Do you know why the Chinese people who are keen on eating melon seeds

Even if they can speak fluent Chinese, Japanese and Korean people are easy to identify if they want to fake Chinese. If you throw a melon in front of him and see how skillful he is, they will know if he is Chinese.

Why is melon and seed popular in China? The common explanation is that Chinese people need to eliminate it. In the long and idle time, people have developed the preference of eating melon seeds.

However, the explanation of eating seeds without doing anything is not reliable. Compared with other snacks, melon seeds are suitable for time consumption, but not only Chinese people need to spend time. In countries similar to Chinese culture, such as South Korea and Japan, there is no sign of melon seeds.

The question is, how do Chinese people eat melons and seeds?

Unlike sunflower seeds that are popular all over the world today, watermelon seeds were the first to occupy the Chinese. As early as the end of Qing Dynasty, French missionary guberna found that people all over China were eating melon seeds for a long time and high density. "You will think you have come to a rodent kingdom." From watermelon seeds to sunflower seeds

For a long time, Chinese people who had kowtow on the seeds of Western melons did not know what sunflower seeds were.

Sunflower originated in North America, and it was not until the end of the 15th century that Columbus was introduced to the new world, and it was introduced to Europe by the Spanish. But sunflower was introduced to China later. With the Spanish colonization in the Philippines in 1556, sunflower and corn potato were introduced into China as American crops through the South Ocean.

Unlike watermelons, which are popular as soon as they were introduced, sunflowers have been cultivated as ornamental plants for a long time in China, and only sporadically.

It was not until 1930 that the records of large-scale cultivation of sunflowers appeared in Hulan county records of Heilongjiang Province. The reason why Northeast China became a large area of sunflower growing in early period was affected by Russia, except that its climate environment was suitable for sunflower growth.

Sunflower was once an ornamental plant after it was introduced into Russia from Europe. But Russia, which has a shortage of oil crops, soon found that sunflowers are the oil producing materials. With the opening of the Middle East Railway connecting China and Russia in 1903, sunflower was brought into the northeast by the Russians.

But China began to grow sunflowers on a large scale because of the shortage of oil in the difficult period in the early 1960s and the later "grain oriented" era. From 1978 to 1980, the planting area of six northern provinces increased from 3.82 million mu to 12.27 million mu.

Sunflower seeds are not only easier to knock than flat watermelon seeds, but also because of their higher oil content and more attractive taste.

In the era of globalization, why can not melon seeds be successfully exported to foreign countries?

To compare with other nuts, melon seeds have no advantage. Nuts are a snack habit all over the world. Because it is rich in protein, oil, vitamins and minerals, nuts are one of the foods available to human beings in nature and have natural attraction to human beings.

Traditionally, Chinese people seldom eat nuts popular today, such as pine, pistachios, almonds, hazelnuts, cashew nuts. Because except for Xinjiang, the nuts that are popular all over the world today are not produced in China like cashew and pistachios, or pine and hazelnut because of the conflict with farmland, which is difficult to promote. The reason why melon seeds stand out of these nuts is because the cost is low enough.

After the 1980s, melon seeds entered a prosperous era. However, the Chinese after 85 think that only the shops can sell melon seeds. Every cinema, school, park, waiting room and Museum door are squatting at the gate of the museum, which has become a distant legend. On one hand, the reason is that the unsanitary is one reason. In addition, eating melon seeds is a technical activity that requires skilled cooperation between hands and tongue, if there are other alternatives, It's very easy to lose young consumers.