Maximum Yield Australia/New Zealand 2020 September/October | Page 54

a brief
HISTORY OF
AVOCADOS
by Philip McIntosh
Humans have cultivated
avocados for millennia, but
it took millennials to come
up with avocado toast.
Purplish-black and leathery on the
outside; green turning to yellow
when ripe; soft and creamy on the
inside with a rock-hard pit in the middle
— that is an avocado. This tree-born
fruit (technically a berry) hails from
central Mexico, with evidence of human
cultivation back as far as 5,000 years.
Archeological evidence suggests people
have been using avocados for as long
as 9,000 years. So, it seems that at about
the same time that corn, beans, and
squash were coming into widespread
use in Mesoamerica, so too was the
avocado, at least in the regions where
the plant was endemic.
The fruit has been known as the
avocado pear or alligator pear (because
of its shape and usually knobby and
somewhat wrinkled skin), but most
people just call them avocados these
days (occasionally shortened to just
“avo”). The scientific name is Persea
americana, with the genus name Persea
apparently deriving from an old Greek
name for a different tree species known
as Assyrian plum (Cordia myxa). How
that came about is not exactly clear, but
the specific epithet “americana” means
from or of the Americas.
The avocado may originally hail from
Central America, but it is now grown in
many places where the climate is warm
and sunny with little chance of frost. The
only places in Australia that avocados
grow are Atherton Tablelands/
Mareeba, Riverland, Sunraysia,
Pemberton, an Perth. There are
many varieties in cultivation
including Fuerte, Bacon, Lulu, and
Hass. Fuerte was once popular but
Hass is the type commonly found
in grocery stores these days.
The avocado is considered a
“low processing” fruit, meaning
you don’t have to do much to it to
get it to market. Avocados have
the convenient property of not
ripening on the tree (in nature they
ripen after they fall off the tree),
meaning they can be picked to ripen
after they get to their destination.
Avocados are tough, too, which makes
packaging and shipping easier than it is
with more delicate fruit.
Mexico remains the world’s largest
producer by far with export market
share greater than 40 percent in 2019.
Interestingly, the Netherlands is a big
exporter of avocados. Since you can’t
really grow avocados economically in
Holland, what is the deal with that? It
turns out that the Netherlands imports
avocados in quantity, mostly from
South America and South Africa, and
then exports them to other European
countries for a profit.
Including domestically produced
fruit, about 20 percent of all the
world’s avocados are consumed in
the U.S. That’s a lot of guacamole and
avocado toast.
Speaking of guacamole and
avocado toast, what are avocados
good for anyway? The avocado has
a umami flavour all its own that
lends itself to many savoury or even
sweet dishes. The texture is often
described as “buttery.” Avocados
are considered to be nutrient and
photochemically “dense,” meaning
they have a lot of good stuff in
them. Stuff like fibre, potassium,
magnesium, vitamins A, C, E, and K,
folate… and more. Plus, avocados are
rich in mono- and polyunsaturated
fatty acids (the good kinds).
Although outdoor cultivation is
limited to tropical areas, the avocado
makes for an attractive house plant
even though it is unlikely to ever
develop fruit indoors. Sprouting
avocado seeds is relatively easy.
Give an avocado seed (the pit) a
good cleaning and use toothpicks to
suspend it over a glass or bowl with
half of the fat end submerged in water
and wait awhile. Eventually, you’ll be
rewarded with an attractive addition
to your plant collection.
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Maximum Yield