The Selling of the Avocado | Hacker News Reader

The Selling of the Avocado

theatlantic.com

61 pointspercept30 comments

The Avocados that they can actually ship (Hass) are pretty terrible. If you haven't lived in an area where they grow avocados you probably haven't had a chance to enjoy the other dozens of varieties of avocado.

Did you know that there's an avocado you can eat like an apple? The skin is thin and edible. There's another avocado with much higher oil content than the Hass and so a different mouth feel. Another kind that has a smokey flavor, and avocados that weren't fertilized by insects and so they have no seed - just a solid fatty oily avocado. And many more...

This is one of the things I miss about CA (specifically, I lived in Ventura, CA). (another is the huge variety of citrus, including a strain where they breed the acidity out of an orange and so it tasted like vanilla...)

http://edibleojai.com/online-magazine/heritage-avocados/

(the one in the lower left looks like the edible skin one I remember)

And a small list of CA varieties: http://ucavo.ucr.edu/avocadovarieties/VarietyFrame.html#Anch...

There's even more varieties in Hawaii.

Same can be said for bananas, I always try to find local bananas (or other fruit) when ever i'm somewhere tropical. So much better.

With that said, I think I've only ever eaten Hass Avocados and I think they are delicious so my next trip to CA I'll be sure to seek out some local varieties.

Last summer I planted a Blue Java banana plant, never having tasted one. I'm waiting rather impatiently for it to mature and fruit so I can see how they taste.

Hass may not be the tastiest avos, but they are superior to what was the dominant commercial variety (fuerte) before they took over.

Related: the Hass "mother" tree:

http://articles.latimes.com/1992-03-29/local/me-373_1_hass-a...

I find the Hass ones to be vastly more flavorful than the big green ones we have here all over Florida.

Here in the Phoenix area Hass is usually the only thing available. Once I saw big, smooth-skinned, lighter green ones from Florida and I bought some. I was very disappointed. I'd love to try some different varieties.

I love Hass avocados because they are less sweet, and good one will have that smokeyness which adds complexity to the flavor. It is a good example of where commercial and flavor interests ended up aligned.

I've lived in CA (Silicon Valley), and I agree that the avocados are one of the best things about living there. The other is the weather: that perfect Mediterranean climate with hot, dry (and I mean no rain April-Sept.) summers and mild, rainy winters.

Now I live on the actual Mediterranean. The climate is still amazing, the avacados...meh. Really not very good at all. But the olives! You have never had olives. Not like this. The varieties, the flavor, it's just like you describe for avocados in CA.

It's always struck me as odd that both places could have their own you-can't-find-them-elsewhere specialities that would be so different for what is essentially an identical climate. For olives, I can only assume it has to do with their multi-century lifespan.

Maybe the soil has something to do with it also. There are some Mangoes that only taste the same if grown in a certain region of India, and I always heard that was because of the soil + climate.

My Father-in-Law lived in Ventura and we used to get a box of avocados a few times a year from his backyard tree. The house he owned had been built in an old avocado orchard and a few trees remained. Fond memories...

Interesting timing. Just as I started reading this article while watching the superbowl pre-game, a segment offering a guac recipe aired sponsored by avocados. I'm reminded how the Patagonian toothfish was renamed as "Chilean Seabass" and of course "the other white meat".

Edit: before I could finish typing this comment, another commercial aired for avocados.

I've done work for the Chilean Avocado Importers Association[1]. One of their selling points is being in the Southern Hemisphere, they're counter-seasonal to North American avos and so sourcing from both gives retailers a year-round supply.

[1] http://avocadosfromchile.org/

Makes me wonder about which great fruit or vegetables I've missed out on my whole life simply because they were unknown and badly marketed.

A recent one would maybe be Kale, which has become dramatically popular in the last 10 years.

Pomegranates have increased in popularity recently although they're still very seasonal and fairly expensive in pure form (or even as 100% juice).

My perception is that cranberries have also expanded beyond their home territories although they're still seasonal as well. (Don't really understand why you can't buy them frozen as they freeze quite well--something I do every fall.)

There are a bunch of tropical fruits that could potentially fall into this category as well but they're mostly too expensive for the broad market so it probably doesn't make sense to market them more.

> and fairly expensive in pure form (or even as 100% juice)

$13.00 for 1 litre Pom brand here in my region of SE Canada. I bought some on sale yesterday for $7.99

I think the big jump in price due to demand after studies may have shown pomegranate juice may have properties which reduces arterial plaque, may! http://i.imgur.com/OPTogVl.jpg?1

And oddly enough I also bought some avocados for the first time ever too.

Another commenter's mention of shipability is one of the keys. Due to the long supply-chains for modern produce, the fruit or veggie has to be picked early, ripen off the vine and stay firm to hold up to shipping. cf. Grocery store tomatoes, etc.

My father is involved with developing the PawPaw (Asimina Triloba) into a commercially viable fruit. It's amazing - as big as your fist with a few black seeds and creamy flesh which tastes like custard. Problem is it doesn't ripen off the tree well and bruises easily in shipping. Various universities have breeding programs and there are some excellent named varieties now but still not quite to a place where they could be commercialized on a broad scale.

Another issue is of course people don't like things they're not used to and are generally reluctant to experiment with new foods. (Generalized to the US.) One way to overcome that is through marketing campaigns. Federal Marketing Orders are what we have in place to do this.[1][2]

[0] http://www.pawpaw.kysu.edu/ https://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/cropfactsheets/pawpaw.ht... etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_orders_and_agreement... [2] http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/FVMarketingOrderLandingPage

(Also, frozen cranberries are generally available - but often seasonally because in popular cooking they're limited to Thanksgiving relish and the like...)

>frozen cranberries are generally available

Interesting. I've never seen them. Probably because they're available fresh in season in New England where I live and, as you say, they're typically viewed as a seasonal berry.

Interesting. In my part of the world, a pawpaw is what you call a papaya.

I hadn't heard that. Wild, in the US they're totally different fruit:

PawPaw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimina_triloba

Papaya: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papaya

I find that mildly annoying :)

The Papaya page on Wikipedia mentions the use of the name pawpaw.

As someone allergic to cranberries (sensitive to blueberries and wintergreen too), it baffles me a little bit how popular they are now. You can't really find a pre-mixed fruit-nut blend that doesn't have them. They're in a lot of salads at restaurants. The worst was when I found out a BBQ sauce at a local placed used cranberry juice for the tanginess, which actually tasted really good, the three days of hives wasn't so good.

It's really not as bad as a lot of other people with allergies have to deal with. I know someone severely allergic to soy. That would be the hardest thing to deal with.

I bring this up because I've been using frozen berries for a morning protein smoothie, and recall seeing cranberries, which again, I avoid.

I had a curious salad recently, whose signature ingredients were pomegranate seeds and mint peas. I wouldn't eat it every day, but it was interesting.

It doesn't even have to be about good or bad marketing, but just how something is marketed and/or commonly used. Take, for example, celery. You're probably used to seeing it like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Céleri.jp... right? Well around here they're sold like this: http://www.varbak.com/galeri/kereviz-b3194.jpg . The flavor of the root is far more intense as well, and makes for a really great soup or stew.

That's called celeriac in English. It's not common, but there should be a few bulbs in a British shop with a decent range of vegetables.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celeriac

It's often called "Celery Root" in the U.S. It's commonly available.

I just wish it wasn't so overpriced.. I make a puree of celery root, cauliflower and a small potato instead of just potatoes. The extra fiber offsets the glycemic index/load... the little bit of potato gives it the familiar flavor. The only people who've tried it that didn't like it don't like cauliflower and celery.

Mangosteens! Good, fresh ones are spectacular.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_mangosteen

Unfortunately they keep really badly and insects love them, so imports are banned in much of the world. The name also doesn't help, as they have nothing to do with mangoes.

Pawpaws! If you live anywhere south of New York and East of Kansas, this September, walk into the woods, find a tree that looks like this: https://www.google.com/search?q=paw+paw+tree&tbm=isch shake it, and eat the fruit that comes out. It tastes like a pina colada! (Or if you are familiar, a custard apple or sitaphal) They are huge unmistakable fruits.

I grew up in Ohio, spent lots of time in the woods, and that entire time, nobody told me that every third tree in the woods had tropical tasting huge fruits in it! My friends were blown away when on a trip home, I could walk off trail in a city park, shake a tree and come back with a delicious fruit they'd never seen before. The only member of their genus to grow outside the tropics, and they are endemic to the US, but nobody knows about them! They have a wonderful flavor but the shelf life is a day or so, so they've never been industrialized.

It's amazing just how common they are. Once I knew what they were I would see them every 20 feet whenever I went hiking.

The passionfruit is virtually unknown in America despite being huge in many places around the world. Hawaii and California have the perfect climate for growing them and preserved passionfruit products make some appearance in American recipes but you virtually never see the fresh fruit for sale anywhere.

I predict it's going to have a meteoric rise sometime in the next few years, it's got everything going for it.

In Colombia they have huge ones:

https://conquistadorc.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/p1050364.j...

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