Marketing triumph

by Jeremy on 22/9/2007

in Travel

Golly it is hard to blog when you can’t connect to some of your favourite sites. First, the NYT. Now Wikipedia. I promise to add the links when I get back to the land of unfettered access.

When I was young, we didn’t have English gooseberries (Ribes uva-crispa). We had Cape Gooseberries (Physalis peruviana) although it was not for another lifetime that I learned that not everybody called them that. And we had Chinese gooseberries (Actinidia deliciosa). Then along came a marketing genius and lo, the faintly suspect Chinese gooseberry (think Cold War Red Menace) stormed the USA and later Europe as the kiwi fruit.

So, guess what they call the hairy green things here? Yup. Kiwis.

Now I need to try an Indian gooseberry (Emblica officinalis or Phyllanthus emblica)

2 comments

Sam Zeitlin September 22, 2007 at 6:43 pm

I bet wikipedia is censored by the Chinese gov’t. It has articles on Tianmen square and all sorts of other verboten activities. It wouldn’t surprise me if the NYT was banned too. One way to check would be to try messing around with Google China – apparently it blacklists inaccessible sites, so if something doesn’t appear there it’s probably banned by the gov’t.

All this food blogging is making me hungry. Which is unfortunate, ‘cos it’s Yom Kippur, and I always fast to justify skipping class. Doubly unfortunate, because this year YK is on a saturday, and so I’m fasting for consistency’s sake. Oh well, the break-fast will be all the more delicious for the wait.

-Sam

Reply

Jeremy September 23, 2007 at 3:38 pm

Oh course that’s why several sites aren’t available here — and I’m not about to make a big fuss about it. Not when access to the internets, though not to all their contents, is considerably easier than many other more “advanced” places in the world.

Anyway, I hope you had a good fast, a good break to your fast, and are thoroughly cleansed. Stay tuned for (lots) more food news, here and at the other place.

Reply

Leave a Comment

Previous post:

Next post: