Meatless Monday: The Tasty Bite

Tasty Bite with full-size utensils

My latest market find, discovered at CitySeed a couple of Saturdays back, is a melon called the Tasty Bite. Much smaller than the seedless watermelon marketed as a “personal-sized melon,” the Tasty Bite is true to its name — a compact ball packed with a few mouthfuls of sweet deliciousness.

The Tasty Bite is a relatively new melon bred by crossing an ananas (an heirloom melon with a taste reminiscent of pineapple) with a Charentais (a cantaloupe with a juicy, fragrant flesh, that originated in the Poitous-Charentes region of France circa 1920). The result is a cantaloupe-like melon with orange flesh and a green outer ring and an above-average shelf life. The Tasty Bite is ripe 70-80 days from planting, a perfect fit for New England which has a shorter growing season than the Deep South, where a number of locales claim the distinction of being “watermelon capital of the world.” 

Inside a Tasty Bite 

The Tasty Bite is a perfect melon for a lunchbox treat. Look for it at the market while summer is still here. If you have plenty of sun in your yard and want to try to grow it yourself, you will find Tasty Bite at Johnny’s Selected Seeds and a number of other online purveyors.

Enjoy!

Happy Monday. Thanks for reading. 

I often blog on food, food issues, or topics related to growing things on Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal health and the health of our planet.”