Culture
Due to their relatively high price and the large size of the fruit of cultivars, the pears tend to be served to guests or given as gifts, or eaten together in a family setting.
In cooking, ground pears are used in vinegar- or soy sauce-based sauces as a sweetener, instead of sugar. They are also used when marinating meat, especially beef.
In Australia, these pears have been commercially produced for more than 25 years.
In Japan, fruit is harvested in Chiba, Ibaraki, Tottori, Fukushima, Tochigi, Nagano, Niigata, Saitama and other prefectures, except Okinawa. Nashi (ja:梨) may be used as a late Autumn kigo, or “season word”, when writing haiku. Nashi no hana (ja:梨の花, pear flower) is also used as a kigo of spring. At least one city (Kamagaya-Shi, Chiba Prefecture) has the flowers of this tree as an official city flower.
In Korea, the fruit is grown and consumed in great quantity. In the South Korean city of Naju, there is a museum called The Naju Pear Museum and Pear Orchard for Tourists (나주 배 박물관 및 배밭 관광체험).
In Nepal and the Himalayan states of India, they are called nashpati and are cultivated as a cash crop in the Middle Hills between about 1,500 and 2,500 meters’ elevation where the climate is suitable. The fruit are carried to nearby markets by human porters or, increasingly, by truck, but not for long distances because they bruise easily.
In Taiwan, pears harvested in Japan have become luxurious presents since 1997 and their consumption has jumped.
In Cyprus, the pears were introduced in 2010 after initially being investigated as a new fruit crop for the island in the early 1990s. They are currently grown in Kyperounta.
Read more about this topic: Pyrus Pyrifolia
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Sanity consists in not being subdued by your means. Fancy prices are paid for position, and for the culture of talent, but to the grand interests, superficial success is of no account.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their ocellated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination.... After the racist statutes are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.”
—Michael Harrington (1928–1989)