Jamaican food of Chinese descent

Continuing with yesterday's story on residents of Chinese descent in paradise, there is a very successful business family in Jamaica by the name of Hendrickson, who owns a major bread company National, and despite the name that sounds more Northern European than Chinese, they are of Chinese descent.

The family is known for having introduced to Jamaica a machine to slice bread, which made their small bakery grow into National, whose many products also include my favourite plantain chips. They then expanded into the hotel business, and now own numerous hotels and resorts in Jamaica and other islands, including Courtleigh that serves my favourite Jerk Chicken Linguine that I wrote about on October 21.

I was looking for a newspaper feature article on the history of the family that I read once, but instead, I encoutered an interesting interview with the head of the family published on the Gleaner in 2003 - Karl Hendrickson: A business titan speaks. His warning then about the risk of Jamaica becoming a country of buyers is spot-on in today's context.

In all those stories about the family that I read and heard about sporadically in different places, what left a lingering impression on me was this machine that sliced bread in a massive quantity. Every story about the family seems to begin with this machine, like a legend. Now every time I see the name National on a small package of plantain chips, the first thing that comes to my imagination is this legendary machine surrounded by people in awe. Beside the legend behind the name National, what I like about National plantain chips is that they are very light and crisp, they are cheap, and above all, they are put in small packages that help me not overeat them. Each small package is only 25JMD - that's only 32 US cents, and contains 120 calories.