Kiwifruit got its name partly to slip past American quarantine inspectors
In 1959 a New Zealand exporter renamed the Chinese gooseberry after a US client warned that berries were attracting suspicion at quarantine, over fears of soil contaminated with anthrax. Jack Turner picked kiwifruit, after the nickname for New Zealanders. Popular stories about the bird or anti-Chinese feeling are myths.
The fruit is native to central and eastern China. A Tang dynasty poem by Cen Shen describes a mihoutao, or macaque peach, growing above a well in what is now Shaanxi, and the first recorded description comes from the Song dynasty in the 12th century. Other old Chinese names translate as fox peach and vine pear. Because people mostly gathered it wild, it was rarely cultivated. Early English speakers called it Ichang gooseberry, after the port of Yichang, and Chinese gooseberry became standard from the 1920s.
New Zealand turned a wild vine into a global product. Commercial planting began there in the early 20th century, and the Hayward cultivar, developed by Hayward Wright in Avondale around 1924, is still the fruit most shoppers know. British and American servicemen stationed in New Zealand during the Second World War developed a taste for it, and exports reached Britain and Australia from 1953 and California from 1959. Turners and Growers registered the new name on 15 June 1959, and by 1970 every New Zealand export carried it. The national marketing board became Zespri in 1997.
China then reclaimed the lead. A nationwide survey of wild vines launched in 1978 yielded over 1,400 candidate cultivars, and commercial farming began in the early 1980s on less than a hectare of Hayward. By 2020 Hayward made up just 6.3 per cent of Chinese plantings, overtaken by domestic varieties such as Hongyang, a red-fleshed mutant of gold kiwifruit found wild in 1982. As of 2023 China grew 55 per cent of the world's crop. The Wuhan Botanical Garden houses the largest kiwifruit gene bank in the world.
The genus Actinidia has around 60 species. Grape-sized kiwiberries have smooth skins and can be eaten whole. Golden kiwifruit suffered heavy losses in New Zealand between 2010 and 2013 when the PSA bacterium struck the Hort16A cultivar, and growers largely switched to the more resistant Gold3, sold as SunGold.
Source: Kiwifruit
