A IS FOR AVOCADO: MILLENNIALS, MILLIONAIRES AND THE TROUBLE WITH THE TOAST
It’s a curious thing about trends. When the first signs of one appear on the horizon, many of us mild-mannered, uncontroversial plain Janes tend to be sceptical. Didn’t we just throw out those low-rise jeans, or say our goodbyes to overplucked eyebrows? All but a little while later, however, neck-deep in the middle of a trend with no shore in sight, we cannot imagine ever dressing, or eating, or living any other way. But then, inevitably, as a little more time passes, these temporary delusions begin to feel like absurd relics of times past, and we don’t like looking back. We have a little more grace for, say, older generations’ beatlemania or shoulder pads that defied gravity and seemingly all logic, than for whatever that thing was that made moustaches appear on everything from cafe mirrors to coffee mugs for a few brief years between 2010 and 2015. That is us: Millennials. We did that, and thankfully most of us lived to tell the tales. It wasn’t long after moustache mania that a new generation began to take hold, began to inform the trends—began to mock Millennials. Today, as the oldest members of this Generation Z are turning 27 and Generation Alpha (often the kids of older Millennials) begins to poke its head around the corner, perhaps it’s time for a look back at the Millennial’s most lasting symbol and mascot, the generation’s most impactful cultural staple: the avocado.
There were other signifiers, of course. The flamingo comes to mind, as does the pineapple: flashes of lives lived under golden sunlight by way of cheap, plastic decor. But none of these spurred industries to the extent the avocado did, or spark discussions like the avocado does. All of which isn’t to say that Millennials invented avocados—avocados have been around for a long long time, and have been cultivated for at least 7000 years, beginning their life as a food source for humans in Central America. They were a part of the diets of Mayans and Aztecs alike, considered, at times, to be an aphrodisiac and, always, a luxury: A fruit so high in fat it spreads like butter, who could not like that? That’s what early industrialists must have thought, too, learning from the success of that other tropical fruit that took the world by storm. In the United States, where the banana does not grow, the fruit had gone from an obscure delicacy to outselling apples and oranges by 1913—an amazing feat for such a delicate fruit that needed to be transported by railway or boat across continents. The banana industry paved the way for industrial scale growing operations, plant grafting and irrigation, for off-the-tree ripening, temperature control and careful transportation. The dark side to this development, of course, was the practical colonisation of Latin America by United Fruit. Unlike bananas, however, avocados could also grow in California, where the first orchards began to spring up, and by 1915, at a meeting in L.A.’s Alexandria hotel, the California Avocado Association was founded with the aim of marketing the fruit to the white masses.
Also unlike the banana, the avocado wasn’t an easy sell to this demographic—seeing as it wasn’t sweet like other fruits, and didn’t take well to cooking as a vegetable. By the twenties the Association was taking out ads in Vogue and New Yorker, marketing the avocado as the “aristocrat of salad fruits”. The avocado began to take hold, slowly. A nineteen-fifties dinner party might include a salad course of tomatoes stuffed with marinated avocado. It showed up, mostly cooked, in some rightfully forgotten seventies recipes, and as a favourite colour for kitchen tiles of that decade. The nineteen-eighties, with its strong anti-fat sentiments, proved difficult for the fruit, but by the nineties, the West seemed ready. In 1995, 360 million pounds of avocado were consumed in the United States. In 2018, that number had risen to 2453 million pounds: an increase of almost 700 percent. In 1995, the oldest Millennials had been fifteen years old, in 2018, they were thirty-eight. The avocado had grown up, blossomed—as had the Millennial. The image began to blur: What had been there first, the Millennial or the avocado?
The most potent image that associated the Millennial with the fruit also came around this time. In the years leading up to 2018, the ‘avocado toast’ had been making its way from Queensland, Australia to cafés the world over, made big by Instagram and Gwyneth Paltrow, and from niche menu item to trend to meme: an unremarkable success story. People picked up on the somewhat extreme price margins on the dish—which in its simplest form consists of two ingredients and requires no technical skill and little more than an electric toaster to pull off. But the real smash came in 2017, when Australian real estate mogul Tim Gurner blamed the lack of Millennial home ownership on the generation’s propensity for spending “forty dollars a day on smashed avocados and coffee, and not working”. The remarks set off a flurry of think pieces. Millennials defended themselves as the “unluckiest generation”, trying to make ends meet amidst rising student debts and shrinking housing and job markets, pointing towards the selfish exploitation of resources previous generations had so carelessly inflicted, leaving them a broken world. A year later, the phrase “OK, boomer” caught on. The generational conflict had fully erupted, and it had started with remarks about Millennials’ lifestyle choices in the field of avocado toast and Starbucks lattes.
No shorthand is the real deal, no symbol a true reflection. So, in short, no: Many other factors play into the fact that Millennials are living in a world of ever-growing economic inequality, it’s not all avocados on toast. But Millennials are not innocent either, and neither are avocados.
Because it is true that Millennials eat a lot of them, and it is true that there are a lot of problems with the way they are produced. The avocado disrupts the image of a climate-conscious generation, keen on changing the systems of inequality their parents and grandparents left them. Because with the rapid growth of the avocado market in the twenty-first century, it became increasingly obvious that California alone could not satiate the Western world’s hunger for the fruit, and so the avocado market increasingly relied on produce from countries in Latin America. Old habits die hard, and exploitation is, once again, the name of the game: of people, of water supplies, of valuable forest turned into farmland, ultimately of Mother Earth.
Some trends are quickly forgotten, others stick around for a while, until they are ultimately replaced by other, fresher ones. This is the natural ebb and flow of our human desires, it is to be expected. Although there are signs of a changing brunch landscape, where home-grown green peas or fava beans are replacing the avocado increasingly regularly, it is likely that we won’t stop eating avocados anytime soon. Not because we want to, anyway—but we might have to. Extreme heat and soil damage caused by floods are increasingly putting a strain on avocado production in Mexico, the world’s largest producer. In 2017, a study by the University of California concluded that avocado production would be cut in half by 2050 as a result of climate change. Of course, these troubles don’t only surround the avocado, but also many other tropical fruits that have become mass commodities in other parts of the world, always ripe, always ready to go, never showing the dark world the empires are built upon.
As the avocado became a shorthand for Millennial laziness, it is worth wondering how it got to that point. Because was it truly the Millennial’s idea to start eating them, or were they victims of a larger scheme? In their early years of life, when the avocado had an image problem as a source of fat, the California Avocado Commission (not to be confused with the California Avocado Society) set up an advisory board to inform people not only of the fruit’s health benefits, but also of how and when to eat it. “Mr. Ripe Guy”, a human-sized avocado mascot, informed the masses that a ripe, brown avocado tasted much better than a paler, greener, unripe one. They began to push guacamole as the unofficial dish for the Super Bowl and thus got millions acquainted with the avocado. It worked. Olga Khazan writes about the marketing of the avocado: “The saga of the avocado shows how food promotion can—when it coincides happily with changing demographics, fortuitous economic policy, and favorable scientific knowledge—work almost eerily well. It can change the way we eat, sometimes forever.”
All of this preceded the years of rapid growth for the avocado industry mentioned earlier on, which are also the years Millennials grew up. Perhaps, the Millennial had no other choice but to love the avocado, as they were served to them, subconsciously, on silver plates, from an early age. It is often said that Millennials are the first generation to be ‘natives’ on the internet, to be ‘fluent’ internet users. Perhaps, they are also—at least in Western countries— the first generation to be fluent avocado eaters, a generation of people who never picked up a brown, rough-skinned, pear-shaped specimen and wondered what on Earth to do with it.
Text: Yannic Moeken
Illustration: Eilis Dart
