Is A Watermelon That's Split In The Center Safe To Eat?

You've gone through the whole rigmarole. You picked a watermelon from the pile at your local grocers or farmers market and toted it to your car and into your kitchen to slice. The whole time, your mind prepares for the inevitable joy and delight of cutting your melon into sticks, cubes, triangles, or whatever shape you so please, colorful flesh bursting with juicy flavor. But then, when you actually cut into the fruit, instead of finding a juicy interior, you're met with a split center. The split can vary in size, from a small slit to a large gap with the interior fruit divided into several sections. For many watermelon enjoyers, a split center may be off-putting or even concerning. One might be left to wonder whether or not these split melons are even safe to eat.

If safety is your concern, you need not worry, as split center watermelons, also called hollow heart watermelons, are completely safe to eat. In fact, they might even be sweeter than your average watermelon. So what causes a hollow heart in a watermelon? Let's dig in. Simply put, that split in your melon is caused by a lack of proper pollination. The phenomenon is most likely to impact seedless varieties of watermelon, and is more likely to occur in fruits that have been placed more than six feet apart from a pollinizer plant during growth. If a watermelon plant isn't properly pollinated, it won't be able to fully mature, thus it is more likely to have a hollow heart.

While hollow heart watermelons are perfectly safe to eat, they might not be what you're after when picking out the perfect melon. Luckily, there are a few things you can look out for in order to ensure your melon has a solid interior. Hollow heart melons are more likely in seedless varieties. So look for seeded watermelons when picking your fruit. Hollow heart also occurs more often in orange or yellow watermelons as opposed to red watermelons, so go for the latter. Besides weeding out hollow heart from solid melons, there are a few other aspects to consider if you'd like to pick out the ripest fruit possible.  

For starters, it's important to remember that watermelon is a seasonal fruit. Melons will be most ripe in the summer, with the season ranging from May all the way to September. So melons will be best during this window. Besides this, there are also some clues that will tell you what you need to know to pick the tastiest watermelon at the store. You'll want to look out for a solid patch of yellow on the bottom of your watermelon. A yellow spot indicates that the fruit is fully ripe, whereas an unripe melon will have a green or pale patch. If you buy a melon with a green patch hoping that it will fully ripen in a few days, it wont: Watermelons don't mature after harvest. In terms of texture, your melon should be firm and have a deep hollow sound when tapped. Keep these signs in mind next time you pick a melon.