Why Has the Sweetness of Childhood Disappeared?
Foodthink Says
As melon and fruit varieties evolve at breakneck speed, why has Baituwa been shut out of the mainstream? Why, despite being deeply loved by consumers, did it not ultimately survive?
As fruit cultivation grows ever more large-scale and commercialised, and sales shift increasingly online and over longer distances, competition in the mainstream market has become an arms race in which “big producing regions devour small ones” and “big varieties devour small ones”. Intolerant of chemical fertiliser, ill-suited to storage and transport, not quite “aesthetically pleasing” enough in looks… varieties like this seem destined to lose the race. The turnover of varieties may favour large-scale commercial cultivation and distribution, but for consumers it is not the best outcome. We hope and believe that since consumers still want these old varieties, they will ultimately find a way to survive.
On International Seed Day, 26 April, Foodthink takes this opportunity to urge readers to pay attention to old varieties. They may be nameless in the written word, yet they are kept alive in the words and hands of farmers. For it is precisely these diverse rather than uniform seeds that are safeguarding the very foundations of our entire food system.
This article is jointly supported by Foodthink’s Lianhe Creative Programme and the Farmers’ Seed Network.
An old farmer returns from the market with two plump muskmelons. They are an old variety from the Guanzhong region called “Baituwa”: white-skinned, with the front end slightly smaller than the back, so that seen from a distance they look just like a white rabbit crouching on the ground—hence the name.
“I just love Baituwa,” the old farmer says with a smile.
In Guanzhong, villagers are accustomed to calling Baituwa “pear melon” rather than “muskmelon”—the latter sounds more like what people in the city call it. Although in everyday life the two names are often used interchangeably, another farmer who once grew Baituwa says, “The ones we grow here are all ‘pear melons’—a little longer than muskmelons, which are round.” The name “pear melon” carries an earthy charm, stirring warm memories of life in days gone by.
I. The Past and Present of Baituwa
When a farming cooperative in Gaoling District, Xi’an, promotes its home-grown Baituwa, it takes pains to recall the old days of eating melons:
“…Back then, we ate pear melons rather heartily. Perhaps because a pear melon was nowhere near the size of a watermelon, it never got a watermelon’s treatment—there was no need for the ceremony of setting it on a board and carefully slicing it into neat wedges with a knife. Those who were a little fussy would scoop up a ladle of water to rinse it; those who weren’t would just rub it on their palm. Fussy or not, the next step was the same: set the pear melon on one palm, raise the other hand high, and chop down with the edge of your palm if you had the strength, or smash it with a fist if you didn’t. Usually the melon split into two wildly uneven halves. You took one half in each hand, gave it a casual shake to toss out the seeds inside, and started gobbling mouthful after mouthful. The un-fussy ones ate the skin too; the fussy ones gnawed the flesh clean, leaving just a thin layer of rind behind.”
In Lantian, Shaanxi, Baituwa is typically grown one season per year. Sowing generally takes place around Qingming, and the melons can be harvested roughly forty to fifty days later; some growers intercrop Baituwa with watermelons. Once the harvest is done, they follow on with wheat, radish or spinach.
For small-scale melon farmers, growing just over a mu of Baituwa currently brings in around seven or eight thousand yuan. While the overall profit is not especially high, the return is still quite substantial compared with growing staple crops.
Yet as new varieties together with pesticides and chemical fertiliser were introduced on a large scale, and ever more market-mature, higher-profit fruit and melon varieties flooded the market, the old varieties suffered a severe blow. Baituwa, too, gradually retreated from the shelves of the city, glimpsed now and then only as a stray presence at rural markets.
The villagers of Yujiagou in Yehu Town, Lantian, say that twenty-odd years ago, nearly every household in the village grew melons. Now, however, fewer and fewer do. Last year the only household still growing Baituwa decided not to carry on because the returns were too poor.
“We get plenty of wild animals coming to eat the melons—wild boar, raccoon dogs—so people don’t want to grow them any more.”
On the other hand, many of the village’s pear melon plots were converted to Chinese white pine. Before long, those trees proved a heavy loss for the locals, and most farmers dug them up to plant crops instead, so the traces of Baituwa grew ever harder to find.
Baituwa may no longer be seen often in the city, but the demand for it persists. In some areas around Xi’an, Baituwa is still grown—both by individual smallholders and by specialised agricultural cooperatives—and in Yanliang, Gaoling District, and other places it has become a local speciality crop.
II. Is the “Aerospace” Baituwa Still the Original Old Variety?
During the collectivisation period, seed for old-variety Baituwa was saved by the farmers themselves—collecting the seeds from ripe melons, washing and drying them, and setting them aside for the following year. But according to melon farmers in Yujiagou Village, today’s Baituwa seeds all come from the county seed company, or from packets sold at seed-and-fertiliser shops run by private businesses in the towns and villages.
However, when I went to the local seed company looking for Baituwa seed, I found that the packaging bore no mention of “Baituwa” at all—instead it was stamped with the words “F1 Aerospace”. The manufacturer told me these were not aerospace seeds; “F1 Aerospace” was probably just there to create an impression of high technology.
Moreover, the place of origin printed on the packaging was not Shaanxi but Gansu. Yet local farmers said that when they buy, they rarely pay much attention to the details on the packet. As long as they can confirm it is “Baituwa”, they still regard it as their local old variety.
So what exactly counts as an “old variety”?
By definition, an old variety is one that has been domesticated and preserved by farmers themselves over generations, adapting to local conditions; its formal name is landrace. From a modern genetic standpoint, old varieties typically possess greater genetic diversity than newly bred varieties, and it is this diversity that underpins the richness of traits within a species.
Yet ordinary people, when they speak of an “old variety”, rarely think in scientific terms.
When older folk recall Baituwa, they invariably stress the taste they remember. A grandmother in her seventies was unstinting in her praise of Baituwa: “This is our local melon—crisp and sweet, and you can eat the skin too.” Glancing at a beautifully packaged muskmelon her daughter had bought from a city market, she muttered that the Xinjiang melons sold in the city now were cloyingly sweet. “Not like Baituwa—after you’ve finished one, your throat doesn’t scratch and your mouth doesn’t feel sore.” Whenever she and her husband spot Baituwa at the market, they buy a few to taste.
An old farmer in a village on the outskirts of Xi’an told me: “People round here prefer the old varieties, because the new ones are GMO. We’ve eaten Baituwa so much that we’re used to this variety.”
In truth, none of the muskmelon varieties sold locally, Baituwa included, are genetically modified. Yet many farmers cannot tell one new breeding technology from another and simply lump them all together under the label “GMO”, reacting with alarm at the mere mention, often accompanied by talk of GMOs possibly affecting fertility.
Compared with several decades ago, the composition of fertilisers has also shifted. Although some growers still prefer farmyard manure to preserve the flavour of Baituwa, others use a moderate amount of chemical fertiliser. This stems not only from concerns about chemical fertiliser but also from a desire for better melon flavour.
An old-timer from Jingyang recalled Baituwa thus: “They’re delicious, but you mustn’t use chemical fertiliser. The moment you apply fertiliser, they look beautiful, but they have no taste.”
A farmer in Lantian County who grows Baituwa told me he had once used chemical fertiliser but ultimately chose chicken manure and other farmyard manure instead. Although chemical fertiliser can boost yields, melons grown with farmyard manure taste sweeter and better. And it is not only melons—as long as the crop is mainly for the family’s own table and they are not chasing yields, most villagers still prefer farmyard manure.
Moreover, farmyard manure itself has changed. Growers told me they now mostly use chicken manure. In the past, farmyard manure comprised not only pig, cow, chicken and sheep dung but also night soil, typically mixed with earth and blended with a generous amount of wood ash. But today, almost nobody still uses night soil or wood ash.
III. Muskmelons in the Age of Commercialisation
On the one hand, Baituwa is intensely seasonal and cannot be supplied year-round. On the other, its growers have always been scattered smallholders: too few and too small to enter the logistics networks of urban wet markets, which demand a steady, reliable supply. Baituwa is sold mainly at rural markets across the Guanzhong region. Consequently, many smallholders, finding the melon labour-intensive and poorly rewarded, have gradually abandoned it.
Meanwhile, specialist growing cooperatives built around local specialities have become the main force behind old-variety muskmelons, though their market positioning and sales channels differ sharply from those of smallholder growers. The marketing model adopted by Yanliang’s Baituwa cooperatives has been particularly successful: by selling through e-commerce platforms and livestreaming, they lead in volume and have delivered significant economic gains to the area.
These professional growers are also developing newer, upmarket muskmelon varieties. At the 2024 China Yangling International Agricultural Hi-Tech Fair in Shaanxi, a new variety of Yanliang muskmelon was showcased. Unlike the smallholders’ Baituwa—narrow at the front, wider at the back—this one is a neatly symmetrical oval, evenly and attractively white with a faint, elusive green beneath. Its packaging is equally exquisite. A staff member explained that it is called the “Crispy Pear”, and that its pricing and target market are pitched higher than the smallholders’ Baituwa.
IV. Old Varieties, Why Do You Stir My Heart So?
After decades of change, Baituwa’s characteristics remain broadly the same as those in people’s memories of the old variety, but the cultivation techniques and operating structures of today have shifted enormously. At the same time, the socioeconomic foundations that once sustained this old variety have also been upended.
The historian of technology Francisca Bray argues that technology is itself a form of culture—the product of the constellation of social conditions and social demands it draws upon within a particular context. And so, when a variety has long since been uprooted from the social environment in which it first emerged, we may find it very hard to say that it is still the Baituwa of our memories.
But whether or not Baituwa has changed, this old variety, stretching across time and space, offers an emotional connection that no new variety can match. For those who know Baituwa, every mention of it seems to tug one’s thoughts back to a far-off time and place.
It is local, it is nostalgic, and it carries the weight of rural culture and collective memory. The author of the prose piece The Muskmelon and the Boy writes in Baituwa’s own voice, recalling how, during the collectivisation era, a whole family would gather round the table to eat melon together: “On a night of stars and moon, I arrived at the dinner table glowing with a soft jade light, letting the boy’s family savour to the full my clean sweetness, my refreshing crispness. Even my fragrant, rich pulp was cradled in mother’s hands while the greedy little boy licked it spotless.”
Perhaps the true charm of old varieties lies in this: they always remind us of a way of life in which people and their labour, people and the land, were deeply intertwined. Back then, labour was part of life itself, and the plants that sprouted from the soil were the medium through which growers felt their own emotions and understood the natural world. Long, patient tending and careful nurture finally yielded, on the tongue, that interlocking sweetness, juice by juice—especially precious in those years of scarcity.
But today, when we fancy a muskmelon, the market offers us so many commodities to choose from that we can pick one out and pay for it in barely fifteen minutes. Compared with the fruit of our own labour, its timeline feels thin, its memories ever briefer.
The philosopher of technology Wang Xiaowei argues that technologies such as food delivery and smartphones, even as they weave themselves into our daily lives, are gradually stripping us of the texture of those very lives. Under the logic of modern technology, food seems to be little more than fuel to fill the stomach and guarantee nutrition, and the bond between people and food becomes negligible.
And so, when people reach out to old varieties in memory and in purchase, the old varieties themselves may no longer be what matters most. What we truly try to recover is a vital need to be connected with the land and its plants—a longing to feel again the weather, the soil, the green surge of life, and the harmony of our own labour and our own life woven into one.
As the seas turn to mulberry fields and times shift beyond recognition, Baituwa may one day be buried beneath ever more modern-bred varieties; yet the moment people hear the name “Baituwa”, it still calls up the shape of a white rabbit and the taste of crisp sweetness.
2. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/xO0ES33CeX3IVDcYXWsKsQ
3. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/t2hiYt3ktEbUnoZuk8xGSw
4. Institute of Folk Culture, Beijing Normal University: Francisca Bray—Technology as Culture, https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/687162223
5. Wang Xiaowei: The Depths of the Everyday—Returning to Harmony Between People and Technology, https://new.qq.com/rain/a/20240202A0673V00
About the Lianhe Creative Programme
After multiple rounds of interviews conducted by six judges, 18 creative projects were ultimately selected to receive support from Foodthink’s Lianhe Creative Programme, of which six have already been published:
“Ame the Cleaner, Who Wants to Eat Properly | A Worker’s Table”
“In Malaysia, Chinese Traders Want Only Grade-A Durian”
“‘Fake Meat’ Drives Out the Real Thing: Herders, the Dining Table and the Amazon”
With thanks to Yidao for assistance with the ecology of old varieties in this article.
Editor: Wang Hao