Feijoas: Love them or hate them they’re here to stay - Glenn Dwight

Depending on how you feel about feijoas this photo could either bring you joy, or make you gag.

Glenn Dwight is the studio creative director - regional at NZME and sometimes writer for The Country. Here, he looks into one of the big issues dividing this nation and isn’t afraid to ask the pertinent question - feijoas: love or hate them?

There are two types of people in this world: those who think Die Hard is a Christmas movie - and those who are wrong.

And around this time of year, another great national divide rears its lumpy green head: the feijoa.

Every autumn, something strange starts happening across New Zealand.

Fences become fruit stalls. Plastic buckets appear on school staffroom tables.

The neighbour’s kid knocks on your door offering a “bag of feijoas” with the dead-eyed stare of someone who’s been told not to come home until they’re gone.

People start scooping, stewing, baking and freezing.

Others start retching, gagging and politely declining anything that’s been within 5m of a feijoa.

Like it or loathe it, the feijoa is not going anywhere.

But where did this green grenade of division come from?

No, the answer isn’t the neighbour’s kids and a guilt purchase for borrowing their fencing pliers and never returning them.

The feijoa originally comes from the mountains of Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina — exotic, sun-soaked places where it goes by its flash botanical name: Acca sellowiana.

And maybe that’s where we went wrong.

Because Acca sellowiana sounds gourmet.

Like something you’d serve in a delicate glass bowl at a dinner party where the dress code is “linen casual” not “Harlequin Rugby shorts and a singlet”.

You’d present it with a flourish, maybe even a sprig of mint.

Kiwis have adopted feijoas like that random ginger cat we swore we'd only feed once. Photo / Steve Davidson

But feijoa?

That sounds like something forgotten in a school lunchbox — fermenting quietly next to a rogue muesli bar.

It looks like a lime and squelches like a wet sock being removed from a Red Band boot.

But still, we have adopted it — like that ginger cat we were only going to feed once. It moved in, took over, and now the feijoa sheds fruit the way that ginger cat sheds fur, turning the backyard into a mowing minefield during peak feijoa season.

But for all this, the feijoa is now ours — it’s Kiwi as — and deserves a place (for at least a couple of months) on the mantelpiece, between the Edmonds cookbook and your grandad’s paua shell ashtray.

So, whether you’re a feijoa fanatic or firmly in the “absolutely not” camp, let’s celebrate this fruit for what it is: a symbol of great Kiwiness.

If you love them, eat them.

Scoop them.

Stew them.

Bake until there’s no room left in your belly for even one more mouthful of gritty, green goodness.

And if you’re a hater?

Use them to your advantage.

Sell them in your honesty box at the gate.

Load up the kids like door-to-door vacuum salespeople and send them into the world.

Offer them to friends with an encouraging: “They’re not that bad this year.”

Because love them or not, for a few glorious (and slightly overwhelming) months every year, feijoas rule the rural roost.