There are times when I stumble across an article by a newspaper journalist and get close to banging my head repeatedly against the desk in front of me.

It happened last month, when I read a blog post entitled Consider the kiwifruit on UK newspaper The Guardian’s website.

You can read more at bit.ly/kiwifruitblog, but for those of you who want the potted version, writer Oliver Thring was basically arguing that the kiwifruit is an over-acidic, hairy, scrotal fruit which takes “several decades” to ripen, and that the ancient Chinese were too clever to grow kiwifruit – he felt it was a “triumph of modern marketing” that would never regain the popularity it enjoyed “in the 1960s”.

The fact that kiwifruit wasn’t grown in Europe until the 1970s seemed to have passed him by, as did most of what we in the trade generally refer to as ‘the facts’.

So I posted my own comments below his article – quite a lot of comments as it turned out – and took him to task on the various things he’d got wrong.

In particular, I was frustrated he was telling his readers that kiwifruit wasn’t popular. Sales of kiwifruit in the UK were worth around £50m in the 12 months to 8 August 2010, according to Kantar, representing a 15.8 per cent share of the British market for exotic fruit.

Someone must be eating them! He also stated with some apparent authority that “production peaked in New Zealand in 1988”. Goodness knows where he got that from!

New Zealand’s kiwifruit production exceeded 1.8m tonnes in 2008, a little above the 450,000-500,000 tonnes or so it turned out two decades earlier.

Again, I had to ask: who did he think was eating all this fruit? Sadly, there was no response from Mr Thring, who apparently prefers to dig the knife into a product and then leave someone else to clear up the mess.

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