All out of guac? Oh, no…

When it comes to pushing my shopping cart around the grocery store, unless something is insanely expensive, I don’t pay all that much attention to prices. I know enough not to pay $10 for a bag of cherries, even if I want them. But mostly I’m not all that price conscious. Lucky me.

So I haven’t noticed that avocados have gotten more expensive.

I like avocados. I use them on salads. I put them on sandwiches – an especially goody-good sammie is avocado, tomato, sprouts, and cheese, open faced, toasted. Yummers. Sometimes I mash an avocado up in a baked potato and call it a day. Extra points if there’s a slice or two of bacon to add to it.

I will admit that I don’t make guacamole from scratch, even though it’s simple enough to do. (I know this because I have observed my sisters making it.) I just buy the tubs as needed.

I’ve also been known to stick toothpicks into the side of an avocado pit, suspend it in a juice glass full of water, and watch it grow. I may have ended up with an avocado plant out of it at one point – back in the day when I had macrame hangers for my plants – but mostly once there are a few leaves, that’s about where my interest ebbs and out it goes. Fun while it lasted…(I like it because it reminds me of putting the top of a carrot in a pudding cup full of water until it ferns up, which my mother let us do when we were kids.)

Any way you look at it, I’m a avocado-er, one of the Americans contributing to the avocado on it’s way to becoming our nation’s favorite fruit.

I suspect that, like most Americans, I don’t consider the avocado a fruit. Sure, it’s got a pit. Just like a peach or a plum. Still, it seems more veggie than fruit, which is how we all pretty much treat it. Sort of like a tomato, when you think of it.

Our per capita consumption was seven pounds in 2016 – up from one pound in 1989. I’m more than doing my bit towards making America a great consumer of avocados. As of 2016, we were up to gross domestic consumption of 2.3 billion pounds.

Avocado was not something – fruit or vegetable – that I was aware of as a kid. They weren’t on our table, and I don’t imagine the were in the fridges at any of my friends’ homes, either. The sum total of our avocado awareness was that some people had kitchen appliances that were avocado green. Not that I knew any of them, but even before the advent of HG-TV, I knew that avocado, alongside harvest gold, was a thing.

When my friends started getting married, we didn’t get them fridges or stoves, of course. But I’m pretty sure I bought at least one avocado-colored fondue pot as a shower gift. I had some kitchen implements – a spatula, an egg beater, a stirring spoon – with a plastic avocado handle.

In my memory, avocado as an accent color was out there before people started eating much by way of avocado.

I did have some avocado awareness. When I was in college, I worked in a student grill that served a sandwich called a Bacon-Avi. And the California Burger had avocado on it. So I can date my knowledge of avocado as an edible to my sophomore year. But avocado still wasn’t a big deal.

Then, all of a sudden, there were margaritas, and chips and salsa, and guacamole. Cobb Salads appeared out of nowhere. And they included avocado.

Fast forward a decade or two or four even, and there it is: almost our favorite fruit.

America’s enthusiasm for avocados may be dented, however, by soaring prices. The wholesale price for a case of 48 avocados peaked at $83.75 in September, up from $34.45 a year before, according to the American Restaurant Association. Some restaurants were forced to add a surcharge on guacamole, or temporarily to scrap it from their menus altogether. Others swallowed the bill. Chipotle, a Mexican-themed restaurant chain, said that “historically high avocado costs” were a big reason why it posted disappointing financial results last year.

Supply shortfalls, brought about by droughts, storms and wildfires in California, Chile and Mexico, help to explain the jump. Production in California dropped by 44% in 2017. Harvests in Mexico that year were off by 20%. Labour strikes in the country further reduced supply. (Source: The Economist)

We’re not the only ones getting in the avocado act. China’s going avocado crazy, and they’ve made trade deals with Chile and Mexico to forge trade deals that – catch this – eliminate tariffs on their avocados.

Maybe we need a trade war – I hear they’re fun and easy to win – that will get us to step out avocado supply.

Not so fast, I guess.

Raising production will be tricky. This is because avocados are a fussy plant to grow, says Mary Lu Arpaia of the University of California, Riverside. Salinity levels need to be just right, the slope of the terrain not too steep and temperatures stable. Erratic weather conditions can easily kill the crop.

Damn!

I don’t want to live in a world without avocado. All out of guac? Oh, no.

Wonder if I impale the pit of the avocado currently residing in my fridge, put it in a water glass, and encourage it a bit – I can even play Mozart to it if needs be – I can figure out how to grow some avocados in my kitchen.