China's exploding watermelon problem

From The Guardian:

The flying pips, shattered shells and fleshy shrapnel still haunt farmer Liu Mingsuo after an effort to chemically boost his fruit crop went spectacularly wrong. Field after field of watermelons exploded when he and other agricultural workers in eastern China mistakenly applied forchlorfenuron, a growth accelerator.

"Exploding watermelons put spotlight on Chinese farming practices" (Thanks, Jim Leftwich!)

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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millie fink

You should see what they put in the plastic stuff they make and sell us. Really, you should. We all should, but yeah, we can’t.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7X-J1DhfjE
Gbaji

The Banzai Institute is working on the problem.
Ugly Canuck

Stuff like this really twists my melon.
redesigned

if you drill a hole in one of those watermelons and put it in the oven to warm it up, you are guaranteed to enlarge your penis. it’s true, my spam told me so.
Anonymous

The most galling comment. Farmers grow the food they are going to eat separate from the chemically contaminated crops they are going to sell ie. they won’t poison their own families but they are more than happy to poison yours as long as there is a buck in it.
Anonymous

Watermelons aren’t quite pumpkins, but sounds like they’re being weaponized. From the pilot episode of the megacorp workplace satire “Better Off Ted”:

Veronica: We want to weaponize a pumpkin.
Ted: Then so do I. Because?
Veronica: There’s a country with whom we do business that grows a great deal of pumpkins and would welcome additional uses for them. As well as cheaper ways to kill their enemies.
Ted: Well, finally the pumpkin gets to do something besides Halloween.
Veronica: Pie.
Ted: Halloween and pie.
Anonymous

I’ll bet this was part of that massive amount of “certified organic” produce we import from China.
Nadreck

Is this how the Green Goblin got those pumpkins of his to explode?
Anonymous

Would it rain too much on your “china bad” -parade to point out that even farmers who hadn’t used the chemicals had their watermelons explode?
- demidan
  
  Link or it didn’t happen.
  - Anonymous
    
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13421374
    
    “According to the Xinhua news agency, 20 farmers in a village in Jiangsu province planted imported seeds from Japan, with 10 households saying their watermelons began exploding last month.
    
    Farmer Liu Mingsuo told Xinhua that more than two-thirds of his crop had blown up.
    
    He said he had used chemicals to boost their growth on 6 May, and the following day more than 180 melons exploded. Mr Liu was reported to be the only farmer from the 10 households who used chemicals.”
Anonymous

In the very least, this illustrates the need to ban ALL food imports from China.
simonbarsinister

Yeah, right… “mistakenly” applied a growth accelerator.
At least it wasn’t Melamine in the baby formula this time.

Made in China, Yay!
- billstewart
  
  I once tried to grow Chinese Long Squash, and I used fertilizer, which turned out to be a mistake. This was in New Jersey, with reasonably good soil and summer rains, and I was out of town for a few weeks and came back to find a third of my lawn covered with squash vines, baseball-bat-sized squash on the porch roof and 15 feet up in the pine trees, making it dangerous to walk underneath. They weren’t very edible, just as zucchini aren’t if you let them grow too big, but they were pretty scary.
  - the Other michael
    
    upvoted
- Gutierrez
  
  Made in China, try made in the USA: “It has been approved for use on kiwi fruit and grapes in the USA.”
Rich Keller

They’ve managed to find a way to bypass Gallager altogether.