Ripe for Global Domination: The Story of the Avocado

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All right, I'm in my kitchen, Cynthia, and I feel as though it's time for some lunch.

I am thinking the same thing, and I have a really lovely ripe avocado here on the counter.

I do too!

I do too!

You might even think we planned this.

Oh, come on, don't tell me we're out of bread.

That would be really unfortunate.

There's no avocado here without the toast.

Come on.

I got bread.

Okay, I'm just cutting it into thin slices.

The bread is ready.

I'm just kind of laying out the thin slices of avocado on the toast.

Okay, a little mashing on the bread here.

Yeah, so I am so freaking bougie that I am going to put a few little pink slivers of pickled radish.

Do you have pickled radish ready for yours?

Cynthia, I'm living that healthy Southern California lifestyle.

Okay, I'm sprinkling some beautiful salt on top.

Oh my god, this is so pretty.

The pink on the green, I feel like I could literally invite Gwyneth Paltrow round to lunch.

Hi, Gwyneth.

Are your ears burning?

We're talking about you.

Don't worry, we are not going to spend this episode talking about Gwyneth Paltrow.

We are, though, going to be talking about an incredibly delicious fruit.

Yes, avocado is a fruit, and how it became the symbol of an aspirational lifestyle.

We are Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Nicola Twilley.

And I'm Cynthia Graeber.

So, this avocado toast thing.

How in the world did it become a thing?

More importantly, how did a fruit that's named after male genitalia become the poster child of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the next big thing in China?

It's a New World fruit.

It's native to Mexico and Central America.

That's Mary Luarpe as she's head of the avocado breeding program at UC Riverside, near me in sunny Southern California.

Nobody is sure exactly where the avocado first came from, but the oldest evidence we have that people were eating avocados comes from settlements from 10,000 years ago in Puebla in central Mexico.

And again, no one is exactly sure where and when the avocado was domesticated.

It might have happened more than once, but it was probably at least 7,000 years ago.

The oldest known culture in the Americas, the Corral civilization of Peru, archaeologists have found evidence that they likely ate domesticated avocados more than 3,000 years ago.

The Corral don't seem to have been eating corn or other grains, and the same is true for another early culture called the mocaya in what's now Mexico and Guatemala.

And so avocado may have played a really important role in their diets as a major staple.

And we know the Maya valued avocados.

The symbol they used for the 14th month of the year in their calendar was an avocado.

When the Spanish conquistadors came to Latin America back in the 16th century, they encountered this fruit that they had never seen before that had this Aztec name ahuacatl, which means testicle actually in the old ancient Nahuatl language.

Brooke Larmer is the on-money columnist for the New York Times magazine and wrote a recent story on avocados.

The Aztecs called these strange bumpy fruits testicles because they hung low, often in groups of two.

And they look kind of testicly in shape.

I mean, I can see testicles in anything, but still.

But the Spanish conquistadores took that name and made it into aguacate, from which our avocado has now derived in English.

The conquistadors were big avocado fans right away.

The first written description of the avocado comes in 1519 from a Spanish guy called Martín Fernandez de Enciso.

He described it as, quote, an orange, and when it is ready for eating, it turns yellowish.

That which it contains is like butter, and is of marvelous flavor, so good and pleasing to the palate that it is a marvelous thing.

Other conquistadors sang the praise of avocados as well.

They likened them to figs.

They said that avocados are healthy fruit for sick people, and when eaten with sugar is like a preserve.

They also said that avocados are like pears but better.

From the Spanish records we can get an idea of how indigenous Mesoamericans were using the avocado.

They documented instances where it was used to pay nobility as a tribute, but they also wrote that it was for sale in the open-air markets of Tenochtitlan.

And apparently, pigs used to gorge on the ripe fruit when it fell from the trees.

Their meat was said to have a particularly excellent flavor.

So it's no surprise surprise that the Spanish quickly adopted the avocado as a favorite fruit and eventually distributed it to other Spanish colonies all around the world where they started to grow it too.

But the avocado didn't become a major commercial crop until recently.

Even though it was grown as a dooryard crop tree throughout Central America and valued for thousands of years, there was no intensive agriculture production of avocados actually until the industry in California and to some extent an industry in Florida started just about a hundred years ago.

What this means is folks like Mary Lou, they've still got a lot to learn about the avocado's evolution and its different varieties and its botany in general compared to more established crops like wheat.

What we do know is that the avocado is really old in flowering plant terms.

A member of the laurel family.

This is a very, very ancient part of the angiosperms.

So ancient, in fact, that you have to imagine back millions of years ago to a time when huge ground sloths the size of giraffes and mammoths stomped around avocado trees.

These are the types of animals that could swallow a pit that big and then poop it out.

These mega-sized animals went extinct about 13,000 years ago, but rodents picked up the avocado reproduction baton.

They gnaw on avocado flesh and leave the seed to grow.

Not the avocado's target audience, but hey, it works.

So for thousands of years, these ancient backyard angiosperms, they came in all sorts of varieties and sizes.

But not here in California.

Over time, we've gone to the point where now here in California, we're 95% Haas.

Haas is the name of an avocado variety.

Really, the avocado variety that you see in stores today.

Haas was a chance seedling that was actually found in La Habra Heights.

La Habra Heights is a neighborhood in southeast LA, just a few miles down the road from me.

And guess who's behind this chance seedling?

Oh my god, it is none other than our old friend, the globe trotting food explorer, David Fairchild.

Fairchild picks up what he sees as the greatest avocado in Chile.

In case you don't remember, our most recent episode was all about Dan Stone's book called The Food Explorer, and this is Dan describing another one of Fairchild's adventures.

He's visiting Chile in 1897,

and he explores and he finds this great variety.

It's got a thick skin, it's got creamy flesh, it's not stringy at all.

and he collects a thousand seeds and sends them back to Washington in hopes that at least a few will survive.

A few do, and they are received in Washington, they are propagated, they are sent out to research stations in Southern California, toward the coast around Fall Brook area and greater Los Angeles.

There were already some avocados in California.

They were brought here in the 1850s by settlers from Nicaragua.

But Fairchild's shipment of a whole bunch of new varieties got people excited about avocados again.

And people start experimenting with avocados.

Farmers start growing them and scientists start breeding their seeds and seeing how they could improve them.

Amateurs get into it too.

In fact, one of them is a postal worker, a letter carrier, and in his spare time, he just grows avocados in his backyard.

And one day, one sprouts even better.

It was a seed that was planted in the mid-1920s.

And the grower who actually was a postal worker kept trying to top work the tree to the variety that was a dominant variety of the day.

The graft kept failing.

They finally gave up for different reasons, and then all of a sudden he realized he actually had something of value.

It's straighter, its fruit comes faster, its skin is even thicker, its flesh is even creamier and greener, and so he decides to patent it, and his name was Rudolf Haas.

The mother has tree?

It was actually still alive and growing in Lahabra Heights.

Apparently it got to an astonishing 65 feet tall.

When I read this, I was so excited I was about to jump in the car and visit it.

And then I read some more and it died in 2002 from the dreaded root rot.

There's a plaque there now instead, and the mother tree wood is still preserved at a nursery in Ventura.

But even though the mother has tree has become so venerated that there's a plaque for it, back when Has avocados were new, this variety wasn't an immediate hit.

And if you read some of the older literature though, the thing that it had going against it was the fact that it turned black.

There was a very nice article written in the mid-1940s mid-1940s where they're complaining about, well, you know, the hass is this great tree, it's a great fruit, but my god, it's black, not green, because the dominant variety in the 40s up through the 70s was sofuerte, which is a green variety.

So it just shows how things have changed.

So the black color freaked out consumers.

But even though it took a few decades, both growers and eaters did eventually get used to it because this brand new Haas avocado had a lot going for it.

Well, I can wax on forever on that one.

Let's wax.

First of all in California the Haas avocado ripens at a very convenient time.

Farmers can harvest the Haas in March through June after the Fuerte's harvest is over but it's not just an addition to the Fuerte.

The other thing is that the fruit hung on the tree better.

Mary Lou is not yet done listing the Haas's virtues.

The fruit is very easy to handle.

It hides a lot of blemishes when it's ripe because it turns black.

And and and.

The hass is also the only avocado that Mexico and Peru are allowed to ship to the US, which makes it a pretty popular choice there, too.

Because they have insect pests in their countries, and research that was done in Mexico indicated that the Haas actually is a very poor host to fruit flies.

There are all sorts of varieties grown in Mexico, but the Haas is the only one they can export.

So this explains why small, black, nubby, Haas avocados have come to dominate the supermarket shelves today.

But why have avocados themselves become so super popular?

Well, they weren't, at least not during the great Haas forte battles of the 30s through the 70s.

They weren't big in the US or much of the rest of the world.

In Central America and the northern part of South America though, the avocado has always been a hit.

Here in Mexico in a commercial way, avocado was grown in small orchards.

Main type of avocado fruit was a small fruit and thin skin with large seeds.

and scarce pulp or meat.

Low commercial value, but good flavor.

Luis Mario Tapio Varga studies water and soil management at the National Research Institute for Forests and Agriculture.

He's based in Michuacan.

Even with the introduction of the hass, which had more flesh than seed and a sturdier skin, even then the rest of the world took some convincing.

Part of the problem with the avocado was its name.

In the early 20th century in the United States, it was marketed as the alligator pear, which might explain why it never caught on, because it's not a great name.

Not a great name at all.

The California Avocado Growers Exchange complained in the 1920s that associating the delicious fruit with an alligator was, quote, ruining the avocado business.

Eventually, the growers got their way, and we now call alligator pears by a bastardized version of the Spanish, bastardized version of the Nahuatl word, which means testicle fruit.

Because testicle fruit was also clearly not going to be a winner.

Testicles and alligators aside, the avocado had bigger problems than just its name.

In the rest of the world, the places where the avocado wasn't from, people had no idea how to eat it.

It was a fruit, but it wasn't sweet.

It was sort of slippery.

It didn't really cook well.

I think when people first encounter the avocado, they're getting them kind of off the truck and they're just not edible.

They're hard.

They don't really know what to do with them.

So, on top of all the avocado's challenges, consumers are buying them unripe.

It is not looking good for the avocado.

How did we get to today?

Lauren Euler wrote an article about the rise of avocado toast.

Yes, we'll get to that.

And she looked back at how a few bold eaters in the U.S.

were at least trying avocados in the early 1900s.

She found a New Yorker article from 1937 called Avocado Comma or the Future of Eating by one S.J.

Perelman.

And he goes to a restaurant in Los Angeles and has an avocado sandwich on whole wheat and a lime rookie at a pharmacy called Best Drugstores.

And so at that point you can see at least that there's the concept of avocado on bread is emerging in our culinary consciousness in America.

And then I also found in a 1962 New York Times article that says you could put avocado in a toasted sandwich and that would be an unusual way to serve it.

Lauren's point is that most people were not eating avocados.

There weren't as many Mexicans in the U.S.

back then and most non-Mexican Americans at the time weren't eating as many tacos or chips and guacamole as they are today.

Most Americans at the time would not necessarily have known what guacamole was.

Plus, avocados were seasonal and only grew in certain areas of California and Florida, and so they were expensive.

In fact, at nearly five bucks an avocado, they were apparently often stolen from grocery stores.

And they were marketed as fancy foods.

If you really wanted to impress your guests, you could serve an avocado with lobster as an elegant appetizer.

That's actually how I first encountered the avocado.

My mom would serve it at dinner parties with a hole where the pit used to be filled with prawn cocktail.

Plus, you know, the 60s and 70s, this is also the beginning of the whole crazy fat is bad time in American history, and avocados are pretty fatty and they would have been seen as unhealthy.

So the California Avocado Commission responded with a marketing campaign.

They poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into this.

The first step, convince folks that avocados are actually healthy.

This body needs good nutrition, including vitamins A, B1, C, E, potassium, niotin, iron.

And this body gets them all in California avocados for just 153 calories in a luscious hashtag.

That sexy avocado fan is the actress Angie Dickinson, and she is lying alluringly on her side, dressed casually in gold high heels and a shiny white leotard, just, you know, scooping an avocado out of its skin with a teaspoon.

As one does in a white leotard.

We've got the video on our website for all of your avocado eating wardrobe Insponies.

I can see how this commercial would send everyone running to the supermarket.

But that wasn't all the commission did.

They funded studies showing that the fat in avocado helped increase nutrient absorption.

They partnered with Harvard to promote the Mediterranean diet full of so-called healthy fats.

This was an all-out avocado blitz.

But there was another problem.

And here's a tip.

Ripen them like this, two or three at a time.

The avocados ripen better together.

Would this body lie to you?

People were buying these fancy avocados while they were shiny and green and trying to eat them, which was not nearly as fun and delicious as eating a ripe avocado.

The commission even introduced a mascot called Mr.

Ripe, as in make sure your avocados are actually ripe.

And to get some attention, they launched a contest looking for his perfect mate, Ms.

Ripe, who would, quote, exemplify the California lifestyle of good health and healthy eating.

But even with Mr.

and Ms.

Ripe and Angie Dickinson encouraging folks to put their avocados in a paper bag or on the windowsill and let them ripen for a few days, the fact remained: it's annoying to have to plan in advance to get a ripe avocado.

Who shops four days ahead?

And then Brooke Larmer told us that an avocado farmer named Gil Henry came up with a revolutionary idea.

He and his children went out to the local market in LA and watched people buy avocados.

And he realized that people would go up there and kind of feel around the avocado.

And if they didn't find a ripe one or one that gave a little bit to the thumb push, they would just walk away.

In fact, the avocado commission installed a hidden camera in a California supermarket in the early 1980s and the footage showed shopper after shopper squeezing the fruit and putting it back down.

It was just lost sale after lost sale.

And so he had this idea, we will do this.

This was invent ripening rooms for avocados.

Gil modeled his avocado ripening rooms after banana ripening rooms.

They're basically refrigerated rooms where the avocados would hang out and small amounts of ethylene would be pumped in.

Ethylene is a plant hormone and it's what causes the fruit to ripen.

And so that's very, very important commercially.

This way, all the avocados ripen together at more or less the same time before they even land on the grocery store shelf.

And so first in Ralph's, the grocery stores in Los Angeles, and then that expanded to Kroger, which owned Ralph's, and that became something where that was also a factor in getting people to buy avocados.

Today, all avocados go through this ripening room process.

It's revolutionized the avocado business.

The chances that you can find a ripe, ready-to-eat avocado at the store are approximately 100% better than they were in the early 1980s.

And so, shoppers now put those avocados in their basket after squeezing them.

And a side effect of all this is that it causes the Haas avocado to fully take over the market.

Beforehand, when avocados were sold unripe, the green fuerte ones looked nicer, they were shiny and green, but once they're sold ripe, the fueres would show any bruises to the soft fruit, while the black Haas avocados hide any small blemishes.

So, between this massive marketing effort, the invention of the ripening rim, the name change, and the nutrition message, the avocado is poised to finally become a regular part of the American diet.

But the thing that really pushed it over the edge, much less glamorous than Ms.

Ripe, it was a trade agreement.

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In 1994, the avocado finally hit the big time because of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Yep, NAFTA.

But something else had to happen first.

There was a ban on Mexican avocados that was imposed way back in 1914, ostensibly over fears of boll weevils getting into the agricultural crops in California.

And it protected the California farmers from infestation, but it also kind of protected them from cheap competition.

So

there was this great fear in the United States that opening the doors to Mexican avocados in this particular industry would destroy the California industry.

So when it came to the talks about the avocado during the NAFTA negotiations?

Well, they were hardly talks.

They were more arguments and fights that went into trying to lift this ban were extremely heated.

I talked to one U.S.

distributor who said that he went into this meeting in Southern California to talk about lifting the ban and he was a distributor, so he favored bringing in Mexican imports.

He said that he was spat at and shouted at and basically kicked out of the meeting.

A few years after NAFTA was signed, the ban on Mexican avocados was finally lifted.

At first it was just for 19 states in the Northeast.

Far away from California so that the New Englanders could consume avocados in the wintertime.

That gradual incremental lifting of that restriction was fully enacted by about a decade later.

And that's what really led to the explosion.

And explosion is the right word.

Back in 1997, Americans only consumed avocados in the summertime when the California avocados were harvested.

None of those were imported.

You know, today, Americans can eat avocados year-round, almost anywhere, if they can afford it.

Post-NAFTA, avocado demand has grown exponentially.

25 years ago, Americans were eating barely one pound of avocado per person per year.

Now, it's more than seven.

The other thing that's boomed is ways to eat all that avocado.

To go back again to when I was a kid in the 80s, encountering avocados in England, we had them on the half-shell, like Angie Dickinson.

Though not, I hasten to add, in a white leotard.

You scoop the flesh out with a teaspoon, and when the pit hole wasn't being filled with something fancy like prawn cocktail, we used to put vinaigrette in there.

But that was the only way I knew to eat an avocado.

And I don't remember even seeing anything like that, at least not in my house or my friends' houses.

I do think my family went out to kind of Tex-Mex restaurants on occasion.

I I remember one down the street from my house in the 80s.

In the United States, we have this Mexican-American community that is growing along with the explosion of Tex-Mex food.

And so, people like me and my family started to eat more guacamole in their everyday lives.

It also became one of the foods popular to snack on during the Super Bowl.

So, the avocado commission decided to do a big PR push to get folks to eat even more guacamole during the Super Bowl.

Avocado from Mexico.

Delicious.

Listen to the celebrity.

Eat them.

Eat them.

Eat it.

Guacamole.

Everyone loves guacamole.

If it's not obvious, they're trying to hypnotize us all into consuming even more guacamole.

And it worked.

Super Bowl weekend became one of the most important dates for avocado consumption in the U.S.

According to the Mexican Avocado Association, a full 12% of America's annual avocado consumption takes place during the Super Bowl.

But 80% of those are imported, and almost nine out of ten of those imports are from Mexico, specifically from the state of Michuacan.

So, Americans are eating lots of avocados.

That's a win for the marketing campaign, and in theory, the growers.

But these avocados are from Mexico.

Sounds exactly like the nightmare that the California growers were worried about.

So, did this mean that California avocado farmers were doomed?

What happened to them?

Well, remarkably, this is a case of a rising tide lifting all boats.

The year-round availability of avocados helped expand the visibility and attractiveness of avocados avocados for everybody.

So there was the growing market and the explosion among consumers only helped the Californians.

Part of this is because Mexico's production actually fills a gap around the California grower's season.

Under the NAFTA rules, California avocados get priority during their season, and Mexico, where avocados bloom four times a year, gets everything else.

But even if California could extend its season dramatically, the state couldn't possibly meet this new and still growing demand for avocados, even if the farmers wanted to.

There isn't enough water and land.

And so they really need this kind of extra input from Mexican avocados.

And so

the analysis is that there's a real benefit to the United States economy, not just that California agricultural growers are spared, but also it's adding many, many jobs.

I think there's something like 19,000 jobs,

new jobs for American workers, more than $2 billion

added to US GDP simply by avocados.

Okay, so California farmers are happy.

American avocado eaters are happy.

But what about the place where all these avocados are coming from?

In Mexico, most of the avocados are grown in a single state, the state of Michoacán, which is in south-central Mexico, not far west of Mexico City that goes down to the Pacific coast.

And it's not something that's run by a big agribusiness.

It's actually there are 20,000 individual orchards that are coordinated by a national association.

Michuacan is the only state that's actually legally allowed to export avocados to the U.S., and the state has been completely transformed by avocados.

It dominates the agriculture in that state.

So, what has the rise of the avocado meant for Michuacan?

Well, it's interesting.

Michuacan is a beautiful state.

This has volcanoes and forests.

I remember my first trip to Michuacan way back a few decades ago was to see the sanctuary where monarch butterflies migrate in the winter from the United States.

And they, you know, these are butterflies that have come three generations or four generations since their original migrants to the United States, and they all come back to the same trees in a couple different preserves in Michuokan state and in the state of Mexico.

But that was my first trip, and it was just a gorgeous state.

These volcanoes and forests are part of why Michuacan is so great for avocados.

It has really fertile soil and lots of rainfall.

In California, one of the real issues is water because avocado trees are extremely thirsty.

Michuokan is blessed blessed with, I think, more than 70% of the orchards are naturally fed by springs, rivers, natural irrigation.

So water usage is not a big issue, at least in Michoacán.

The bigger environmental issue, at least for now, is what the avocado is doing to all those gorgeous forests.

The Mexican environmental authorities estimate that about 50,000 acres a year are deforested in the state of Michoacán.

It's a big problem, and it's not just because of avocado farms, but they are one of the causes.

We asked Mario, the researcher who works on forest and water issues.

The natural forest has been deforested for three main causes.

Illegal logging, forest fires, and avocado planting.

And about 30% of that is due to avocado growing.

The Growers Association will respond that, well, actually, these new orchards, most of these new orchards, were previously used for other crops that have transferred their growing to avocados because they're much more lucrative.

So the avocado is not the only culprit here.

And in case you were worried about the future of the monarch butterflies, the forests that are being cut down for avocados aren't the ones where the monarchs go to spend the winter.

Those are higher up in colder areas that aren't as good for avocado farming.

But still, as an avocado eater, I would love to enjoy my daily dose of creamy green goodness without contributing to deforestation.

Mario told us that there had been some discussion about a law that would protect the forest and actually require avocado growers to return 10% of their cultivated land to wild forest.

I am not optimistic of this situation.

The growers fought back and the government wasn't interested in pushing this law, partly because it has bigger things to deal with like drugs and partly because Mario thinks that corrupt government officials are making money from avocados.

So what should a concerned avocado eater do?

Mario says that, in fact, we are the ones who can make a difference.

The only way to protect is that,

for example, that the United States said, I don't buy you more avocados if you continue the forest in your lands.

This strategy, that American demand can make a difference, it worked in the past.

Mario said that avocado crops had been poorly handled.

There were lots of pesticides left on and bacteria, but Americans wouldn't put up with that.

So Mexican farmers improved their farming methods to meet the demand.

Mario thinks the same thing could happen with the forests, that if U.S.

consumers demand avocados that don't contribute to deforestation, that that could help save the forests.

But there's also another problem in Michoacán, which is that this is the center of the Mexican drug war.

Drug cartels in Mexico have made so much money from Americans looking to smoke pot and take meth that they've actually pretty much replaced the government in some places.

They are super powerful along the west coast and in Michoacán too.

So you can imagine when avocado profits in the last 20 years started to rise, the cartels were quite interested.

In Michoacán, avocados are known as oro verde, green gold, and the cartels became kind of an insidious influence within the avocado industry.

There were different groups, one called the Knights Templar, who kind of had this medieval silvalric code and came in, but extorted growers, kidnapped owners, usurped land.

They created a kind of almost in a warlike situation for growers.

It became very dangerous for the larger owners, especially.

Today, the Knights Templar have faded from the scene, La Familia Michoacana has faded from the scene, and now there's a small splinter group called Los Viagras, which is apparently named for the leader who had heavily moosed hair that kind of stood on its end.

On one level, if anyone is going to control the testicle fruit trade, it should be the Viagra gang.

But seriously, cartel violence is a gigantic problem.

You may have even noticed reports in the U.S.

media in recent years about blood avocados.

I mean, it's not just that we don't want to to eat something that's contributing to deforestation.

I definitely don't want to eat something that's supporting the cartels.

But Brooke tells us that in the past couple years, things have looked up a little.

In response to a lot of this cartel activity, many of these smaller towns have created self-defense militias, usually formed by the owners themselves.

Many of the owners have teamed together.

to try to keep the peace and keep their avocados.

There's one place in particular called Tancitaro, which has become kind of famous as the last place where it has this kind of self-defense militia.

It's like an 80-person force where they surround their town with checkpoints, and the producers have to work with armed bodyguards.

But they've now celebrated 40 years without a kidnapping, which is considered a success.

So the cartels are still an influence on it, although they haven't really slowed down production, which is quite amazing.

And again, like the deforestation issue, the cartel violence is not entirely the avocados' fault.

I mean, first of of all, I think that the drug cartels were not created by avocados.

They happened to attract the cartels because of their lucrative nature.

And actually, Mario says that avocados have been really good for Michoacán in a lot of ways.

The avocado in Norchas Cab permitted that the people, the poor people of many communities that was in the poverty, now

they are in economic best conditions.

And those economic benefits mean that more people can stay in their homes with their families.

MitchoCon is a huge sending community, or has been a sending area for migrants to the United States.

But avocados have kept more people closer to the land without necessarily needing to migrate.

Great to know that we can enjoy Mexican avocados with very little guilt.

Because, frankly, what would happen to the Instagram feeds of millennials if you took away their avocado toast?

Just kidding.

Don't write us angry emails.

This month on Explain It to Me, we're talking about all things wellness.

We spend nearly $2 trillion on things that are supposed to make us well: collagen smoothies, and cold plunges, Pilates classes, and fitness trackers.

But what does it actually mean to be well?

Why do we want that so badly?

And is all this money really making us healthier and happier?

That's this month on Explain It to Me, presented by Pureleaf.

Trip Planner by Expedia.

You were made to outdo your holiday,

your hammocking,

and your pooling.

We were made to help organize the competition.

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And for even less guilt, if you want to get rid of that lingering worry that your avocados from Mexico are contributing to deforestation, right now, the best you can do is look for an organic, Rainforest Alliance, or Equal Exchange label.

Rainforest Alliance and Equal Exchange avocados are hard to find, and organic doesn't specifically guarantee that a grower is not cutting down virgin forests, but it does mean that the cultivation is less intensive and doesn't pollute the groundwater as much.

Not a perfect solution, but one that means you can go ahead and have your avocado and eat it on toast.

So I was actually talking to someone yesterday, and I was like, oh, I'm going to do an interview for a podcast about avocado toast.

And they were like, yeah, what?

It's like, what is it exactly?

I'm not really sure I understand.

I'm like, it's literally what it sounds like.

It's avocado on toast.

This is Lauren Euler again, journalist and author of an in-depth look at the origins of avocado toast.

And in case you've been living in a cave for the past few years, avocado toast is having something of a moment right now.

I feel like it came to avocado appreciation relatively late in life.

I grew up in West Virginia and it's not that we didn't have avocados there, but it's not like one of the main food groups as it is in somewhere like New York or LA or even Berlin where I used to live.

Lauren first noticed avocado being served on toast just a few years ago when she moved to Berlin after college.

I don't really remember eating it in college and I graduated in 2012 and then when I lived in Berlin there are a lot of Australians living there and there are a lot of Australian cafes and I think that is probably the first time that I really noticed it on a menu.

This is kind of late in avocado toast terms, or at least in terms of the current wave of avocado toast.

Because the question of avocado toast's origins is a tricky one.

Because you could certainly argue that avocado on a tortilla is the original avocado toast, right?

But I think that's a fundamentally different eating experience.

Though it may be a predecessor to avocado toast, and probably certainly is a predecessor to avocado toast.

Which today is basically mashed avocado on toast with maybe salt and pepper and a few beautiful garnishes like Nikki's pickled pink radishes.

That avocado toast is now found on the menu at restaurants and cafes, basically everywhere.

But Lauren wondered, where did it first come from, this current incarnation of avocado toast?

There's truth to the idea that Australia popularized avocado toast in the way that we know it today, which is as a sort of like

glamorous snack or meal that one can can take a nice photo of for one's Instagram account.

Generally, the first menu avocado toast is said to be at a cafe called Bill's, I think in 1993 in Sydney.

Bill's is a trendy all-day restaurant run by a well-known Australian chef called Bill Granger.

He has confessed that he had no idea what he was starting when he first put avocado toast on his menu.

He says he just thought avocado was a nice thing to have with with a bit of tomato on some toast.

He published a recipe for avocado toast and he put it in his cookbook and he was sort of like, I felt dumb putting a recipe for this in my cookbook because it's like so easy and obvious that you shouldn't need a recipe, but I need it to fill a page.

It wasn't an overnight success, but then a little more than a decade later, an Australian chef named Chloe Osborne put avocado toast on the menu at Cafe Gutin in Manhattan.

And then came Gwyneth.

Paltrow, in case you're not on first name terms, she put avocado toast in her 2013 cookbook, It's It's All Good.

And this, according to Lauren, is the moment when avocado toast went from being a thing you ate to a cultural phenomenon.

So much so that Miley Cyrus has a tattoo of half an avocado on her upper left arm.

But when we say phenomenon, really, it's kind of crazy how much the avocado and avocado toast, of course, have taken over.

From toast to guacamole, avocados are seemingly everywhere.

So that, but then I also talked to some people who grew up in California in the 70s and they were like, yeah, we ate avocado on toast too.

Yeah, not everyone is on board with the Bill's Cafe Jetan Gwyneth origin story for avocado toast.

Turns out, people have been mashing avocado onto grain-based products for a while.

After I published that article, someone messaged me saying that her

sister or something had spent a lot of time in Tel Aviv and that they always ate avocado on toast too.

So that she thought that that meant that they had invented it.

This was my experience.

I first fell in love with avocado in the 90s when I was living in Israel, and everyone just sliced avocado and put it on bread and sprinkled some salt on it.

And I was like, this is delicious.

Not revolutionary, just delicious.

But I think trying to pinpoint the origin of it is a fool's errand.

No shit.

But the real question is why?

Why has avocado toast transcended its status as snack to become a symbol of everything?

Part of it is that it's become something that somehow seems pure and fresh and healthy and the good fatty and somehow just perfect.

I think as a status symbol, the avocado toast does sort of advertise a certain lifestyle, which is like a wellness, a healthy lifestyle, which now is a kind of status symbol.

And along with like doing yoga or going to soul cycle or going on a vacation to like Joshua Tree or something, avocado toasts can like signify a certain kind of person and a certain kind of aspirational lifestyle.

And it turns out that avocado toast is the perfect visual aid to advertise that lifestyle.

It is the Instagram food par excellence.

Last July, British Vogue reported that 3 million new pictures of avocado toast are uploaded to Instagram every day,

which truly says something about our times.

I can't even wrap my head around that figure.

So why in the world has avocado toast taken over Instagram?

What makes it such a perfect model?

Once again, Lauren has the analysis.

I think the color green of an avocado is bright and alluring, but it's not so bright that you can't pair it with other colors.

So you often see like a radish on avocado toast or maybe like shaved beets or some kind of beet-like thing.

And so with the contrasting with the pink or the purple, it looks really, really nice.

It's beautiful and healthy.

And it's expensive.

In May, Australian millionaire and property mogul Tim Gerner said this about millennials.

When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn't buying Smash avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each.

Bro, what?

So there was a controversy semi-recently in which I think an Australian investor or a millionaire or some sort of rich Australian non-millennial was deriding the millennial generation and saying that we couldn't the reason we couldn't afford to buy houses was because we were spending so much money on avocado toast and four coffees that cost four dollars.

A tsunami of people helpfully told this dude that he had his head up his ass and the real reason millennials can't buy homes is not actually because they're spending all their money on avocado toast.

But because of raging income inequality and the subprime mortgage crisis and all the sort of economic stuff that has been pushed onto us from the older generations.

And while I agree with the structural critique of his statement, statement, I also do feel like avocado toast is quite expensive.

And also,

it's something that you can make at home for very cheap.

And

so

I don't want to say I see where he's coming from because it was a stupid comment, but

avocado toast is quite expensive.

I mean, like, you can get it for like $13 at some places in New York, which is

more than I'm going to spend on a piece of toast, shall we say.

Look, I get it.

Sometimes you're out at a cafe and they have awesome bread and they put fun garnishes on it and you want a piece of avocado toast.

For Lauren though, it's come to mean something more.

When I encounter avocado toast on a menu today,

I always have this sort of like pain, like feeling of yearning because

I at least still cannot justify ordering it in a restaurant, though I see people doing it all the time.

And I'm always like, if only I were, like, I feel like there's at some income level, I will be frivolous enough to order an avocado toast in a restaurant.

But it's still there's like a barrier to me.

It just seems so like luxurious.

When you hear about Miley Cyrus having an avocado tattoo or avocado toast breaking Instagram and denying a whole generation home ownership, you think we must be at peak avocado.

But no.

Because of the future of avocados, it's probably not in the U.S.

at all.

In the year 2010, there were fewer than two tons of avocados imported into China.

A small sedan, considered that many avocados.

But since then, it has become much more widespread, mostly among young millennials in the upper middle class, but as a healthy fruit.

And it's known in China as the butterfruit.

which seems to me like a perfect name for the avocado because that's exactly what it feels like when you eat it.

It's so buttery.

So, okay.

In 2010, there was a carload of butterfruit sold in the whole of China.

That was the situation seven years ago.

Last year, 32,000 tons were imported into China.

And this is partly a marketing campaign and also partly kind of a young urban middle class reaching for a global craze.

Brooks says Chinese entrepreneurs are building ripening rooms for avocados.

They're starting to talk about growing avocados in China.

We've had our boom here in the U.S., and now that boom is moving on to other shores.

Chinese have an unbelievable unbelievable ability to adapt and incorporate new things into their cuisine.

They are omnivores of the first order and also

have a very, very widely diverse palate.

And the avocado is a flavor carrier.

In China as in in Southeast Asia, they're also able to see it as a fruit.

They don't mind a fruit that looks like a vegetable or are using it both for sweet and savory outcomes.

In fact, Brooks says that in the southernmost part of China, near the border of Myanmar, avocado is already popular.

It's used in salads with tomato and onion, like a kind of proto-guacamole.

And it also goes into shakes, where it gets blended up with condensed milk, sometimes with powdered chocolate added for good measure.

This is pretty common around the world.

You find avocado ice cream and avocado shakes.

It's only starting to catch on here.

We still seem to think of avocados mostly in savory dishes.

But Brooks says we can't even imagine how big avocados are going to get in China.

The avocado's journey from Mesoamerican backyards to world domination still has a way to go.

One of the guys that I quoted in the piece, this guy Steve Barnard, who's one of the biggest distributors in the world, dreams like every entrepreneur of introducing four chunks of avocado in every noodle soup, every bowl of noodle soup in China.

But wait, there's more.

What about the new pitless avocados and avocado hand?

And that trendy new variety that is supposed to be better than the Haas and that I want to plant in my back garden, but it's impossible to get hold of.

It's so hot.

Well, you can find out about all of that if you are one of Gastropod's special supporters and get our special supporter newsletter.

Every episode, it's full of fun stuff we just couldn't fit in.

It's five bucks per episode donation on Patreon or nine bucks a month support on our own website, gastropod.com/slash support.

Thanks this episode to Brooke Larmer, freelance journalist, avocado fancier, and New York Times on money columnist, and also to Lauren Euler, freelance journalist and avocado toast aspirer, as well as to Mary Lou Arpea and Eric Fogt of UC Riverside and Luis Mario Tapio Vargas at the Mexican National Research Institute for Forests and Agriculture.

We have links to their articles and publications and websites on our website, gastropod.com.