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In the decades before they became a cultural phenomenon, Australians consumed avocados in but two dishes: accompanying prawn cocktails, or served with salad. So what happened?
One person you might ask is Antony Allen. Few in Australia know more about avocados than he does.
Soft-spoken, with an adman's glasses, Mr Allen is a qualified horticulturalist, the current president of the International Avocado Society, and a former chief executive of Avocados Australia.
Mr Allen is also chief executive of The Avolution — a coalition of Queensland avocado growers whose Pinterest page offers the beguiling taxonomy of "catchy food info", "fresh retail", and "recipes yum".
On The Avolution's website, the picture placed next to his biography is a Hass avocado tree. But Mr Allen hasn't always been a champion of the green-skinned goody.
"I used to pick the mushy bit out [of salads] whenever my mother put the avocados in," he says. "I wouldn't touch it."
Australian avocados, by the numbers
For a while, being classed as a salad staple led to a degree of stigmatisation, Mr Allen says.
Now those days are long gone. A growing awareness of the avocado's utility, its relatively high monounsaturated (or "good") fat content, and concerted marketing campaigns have led to some wild numbers in the Australian fruit context.
Over the last decade, per capita consumption has tripled (from 1.2kg to 3.5kg), production has more than doubled (to 60,000 tonnes) and the gross value of the industry has nearly quintupled (from $100 million to $460 million).
As John Tyas, current chief executive of Avocados Australia, says: "Once people get the taste for avocados, there's actually nothing else you can put in there to substitute."
The birth of an icon
Avocados are not native to Australia. Their seeds were first brought here in 1840, before being planted in Sydney's Royal Botanical Gardens.
Almost immediately, nothing happened.
As Mr Tyas puts it: "They sat there for a century, and nobody really did much with them."
The berry — yes, fruits of the avocado tree are technically berries — had long been a staple of diets across Central America and the Caribbean.
For years, despite recognised health benefits, avocados struggled to gain a foothold in a Western diet.
In a 1915 annual report of the California Avocado Association, an agricultural explorer at the Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction queried: "Why [has] not the extraordinary value of this fruit been earlier recognised?"
According to Mr Tyas, part of the reason is that avocados are difficult to grow — most varieties of the fruit flourish only in subtropical climates, and their root system is quite poor.
"They love water, but they don't like wet feet," he muses. "So they're a little bit precious."
Commercial opportunities for the fruit were limited, too, until widespread adoption of drip irrigation sufficient advances in combating cinnamon fungus — which, as botanical pathogens go, is something of a nemesis of fruit once known to the Aztecs as ahuacatl.
Getting onboard with avo
Once you've figured out how to grow avocados commercially, it's an entirely different problem convincing people to eat them.
"It's an incremental process," Mr Allen admits.
Marquee fruit products can rely on rather simplistic advertising: the most successful jingle in Australian fruit advertising history, you will recall, consists mostly of repeating the word "banana".
For avocados, the messaging is a more subtle, one of usage change.
"We had to evolve the industry," Mr Allen says. Thus, the "Add an Avocado" line was born.
Sweet or savoury, hot or cold dishes, it didn't matter: "It was about giving people the perspective [that] avocados could do the same things they do for salads for other meals."
Something else happened over to coincide with the avocado industry's renewed messaging: an overall awareness in nutrition in Australia.
"Health became a much more important aspect of the Australian lifestyle," Mr Allen says.
"So you started to see [avocados] being added to chocolate mousses, cakes, cooking — all these sorts of things."
In the age of wellness bloggers on Instagram, the avocado has an additional advantage: its flesh is bright green.
Avocados are grown year-round in every state of Australia. This regularity makes them an attractive product for Australia's main retail game: the supermarket duopoly.
"Because it is produced year-round, it has enabled the retailers to get behind it," Mr Tyas says.
In turn, consumers know there will always be a fruit of the Persea americana available to them.
"That's helped people to get into regular purchase patterns as well," he adds.
The 'smashed avo' generation
When the demographer Bernard Salt suggested young Australians spend too much money on smashed avocado at cafes to afford housing deposits, the humble Caribbean foodstuff became an unlikely flashpoint for class and generational warfare.
Economic dismantlings of Salt's theory aside, ordering smashed avocado in a café came to stand for, as Barthes once said of steak and chips, "both a nature and a morality".
In its smashed form, avocado offered an easy generational shorthand — a way of at once railing against the profligacy of gen Y and providing a causal link for their poverty. And weren't people livid.
"Anytime you want to talk about millennials, about avocados — it sets off a live wire," Jayne Orenstein, a Washington Post reporter, tells the Money.
"It's like avocado toast represents what's wrong with millennials!"
Which is all very surprising, when you consider for even a second where smashed avocado began.
Humble beginnings
"I don't even know why I stuck it on," Bill Granger says, of his decision to offer avocado as a side dish on the menu at his flagship Sydney restaurant, bills, in 1993.
"I used to like avocado and I thought it was a nice thing to have with a bit of tomato on toast."
He wasn't alone, and once it was on the menu in its own right, avocado toast became a popular dish — years before some millennials were even born, let alone using social media.
Later, Granger would go so far as put a variation of his recipe in a cookbook.
"I remember thinking at time, 'This is really stupid.' People are going to think I'm stupid for doing a recipe for avocado toast in a book," he says.
Granger — and Australian café culture more broadly — has since been credited with the global rise of the dish, though the California Avocado Association's 1915 report mentions in its recipe section that avocado toast "is one of the nicest ways of serving avocado".
For Granger, the avocado's worldwide dominance was entirely unplanned, "a total fluke".
Culinary prophesising isn't his main game — he prefers to stick to making food — but when pressed, he offers one contender: rice breakfasts.
"People are a bit more concerned about not having as much gluten," he says.
"In a lot of cultures, rice breakfasts are already huge, but I think in Western cultures they're going to become one of those straightforward, everyday things."
Topics: agricultural-crops, vegetable-fruit-nuts, rural, human-interest, business-economics-and-finance, food-and-cooking, lifestyle-and-leisure, food-and-beverage, hospitality, industry, australia
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