Taking Inventory: Melon Slice

Melon slices joined the Minecraft item party in Beta version 1.8 alongside iron bars, brick stairs and rotten flesh. Nice company. They’ve not changed much since then,  but got a retexturing like lots of other blocks and items in the recent 1.14 update.

Want a melon slice? Go smash a melon. Ideally with an axe, but literally anything else will do including your hands. Once pulped, the melon block will drop 3-7 slices – or a few more if you have a tool enchanted with Fortune.

Once obtained, you can put the melon back together with nine slices in a crafting grid. Or just put in one slice to extract the seeds and grow another melon. Oh, and you can eat melon slices too. But you knew that already, right?

If you’re feeling particularly fancy, surround a melon slice with gold nuggets to create a glistering melon slice that can’t be eaten but does dissolve nicely into potions.

Real-world melon slices are just as tasty as the ones in Minecraft. There are lots of different kinds, but they all originated in Africa, Iran and India. The ancient Egyptians were big fans of farming melons, but they were brought to Europe much earlier than that – melon seeds found in sacred wells in Sardinia have been dated back to 1350-1120 BC.

Minecraft’s melon most resembles what we would call a watermelon - with a stripy green outside and bright red interior. In 2017, about two thirds of the world’s watermelons were grown in China, though they originally came from West Africa. 

Here’s a fun fact – watermelons, and in fact all kinds of melon, are actually a type of berry. Specifically, they’re a “pepo” – which is a berry that has a hard outer rind and isn’t internally divided. Other pepos include cucumbers, bananas and coffee.

So next time you’re chowing down on a watermelon with some friends, bust that little factoid that. I can guarantee that they’ll be berry surprised.