Green machine

A simple way to get your fruits and veggies in, whatever time of day

Kiwifruits aren’t really called kiwifruits, and they’re not even really Kiwi. Rather, kiwifruits are native to China and were originally called mihoutao, ‘macaque fruit’, in reference to the monkeys’ love of the furry green bullets.

In the English-speaking world, mihoutao became ‘Chinese gooseberry’, and it was only in 1904 that the first Chinese gooseberry seeds wound up in New Zealand, when adventuring school mistress Mary Isabel Fisher brought seeds back from Ichang. The first New Zealand-born fruit thus appeared in 1910, but it wasn’t until 1959 that exporters Turners & Growers rebranded the Chinese gooseberry the ‘kiwifruit’ – the national bird’s name having become synonymous with its people, and the idea being to avoid associations with gooseberries in general, which were experiencing poor sales in the US.

The rebranding clearly went well as today kiwifruits account for NZ$3.34 billion (approx £1.7bn) annually, more than 1% of New Zealand’s GDP. And here, kiwis account for a vast chunk of this smoothie’s healthy credentials, especially when blitzed with their skins on (as a rule with fruit and veg, a high concentration of nutrients is found just under the skin, meaning peeling certain fruits and veg is doing your body a disservice).

Throw in the spinach, kale and the rest of the fruit and suddenly this simple-to-make drink is elevated to super-smoothie status, packing six of your five-a-day (dietician tip: five should really be ten) and offering plenty of fibre, big doses of vitamins A, C, E and K plus plenty of Popeye-level iron. Sweet as, the Kiwis would say.