The Avocado

All the talk around campus seems to be about Avocados. I’d always wondered about them, so I did a little reading. It got racy, I started blushing, and just now finished sputtering my way through the randy history of the buttery fruit. For apparently, with avocados, it’s all about sex.

It starts with the name. Avocado is a bastardization, the actual name comes from the Aztec ahuacatl, meaning testicle. Yeah, I went there. It gets worse. The fruit hangs off the tree in pairs.

The spanish took the aztec word and went with aguacate, which slowly became avocado. How’d they do that? We can only speculate, but it probably came about from lawyers with inferiority complexes. The spanish aguacate slowly became synonomous for abogado, legal expert. The french use avocat for both avocado and lawyer, the italians use avvocato for lawyer, and avocado for fruit.. Draw your own conclusions.

Naturally, avocados has a long history of being an aphrodisiac, following a botanical tradition of anthropomorphizing food based upon its looks. (there’s a name for that, anyone know it?) The first recorded english use of the word was in 1697, as Avogato Pear, but that was still hitting too close to home, so English prudes tried later to change it to alligator pear. Wiser heads prevailed, we’re calling a spade a spade, so Avocado it is.

And the sex isn’t stopping there. Avocados have evolved to avoid inbreeding at all costs. There are two types of avocados, A’s and B’s. Imagine this-a plant where the female flowers open on the morning of the first day, then in the afternoon of the second the male flowers strut their stuff. That’s an ‘A’ type tree, the B’s reverse this, with the males starting.

Our dining halls are filled with Ettinger Avocados, according to Midd-Blog, which is a ‘B’ cultivar. Bred in Kefar Malal, Israel in 1947, and brought to the US in 1954, this type is frequently used as a mate to the more popular Hass variety. (what makes Hass so popular? Marketing, savvy marketing. Hass bears all year, so is much easier to grow and sell, so the industry has made it popular.)

The pits are filled with a milky sap that turns red when exposed to air, and was used as an ink by the conquistadors. Bonus points for the first Middkid to write their thesis with this.

An avocado tree gets about 80 feet tall, and a mature tree will bear about 200 fruit. The trees are evergreen, and scared to death of the cold, although some can tolerate freezing temps for a couple of days. Most trees are grafted nowadays, and bear fruit in a relatively short 1-3 years. Stick 3 toothpicks in a pit about halfway up the fruit, suspend it in a glass of water, and watch roots grow in a couple of weeks. TAKE THEM HOME, I’m not taking care of them if you plant them out in the landscape.

Avocados are one of the Anachronistic Fruits, like the Mango or our Osage Orange, evolved to disperse its seeds with an extinct mammal, in this case probably something from the Pleistocene era. Or at any rate, if anything alive has the ability to eat and excrete an avocado pit, I don’t want to meet it.

One thought on “The Avocado

  1. “a botanical tradition of anthropomorphizing food based upon its looks. (there’s a name for that, anyone know it?)”

    I think the term you are looking for the doctrine of signatures.

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