This Kiwifruit Isn’t From New Zealand at All. It’s Chinese, and This Is How It Got Hijacked 這種獼猴桃根本不是新西蘭產(chǎn)的。它是中國的，這就是它被劫持的原因
時代雜志版本
he kiwifruit may be New Zealand’s defining agricultural product, generating a handsome $1.05 billion in exports for the country in 2015, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But how the South Pacific nation came to claim the exotic, fuzzy fruit with soft, green flesh and a unique taste is a story that combines considerable luck and a stroke of marketing genius.
The erstwhile Chinese gooseberry, as its archaic English name suggests, finds its root a hemisphere away in China. Its original name in Chinese, mihoutao — “macaque fruit” — refers to the monkeys’ love for it, according to the 16th century Chinese medicine encyclopedia, the Compendium of Materia Medica.
The kiwifruit’s status as a transplant might not come as a surprise for many readers. After all, the story of one of the world’s greatest marketing and botanical hijacks has been vaguely circulating for decades, from a New York Times item about trade in New Zealand over 30 years ago to a TIME column about branding and psychology in 2010.
But the scant documentary evidence of how the fruit made it across the Pacific has given an apocryphal flavor to a tale that is, in fact, all too real.
“There is no formal history of the kiwifruit industry in print, so we have to patch together information about the past from multiple sources,” Hugh Campbell, a sociology professor at New Zealand’s University of Otago, tells TIME by email. He co-authored the entry on the kiwifuit in Te Ara, the official New Zealand online encyclopedia.
Historical consensus — as presented on New Zealand’s official history website — suggests that the first seeds arrived on New Zealand at the turn of the 20th century.
It all began in 1904, when Mary Isabel Fraser, the principal of an all-girls school, brought back some Chinese gooseberry seeds from China. They were then given to a farmer named Alexander Allison who, planted them in his farm near the riverine town of Whanganui. The trees went on to bear their first fruit in 1910.
New Zealand’s appropriation of the Chinese gooseberry wasn’t inevitable. Around the same time the first seeds were introduced to New Zealand, the species was in fact also experimented with as a commercial crop both in the U.K. and the U.S., wrote New Zealand plant physiologist Ross Ferguson, one of the world’s top kiwifruit researchers, for Arnoldia, the magazine of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum.
But, as luck would have it, neither the British nor the American attempt at commercializing the fruit was as fruitful. For example, the first batch of seeds brought to Britain’s Veitch Nursery all produced male plants, thwarting the growers’ plans to produce edible fruit. The same fate befell the U.S. government’s attempt. “It seems ironic that the sending of seed by a missionary to an amateur gardener should eventually lead to a new horticultural industry, when the efforts of the Veitch Nursery and the U.S. Department of Agriculture were so much less successful,” Ferguson remarked in his 1983 essay.
The gooseberry’s rebranding didn’t happen until almost 50 years after Allison’s trees bore fruit, according to New Zealand’s official history, when agricultural exporter Turners & Growers started calling their U.S.-bound Chinese gooseberries “kiwifruits” on June 15, 1959.
The fruit’s importer told Turners & Growers that the Chinese gooseberry needed a new name to be commercially viable stateside, to avoid negative connotations of “gooseberries,” which weren’t particularly popular. After passing over another proposed name, melonette, it was finally decided to name the furry, brown fruit after New Zealand’s furry, brown, flightless national bird. It also helped that Kiwis had become the colloquial term for New Zealanders by the time.
Demand for the fruit started to take off, and by the 1970s, the name kiwifruit took root across the Chinese gooseberry trade, cementing its popular imagination as the quintessential New Zealand product. All this happened while China was busy tearing its own social fabric to pieces, during the decade of terror that was the Cultural Revolution.
“I think it was a matter of luck and suitable climate” that the fruit thrived in New Zealand, Ferguson tells TIME. Now an honorary fellow at the New Zealand Institute for Plant & Food Research, he helped classify the Actinidia deliciosa — the furry, green kiwifruit — as a separate species in the 1980s.
Large-scale cultivation of the kiwifruit can now be found in many countries, including the U.S., Italy and — ironically — China, which became the world’s top kiwifruit producer by 2014, and where the fruit is commonly used to make jam. But much of the kiwifruit grown worldwide can be traced back to Alexander Allison’s Whanganui farm — so much so that the Pacific nation had to try to halt the export of kiwi plants at one point, in order to reduce potential competition on the global market.
Today, even parts of the Chinese-speaking world call the fruit by a partial transliteration of its Oceanic moniker. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, at least, it’s known as strange fruit — qi yi guo in Mandarin, or kei yi gwo in Cantonese. (Google searches of mihoutao still turns up considerable results, but mostly confined to web pages from the People’s Republic.)
And how deliciously ironic that unscrupulous Chinese traders have tried to pass off domestically grown kiwifruits as imports.
根據(jù)美國農(nóng)業(yè)部的數(shù)據(jù)，獼猴桃可能是新西蘭的標(biāo)志性農(nóng)產(chǎn)品，2015年為該國出口了10.5億美元。但這個南太平洋國家是如何聲稱這種異國情調(diào)的、毛茸茸的水果的，它有柔軟的綠色果肉和獨特的味道，這是一個結(jié)合了相當(dāng)大的運氣和營銷天才的故事。
正如其古老的英文名字所暗示的那樣，昔日的中國醋栗在半個半球之外的中國找到了它的根。根據(jù)16世紀的中醫(yī)百科全書《本草綱目》，它的中文原名“獼猴果”是指猴子對它的喜愛。
獼猴桃作為移植植物的地位可能不會讓許多讀者感到驚訝。畢竟，幾十年來，世界上最大的營銷和植物劫持事件之一的故事一直在模糊地流傳，從30多年前《紐約時報》關(guān)于新西蘭貿(mào)易的文章到2010年《時代》雜志關(guān)于品牌和心理學(xué)的專欄。
但是，關(guān)于這種水果是如何穿越太平洋的文獻證據(jù)不足，這給一個事實上太真實的故事增添了一種杜撰的味道。
新西蘭奧塔哥大學(xué)的社會學(xué)教授休·坎貝爾通過電子郵件告訴《時代周刊》：“沒有正式的獼猴桃產(chǎn)業(yè)歷史印刷品，所以我們必須從多個來源拼湊過去的信息?！薄Ｋc人合著了新西蘭官方在線百科全書Te Ara中關(guān)于獼猴桃的條目。
新西蘭官方歷史網(wǎng)站上的歷史共識表明，第一批種子是在20世紀初抵達新西蘭的。
這一切始于1904年，當(dāng)時一所女子學(xué)校的校長瑪麗·伊莎貝爾·弗雷澤從中國帶回了一些獼猴桃種子。然后，它們被交給了一位名叫亞歷山大·艾利森的農(nóng)民，他把它們種在了靠近河岸城鎮(zhèn)旺甘努伊的農(nóng)場里。1910年，這些樹結(jié)出了第一個果實。
新西蘭對中華獼猴桃的侵占并非不可避免。世界頂級獼猴桃研究人員之一、新西蘭植物生理學(xué)家羅斯·弗格遜在哈佛大學(xué)阿諾德植物園雜志《Arnoldia》上寫道，大約在第一批種子被引入新西蘭的同時，該物種實際上也在英國和美國作為一種商業(yè)作物受到了考驗。
但是，幸運的是，英國和美國將這種水果商業(yè)化的嘗試都沒有取得如此豐碩的成果。例如，第一批帶到英國維奇苗圃的種子都是雄性植物，這阻礙了種植者生產(chǎn)可食用水果的計劃。美國政府的嘗試也遭遇了同樣的命運。弗格森在1983年的文章中說：“具有諷刺意味的是，當(dāng)維奇苗圃和美國農(nóng)業(yè)部的努力不那么成功時，傳教士向業(yè)余園丁發(fā)送種子最終會導(dǎo)致一個新的園藝產(chǎn)業(yè)?！薄?br />
根據(jù)新西蘭官方歷史，獼猴桃的品牌重塑直到Allison的樹結(jié)果近50年后才發(fā)生，當(dāng)時農(nóng)業(yè)出口商Turners&Growers于1959年6月15日開始將他們運往美國的中國獼猴桃稱為“獼猴桃”。
該水果的進口商告訴Turners&Growers，中國醋栗需要一個新名字才能在美國商業(yè)上可行，以避免“醋栗”的負面含義，因為“醋栗”并不特別受歡迎。在通過了另一個擬議的名字“melonette”后，最終決定以新西蘭毛茸茸的棕色不會飛的國鳥命名這種毛茸茸的棕色水果。這也有助于新西蘭人成為當(dāng)時新西蘭人的口語術(shù)語。
對獼猴桃的需求開始起飛，到20世紀70年代，獼猴桃這個名字在中國獼猴桃貿(mào)易中扎根，鞏固了其作為典型新西蘭產(chǎn)品的流行形象。所有這一切都發(fā)生在中國忙于將自己的社會結(jié)構(gòu)撕成碎片的十年恐怖時期，即文化大革命。
“我認為這是一個幸運的問題和適宜的氣候”，水果生活在新西蘭，弗格森告訴時代?，F(xiàn)在，他是新西蘭植物與食品研究所的名譽研究員，在20世紀80年代幫助將美味獼猴桃（一種毛茸茸的綠色獼猴桃）歸類為一個單獨的物種。
獼猴桃的大規(guī)模種植現(xiàn)在可以在許多國家找到，包括美國、意大利和中國，具有諷刺意味的是，中國在2014年成為世界上最大的獼猴桃生產(chǎn)國，獼猴桃通常用于制作果醬。但全球種植的獼猴桃大多可以追溯到亞歷山大·艾利森的旺格努伊農(nóng)場，以至于這個太平洋國家不得不一度停止出口獼猴桃植物，以減少全球市場的潛在競爭。
今天，即使是部分講漢語的國家也用“海洋”這個名字的部分音譯來稱呼這種水果。至少在香港和臺灣，它被稱為奇怪的水果-在普通話中的奇一果，或在粵語中的kei yi-gwo。（在谷歌上搜索米后濤仍然會得到相當(dāng)多的結(jié)果，但大多僅限于來自中華人民共和國的網(wǎng)頁。）
具有諷刺意味的是，肆無忌憚的中國商人試圖將國產(chǎn)獼猴桃冒充進口。
https://time.com/4662293/kiwifruit-chinese-gooseberry-new-zealand-history-fruit/
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