A Spanish-speaking Asian server placed the avocado appetizer atop the zodiac-themed placemat, which told Spencer Flores his birth year animal was a rabbit.
La Caridad, the Upper West Side Cuban Chinese fusion restaurant, had been the Flores family reunion spot throughout Spencer’s childhood. Each visit, he checked the placemats to see if the 1999 zodiac had miraculously changed to a tougher animal, like the tiger or dragon. Yet each time, his zodiac remained the same. So did the appetizer.
Bathed in olive oil, salt and pepper, the avocado cubes laid gently atop a plate of shredded lettuce. A lemon wedge and sliced onions finished the piece.
The Flores’s had been dining at La Caridad since Spencer’s father was a kid. When the restaurant closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Flores family lost more than a good meal, but decades of tradition. And there the avocado was. Right at the center of it all.
The taste of avocado, or just hearing the word, Spencer said, “is nostalgic of me being in the city with my family.”
Avocados have this effect on people. No one gets excited or disgusted or nostalgic about pears. By just being itself, the avocado has become part of cultural, environmental, even imperial debates. They are the chameleon of the food world, finding a home in something as niche as a Latin American restaurant with Chinese zodiac placemats.
Though their modern popularity originated from the millennial clean eating trend, avocados are thought to have been consumed in central Mexico up to 10,000 years ago, during the hunter-gatherer era. They were domesticated by tribes there in 3000 B.C.
Aztec peoples named the fruit “āhuacatl,” which translates to “testicle,” due to its shape, but also because they believed it to have aphrodisiac powers. Similarly, they believed it gave great strength to whomever ate it. Ancient Mayan peoples believed in its powers as well, basing the 14th month of their calendar on the avocado glyph, or symbol.
Eventually, it moved north. The magical testicle fruit began appearing in tropical regions of the Unites States in 1833, and by the early 1900s, Americans changed the fruit’s name for marketing reason. The commonly known “alligator pear” became “avocado,” adapted from the sound of the original Aztec word. In the ‘50s, Americans began pairing it with salads, but it grew unpopular in the ‘80s with the rise of low-fat dieting. In another marketing move in the ‘90s, avocados, or more specifically, guacamole, became a ‘must have’ for Super Bowl Sunday.
The most recent boom came in 2014 after a study publicized its healthfulness, and millennials ate that up. Avocado toast became a brunch staple, and then a cliché. A British newspaper fawned over Kate Middleton’s use of avocado as a morning sickness cure in 2017. Just 16 months later, the same paper attacked Meghan Markle for serving the snack at high tea, saying the millennial health food was responsible for human rights abuses, drought, and murder.
Apparently more of us want to be like Kate. Demand has tripled since 2001. The average American now eats 8 pounds of avocados each year.
“Growing up in California, they are an important staple of my diet,” said Audrey Foster, 22-year-old who has since lived in South Carolina and Texas. “They’re a lot fresher and cost a lot less there.”
California has historically led the U.S.’s avo-consumption, accounting for 80 percent in the late ‘90s. While New York City ate 300 million avocados in 2015, Los Angeles ate more than twice that amount. But even in California, there is dissent.
“I freaking hate avocados,” said Aseda Safoa, another California native. “Its taste, texture, the fad, all of it.”
Again with the “fad.” Regularly paired with that word, avocados never simply are. They often seem to stand for something.
Food is interdisciplinary, said food sociologist Michaela DeSoucey, Ph.D., so it can hold many different meanings.
For avocados, one of those is a generational fight, and more specifically, commentary on how millennials have taken a different path into adulthood than their parents did.
“When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,” millionaire Tim Gurner told 60 Minutes Australia in an interview (that went viral) several years ago. He was born right on the cusp of the Gen X/millennial turnover.
But DeSoucey calls this a distraction. “Who cares if someone eats a $10 avocado toast?” she said. “If you stop eating one a week and have an extra $500 at the end of the year, you still can’t afford the New York housing market.”
Avocados are increasingly seen dancing around ‘appropriation’ as well.
“I don’t understand how avocados are considered fancy in Western cultures while they’re so commonplace in Latin American cultures,” said Jack Cheng, who grew up in China and now lives in the United States.
Like conversations around sushi and pho, avocados have a place in the Western commoditization of foreign cultures. Over time, the fruit has been “whitewashed” out of traditional Latin American cultures. What used to be called “poor man’s butter” now describes the diets of skinny white women.
“How did avocado get wrapped up with sushi?” DeSoucey pointed out, referring to the California roll. “Avocado was never an ingredient in sushi until the ‘80s, and now, the pair is so popular.”
Like these other cultural capital, avocado rides the line between appreciation and appropriation.
“Who get the recognition and the money?” DeSoucey asks. With appreciation, a product’s original culture profits. If anyone else profits, it’s appropriation.
Fixing this starts with looking at the production system and asking what people in the lower rungs of the industry want.
State of the Production System
Avocado farms require a significant amount of human labor, because unlike other fruit-and-vegetable-picking processes that can be automated by robots, avocados must be picked by hand. The job is physically demanding, and a lack of workers can mean rotting fruits in the fields. For the short months the trees produce in the United States, both COVID-19-related labor scarcity and immigration policies have left farmers shorthanded. As of 2018, almost half of U.S. farm workers were undocumented immigrants. With immigration crackdowns also targeting temporary Visa programs designed for farm workers, finding enough labor to keep up with production has been unsuccessful.
Avocados are imported from Mexico year-round, due to specific climate conditions the trees require. However, the multibillion-dollar industry has attracted the sights of drug cartels and gangs in Mexico.
As demand for the ‘green gold’ increased, so has violence in Michoacán, the region where the U.S. imports its avocados from. Organized crime groups have extorted local farmers, even kidnapping them in many cases. Mexican law enforcement has been unsuccessful in fighting these groups, so much so that Michoacán community citizens have taken it into their own hands. Similarly, there is little regulation on this import due to the relatively new free trade agreement the U.S. reached with Mexico and how quickly avocado demand grew in the last decade.
Knowing about the avocado war hasn’t stopped consumers from buying them either. After speaking about the cartels, Florida resident Emily Cortes responded to whether her opinion about eating avocados changed: “No, I actually ate one today lol.”
Aside from these factors, the environmental implications are still considerable. One avocado takes 60 gallons of water to grow. In low-income avocado-growing areas, natural water sources like rivers have been depleted for the sake of avocado farms, leaving its inhabitants without the necessary resource.
In other areas, its profitability has dominated, so avocado trees are the only crops being planted. Soil needs rotating nutrients from multiple crops to stay viable, so rows of nothing but avocado trees are slowly depleting the soil. If the land stays viable, it will be subject to more pests, which means more pesticides. If not, farmers must find new land. Enter deforestation.
For Cory Searcy, sustainable supply chain expert, sustainability is about remaining between thresholds — upper limits on greenhouse gas emissions and lower limits on wage earnings, for example.
Both companies and governments can be responsible for recognizing and enforcing these thresholds, he said. Companies can’t police themselves effectively, so governments can set norms through legislation and regulations. But since many supply chains cross borders (like the avocado’s), governments cannot be held fully responsible. That’s where individual companies come in again.
Importing countries can also have market access requirements, Searcy said, though realistically, this might not solve the problems in the avocado industry. By just looking at the thirsty fruit, it is impossible to tell if a drug cartel extorted the farmer during production, or anything about how it got there.
Farm to Table, and Everything in Between
Today’s avo-controversy revolves around the mystery that is post-COVID pricing. Inflation is up across the board, without much indication of leveling out soon.
“Pre-pandemic, we hadn’t seen much inflation in the last decade,” said Steve Reed, economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Now, almost all categories are up.”
October’s BLS Consumer Price Index reported the highest consecutive 12-month inflation rate in 30 years. November topped that.
The November CPI shows prices increasing by 6.8 percent since this time last year, 0.6 percent higher than the previous month’s record. High inflation can signal the period before the economy fully recovers, but concerns about the continued inflation persist, especially because consumer wages are not rising at the same rate. The 12-month wage increase sits at 4.8 percent, still 2 percent less than the inflation figure.
Avocado pricing has climbed over the years, said the Department of Agriculture. From 2011 to 2018, California growers increased their rate by 22 percent.
How much does the green gold cost at the moment? That’s hard to tell, because store to store prices can fluctuate. Prices of cases sold to restaurants are a better measure, and this August, those prices were 10 percent higher than the five-year average for large avocados and 8 percent higher for small ones. Last month in New York, grocery prices varied from 99 cents to $3 per avocado.
The current inflation is less about the avocado itself, and more about its supply chain. Dimitri Soyfer, New York produce distributor, said he had to double his avocado prices because his production cost became so expensive.
Soyfer owns Associated Produce Inc., which supplies about 75 low-to-middle-income neighborhood supermarkets in New York. Michoacán-grown Hass avocados, the most popular variety, spend days on a truck before they make it to the city.
Soyfer shops directly from growers like Mission Avocados and Del Monte. They are shipped via freight truck from Michoacán to a storage facility in New Jersey, before they are pulled up to the Bronx warehouse.
“I used to pay a truck from New York to Mexico $5-6,000,” he said. “Now, it’s around $8-9-10,000, and it’s hard to find trucks in general. Not to mention truck drivers.”
Traveling from Michoacán to the Bronx warehouse takes 43 hours in a truck, clocking in at over 2,600 miles. While taking his produce on a flight might seem easier, the cost isn’t viable, he said. Similar to domestic farmers struggling to find labor, the pandemic has limited drivers as well.
“Gas is more expensive which also affects my ‘last mile deliveries,’” he said, referring to the route from the warehouse to supermarkets. “My truck gas bills went up by about double.”
Energy has risen the highest out of any category in the CPI, at 33 percent in the last year. Gasoline specifically increased 58 percent since last November. Used cars and trucks are up 31 percent, while new cars are up 11 percent.
“Everyone is pretty much in the same boat,” Soyfer said. “Everyone had to raise prices. I can’t pay less for a truck than my competitor, so in the end, the customer has to pay more.”
Even with the costly supply chain, consumers are still spending their money on avocados.
Allison Priest, who is studying to be a physician’s assistant, said she didn’t notice a price increase, and she’ll continue eating at least half a day.
After only a few years of popularity, avocados are at the mercy of an obsession. Avo-characters appear on pajama sets, tote bags, slippers, jewelry – anything wearable. ‘Throw Throw Avocado’ is a children’s game. So is ‘Avocado Smash.’ And ‘Toss-an-Avo.’ Specialized 3-in-1 utensils have been engineered to aid in avocado slicing. On Shark Tank, Mark Cuban and Barbara Corcoran invested $400,000 in an avocado-inspired bar and restaurant, valuing the company at $2 million. It has since opened two more locations. In 2018, Instagram influencer Toni Okamoto Shapiro got proposed to with the ring inside an avocado, which she posted to her 500,000 followers. Dozens of similar proposals have been shared on social media. Pool floaties, bathmats, stuffed animals, wrapping paper, even a flavor of Doritos. Western culture has turned the fad into a lifestyle.
What does the food we eat say about us? For DeSoucey, the food sociologist, “everything.”
“You are what you eat,” she says. “Well actually, yes.
“For some, that means following trends. For some, it’s about diets or culture,” she added. “What tastes good, what’s convenient, what’s environmentally conscious.”
At the same time, she says, “People judge each other too much about what they eat as being too ‘froofy,’” avocados being the president of that club.
The shaming around food needs to stop, she said, because if there’s something environmentally detrimental or ethically unjust, the production system will be the avenue to fixing it.
“If we dug into every single food industry and saw all the crap,” DeSoucey said, “we wouldn’t be able to eat anything.”
