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Comment by Taniwha | Hacker News Reader

Sadly there's a long history of American companies taking our NZ identity, after they renamed Chinese Gooseberries as "kiwifruit" many people stopped recognising "kiwi" as a nationality.

Nowdays if you claim to be a kiwi in the US people look at you blankly trying to figure out why you might be a small fuzzy fruit

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You might want to set aside the anti-American prejudice, as you've got your facts completely wrong.

T&G, the New Zealand kiwi company (founded in 1897 by an England-born immigrant to New Zealand) started marketing their fruit as the kiwi in the US in 1959. This was presumably to get a leg up on their Chinese competitors and to associate the fruit with New Zealand instead of with China.

I lived in the US for 20 years, it's home as much as NZ is.

It was their American marketing manager who changed the name

So-called Chinese gooseberries have nothing to do with gooseberries. The Chinese name is something like “monkey peaches”. “Kiwifruit” is certainly no more misleading than either of those names.

Kinda related: Aussies are trying to pull of a similar scam, renaming a Bolivian fruit called achachairu. Check it.. this is supposedly a "news" website calling the fruit by a name made up by Aussie marketers: https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2014-06-19/gallery-achacha...

Is the ordinary Bolivian name achachairú and the Australian grower is marketing it as achacha?

I dunno if I'd get my titties in a tangle over that. It's not like they're renaming it to Burdekin Fruit.

They were called "Chinese Gooseberries" in NZ before they were called "kiwifruit"

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