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The world does not need out-of-season melons.

If ever a product recall enhanced our lives, it was the recent decision by Canadian and U.S. authorities to block shipments of cantaloupes from Honduras that have been linked to salmonella outbreaks. By taking a stand against disease, the officials who watch over the mass migration of fruit have also found a way to banish dullness from our diets, if only temporarily.

That's not their intention, of course. But until we have a really useful food agency that can figure out a way to protect us from tasteless fruit, we'll have to make the best of the bureaucracy we've got. And any government watchdog that can keep boring imported cantaloupe from tinting the first fruit salads of spring deserves our heartfelt thanks.

As a confirmed opponent of unseasonal cantaloupes, though, I'm more inclined to say, "What took you so long?"

For a couple of weeks every summer, it's possible to taste melons that define the meaning of pleasure. People who don't normally associate the fruit course with shivers of sensual delight stab a morsel of musk or charentais melon and suddenly find themselves quoting the more erotic food similes from the Song of Songs.

To me, this isn't farfetched at all. It's exactly the kind of primeval physical response ripe fruit is meant to produce. When you breathe in the melon's heavy perfume or feast on the honeyed succulence of its sun-warmed flesh, it's a reminder that evolutionary success, for both us and the melon, doesn't have to be some grim Darwinian battle for survival.

Tell that to the cantaloupe exporters. They see us as soulless, pleasure-denying suckers who can't live without watery cubes of orangish pulp in the eternal-summer diets of our make-believe world.

They have no compunction about sending us their unripe fruit that can do one thing and one thing alone: travel thousands of miles without bruising or going soft. This, it need hardly be said, is actually a bad thing in a melon, which is at its best at the very point when it is most delicate.

The cantaloupe and its mutant sibling, the equally dull honeydew melon, aren't the only out-of-season fruits that deserve the old heave-ho. But somehow they manage to escape the scorn that rains down on grotesque, over-inflated strawberries - being boring, everyday melons, they just keep turning up without much expectation or justification, as if having a vague sweetness were good enough.

And perhaps it is, for those who don't know any better, who think every tomorrow should be just like yesterday. But for anyone who knows what a real melon can and should taste like, these pale imitations can't disappear fast enough.