right?) they don’t have much retail space in grocery stores. It’s hard to stock round or oblong watermelons because they are tough to stack and take up a lot of room.

Use a little ingenuity and bring on the square watermelon! Easy to stack, easy to store.

Making the melons square is fairly easy, just put the fruit in a box as it grows, the same way they get a pear in a bottle of brandy.

And for this special hand boxed hand-picked fruit, grocers charge 10,000 yen, or using today’s exchange rate, about $126. Yikes.

Why am I nattering on about square watermelons? Because today’s Theme Thursday just happens to be “square”, of course!

Details from BBC News.

Photos from all over the web, but these both come from Financial Hack.