If I am most like any fruit, I am probably most like an avocado. For most of their existence, avocados are either too soft or too hard. Only on their best days are they just what you were looking for. Open them up—ask them to tell you about themselves—and you never know what you’re going to find. Sometimes, something comforting, creamy and delicious. Sometimes, something rotten, withering and dark.
I have a friend who has a real love-hate relationship with avocados (this is no longer an analogy about me), but then who doesn’t?
You’re probably asking if I mean who doesn’t have a love-hate relationship with avocados? or who doesn’t have a friend who has a love-hate relationship with avocados? To which I reply with gusto: yes!
The other day I got the following email from my friend. The subject line was “Avocado”:
So I got a batch and the part around the seed in the middle is like gray. You ever seen that? Sent from my mobile device.
This was bothering him quite a bit, as you can see. He wasn’t merely feeling bad enough to email me about his sketchy produce. He also couldn’t wait to do it, dispatching his message to me by phone. From right where he was standing! I am surprised he did not include a photo.
Before we go further, let’s pick a grammatical bone. Right now in your kitchen or pantry you might have one potato, one tomato and one avocado. But you may have a decent supply of all three, in which case you must have some potatoes, some tomatoes, and some avocados. What did avocados do to be stripped of their plural E’s? When a potato and a tomato get together, does the avocado feel left out? Probably wants to just drop those other two into some volcanoes.
Plural inconsistencies aside, avocados are a real pickle for purchasers and eaters. As you know if you are a regular partaker, they must be purchased unripe because once ready to eat, they progress rapidly from ripened to rotting. If you buy an avocado already ripe, you pretty much have to eat it that day. Before too long you will have a desiccating husk on your hands.
Then again, if you are desperately trying to think of something to make for the block party (not pasta salad again), you might light upon guacamole as an odds-on crowd pleaser. Guacamole, that chip dip from the Aztec Empire, is of course made with avocados. Ripe avocados, which is to say, you have to have thought ahead, or you cannot make guacamole. Underripe avocados, in addition to having the consistency of a stack of used band-aids, have the flavor of bitter bananas.
The person who has, against all common sense, stubbornly attempted to make guacamole with freshly purchased, unyieldingly unripe avocados is probably also the person who in the end brought that eighth bowl of pasta salad to the block party.
I replied:
See all kinds of stuff with avocados. Greenish gray or just gray?
Tantalizingly, he responded:
Hard to tell. Didn’t look “normal.” Such a grim tale, these avocados.
Hard to tell! Avocados, in addition to being mercurial in nature, are apparently also secretive. One imagines this green or gray or greenish gray avocado cowering in the shadows below the cabinets, saying in a flat voice, “Please don’t look at me.”
ME: You seem especially affected by them.
HIM: Meaning?
ME: I have thrown out dozens of avocados in my life either partially or wholly uneaten because of what I found inside. You are a little more demanding I guess!
HIM: This latest turn of events is unsettling, to say the least.
I will agree that there is something unsettling about avocados. Like 3-year-old boys, they sometimes dictate the terms of your life against your will. Many’s the time I’ve come home from work with one dinner in mind, only to feel the softening skin of an avocado on my counter and realize that I have to eat it that night or throw it away.
So why go through all the trouble? For instance, you won’t catch me eating starfruit or chayote squash or other fruit that give me agita. The one inconceivably sour persimmon I ate in my life did ghastly things to my tongue that I still don’t understand. I would rather go to the dentist that peel a kiwi.
The allure of the avocado was perhaps best illustrated by the famous behaviorist B. F. Skinner. He showed in his Skinner Box experiments that rats that were rewarded with food by pressing a lever would keep pressing the lever for more rewards, and rats that were punished when pressing a lever would stop pressing it.
Skinner also showed that rats pressed the lever most frantically if sometimes they got a reward, and sometimes they got nothing. You can see how avocados, one day pristine and delicious, the next day ashy and disgusting, are nature’s own Skinner Boxes.
The unpredictability of avocados might be the very thing that keeps us eating them. If they were perfect every time, we might not be that interested. It’s clever, if you think about it. Those sly, grim avocados.
