Heart-shaped cucumbers up close

Heart-shaped cucumbers made news last summer, but I just recently found them in my local grocery story, a discovery which prompted a little more research into these strangely shaped salad staples.

As it turns out, they are grown by a co-op of nine women called Heartstick Ojaru in Chiba (a suburb of Tokyo) using plastic molds affixed to the stem of the plant, which create heart and star shapes visible when the cucumber is sliced cross-wise.

Compared to the square melons that made headlines a couple of years back, which were designed by vegetable growers to make melons easier to transport and stock, these creative cucumbers are representative of what appears to be a grass roots effort to make meal preparation a little bit more exciting for suburban housewives.

In addition to being more fun, they are also considerably cheaper. One cucumber runs only ¥105 (about 2-3 times the price of a normal one) and , as the product website demonstrates, the creative applications are endless.