Something of a food theme to this page for this month. We start in China, where there have been some rather rum goings on of late. In Jiangsu province, for instance, farmers have been "left perplexed" by exploding watermelons. Some have blamed the phenomenon on the over-use of "a chemical that helps fruit grow faster" - isn't that what we generally expect of a fertiliser? -but that doesn't explain why farmers who didn't use chemicals on their fruit also suffered. Perhaps it's the Japanese to blame - some 10 out of20 farmers in one village who were affected by the epidemic had bought seeds from Japan.
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