Watermelon Ham

About

Watermelon Ham is a vegan dish served at Ducks Eatery in New York City which is a watermelon prepared as a ham roast. The dish is smoked for eight hours then marinated for four days in a brine of salt, ash and spices. After the dish began spreading on social media, it sparked strong reactions from social media users and trended in food enthusiast communities.

Origin

The dish is prepared by Ducks Eatery in the East Village of Manhattan, New York City.^[1] One of the earliest popular social media posts about the dish was posted by Instagram user ogbubbakushdabs, gaining over 36,000 views (shown below).

Spread

Two days later, the dish was tried by food-centric YouTube channel Brunch Boys, receiving a positive review (shown below, left). On August 7th, 2018, the ham was covered by Food Insider in a video that gained over 375,000 views (shown below, right).

The Food Insider video caught the attention of social media users and Buzzfeed,^[2] who wrote about the phenomenon and compiled Twitter reaction to the dish. User @LastLightSaver tweeted their confusion, gaining over 30 retweets and 160 likes (shown below, left). Twitter user AliffAbdRani did the same, gaining similar numbers (shown below, right). The reactions were also covered by The Daily Dot.^[3]

Online Reactions

Search Interest

External References