My parents came to stay a few weeks ago, bearing bags of kiwifruit from their orchard. “We’ve got so much!” my mum exclaimed as she dumped three or four bulging bags in the front hall. “The fruit shops at home are giving them away.” Her face became more serious, “And the pack house want to pay us to mulch our kiwifruit into the ground. There’s so much around that it’s cheaper to mulch the poorer quality fruit than pick and pack it. They say the orchard manager hasn’t been doing his job properly and the kiwifruit just don’t last well for export. A week later a fierce hail-storm decimated heaps of kiwfruit orchards around Tauranga and Te Puke – an economic disaster for those poor orchardists. Mum phoned me: “They have lost so many orchards that now they want our fruit”.” It was a bitter-sweet moment.

Kiwifruit has been in my mouth and on my mind a lot lately. Green and gold varieties fill my fruit bowl and every day we eat them with breakfast, as snacks, in the lunch-box, and after dinner. Most children I know prefer the gold variety. It has less of that puckered mouth zing to it and they love its sweet flavour and bright colour. If any Kiwi family isn’t eating kiwifruit at the moment they are missing out on a cheap and incredibly healthy food. And because now is kiwifruit season it’s most likely that we are getting the optimum amounts of all the nutritional goodies they contain.

Kiwifruit is one of the most nutrient dense fruits around. That’s why it’s been called a ‘super-fruit’. It’s packed with vitamin C, and the gold ones are also rich in vitamin E. But that’s not all: it has plenty of other phyto (plant) chemicals, especially carotenoids which cause the gorgeous green and gold colours and protect our precious DNA from damaging oxidation.

As kiwifruit ripen, their cell walls (that’s the fibre) swell to three or four times their unripe size. It’s sort of like a sponge full of water and it’s sure to help swish things through. In 2002 around 40 people aged over 60 ate two or three green kiwifruit a day for three weeks to see if it would reduce constipation – a common problem in older people. The study really just confirmed what anyone who’s pigged out on kiwifruit knows: you end up on the toilet and there is definitely no straining!

Both green and gold have plenty of fibre but the green also has an enzyme that stimulates gut motility. Leave some green kiwifruit on your steak for a while and it will soon be as though you had clobbered it with a meat mallet! It’s the same enzyme: it tenderises meat and it gently gets your gut moving.

Green kiwifruit also have lots of fructo-oligosaccharides – called FOS’s for short. These act as a pre-biotic which means they are food for the good bugs already in your gut. It’s sort of like ‘grow-your-own’ bacteria!

I recently chatted to Vital Foods – a New Zealand company that has worked out how to put pure kiwifruit pulp into a pill. It’s sold in chemists as a supplement for gut health, and the studies they have conducted on it have had good results. They have even managed to extract the oil from kiwifruit seeds. Just like flaxseed oil, it’s rich in alpha-linolenic acid which converts to omega-3 fats in the body. Vital Foods say that kiwifruit oil is 65% ALA compared with flaxseed oil’s 55% but there’s just one problem – they can only produce a small amount.

So if you don’t like kiwifruit or think you need a concentrated dose of it, you can try the supplement – Phloe (Info and Reuters 2008 press release here).

Me? I’m off to the fruit shop – Bye!

You may have seen the movie “Once Were Warriors”. Well the Maori people were not just warriors they also ‘once were gardeners’! Before the Europeans arrived they worked hard cultivating kumara – a delicious purple root vegetable with sweet golden flesh. Kumara was their main carbohydrate source, along with ferns, kanga wai (fermented corn) and other native plants. They had a diet high in protein from birds and fish, low in fat and low in carbohydrate. This was especially so over summer when the last year’s kumara stores ran low and the people had little to eat. Everyone would hang out for Potuterangi – the star that appeared in March and told them that they could eat the first kumara.

In less than 100 years we’ve gone from gardening to driving, and from kumara to KFC! It’s no wonder that our Maori people die younger than Europeans and even our children are getting Type 2 diabetes – once only seen in older people. All those cheap chips, pies, fried bread and fatty meat is the exact opposite of what the Maori of a few generations ago ate. This food flip has happened in many people but it is especially tragic to see the drastic change in health of a once lean, muscular, fit people in such a short time.

The colonising of New Zealand, as in all countries, brought good and bad. The bad was the decimation of Maori land, mana, wealth, and subsequently health. Many Maori still carry the hurt of the injustices of the past and, like any emotional wound, it often affects physical health and habits. How do we get past this?  Acknowledge what’s happened. If you are European, ask Maori for forgiveness on behalf of the earlier generations. If you are Maori, forgive. This breaks the bonds that tie you to past hurts so you are free to move forward. Then together, as Kiwis, we can restore health – not just through nutrition knowledge but also through re-building confidence and self esteem.

“A heart at peace gives life to the body”

Related post: Recollections of Maori food