How many salads can you make with an 88-pound cucumber? Some (un)lucky Brazilians may soon find out.
The giant vegetable -- which is reportedly 1.15 meters (3 feet 9 inches) thick, 70 cm (2 feet 4 inches) long and weighs about 40 kilograms -- was recently spotted at a market in the Vila Palmeira neighborhood of the northeast city of São Luís.
Antônio Carlos Jr., who was given the cucumber by his father-in-law, decided to display the vegetable in the front of his store at the market. He said some people don't believe it's actually a cucumber and think it's a watermelon, according to the city's O Imparcial newspaper.
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Stephen Reiners, an associate professor of horticulture at Cornell University, told The Huffington Post there's a pretty good chance it's not actually a cucumber: "My guess is that it was not a cucumber but may have been in with some seeds that they thought were cucumbers and instead it was an entirely different species of watermelon or squash."
No one has tasted the "cucumber" yet, but Carlos plans to cut it up and distribute it among the townspeople to make salads, photographer Karlos Geromy (who captured the above photo) explained to HuffPost in an email. But even if it is a cucumber, one that large "would be of terrible quality," Rainers said, adding that it would taste "more like eating cotton as it would be extremely fibrous."
Geromy said the seeds that grew this cucumber came from the city of Itarantim and previously grew another cucumber that weighed about 6 kilograms (13 pounds). He added that an agricultural engineer thinks the cucumber's size may be due to a genetic mutation.
For reference, a typical U.S. cucumber is only about 8 inches long and weighs half a pound, according to Michael Mazourek, a professor of plant breeding, also at Cornell.
"Environment is a huge factor in plant size," Mazourek told HuffPost.
Other giant cucumbers have appeared on the Internet in the past, but this Brazilian veggie may be the world's heaviest if it does indeed check out.
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