Consider the humble avocado.  Green and tough on the outside, somewhat slimy on the inside, it’s high in fat (but, as supporters tell us, the good kind of fat) and difficult to use in cooking.  In short, it’s a strange kind of fruit, and it’s had a tough time since its introduction in America in the late 19th century.

As Jeffrey Charles writes in his article “Searching for Gold in Guacamole: California Growers Market the Avocado, 1910-1994″ (in the book Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies), the avocado is a good example of a food where growers essentially put the cart in front of the horse.  That is, they first started growing the fruit on a large scale, and then tried to find a way to sell it to Americans.  That didn’t always work so well.

Charles notes the many things the avocado had going against it in the eyes of consumers.  It’s a fruit, but it’s not sweet; it has high levels of fat (and the good fat/bad fat thing is a product of only the past few decades—before that, all fat was bad), and it “cannot be cooked, stewed, or baked, or it turns rancid.” (page 132)  Furthermore, it had two negative associations (from the point of view of marketers): since it was often used in salads, it was seen as being a feminine food, and therefore unfit for men; and since it was originally grown in Latin America, there was an association with Latin American culture, and Latin American foods were not really popular in this country until the 1960s and 1970s.

In spite of the negative aspects of avocados, one thing the fruit had going for it in the early 20th century was people who wanted to grow it.  Starting in the 1920s two trends centered in California induced lots of people to grow avocados.  The first trend was the development of large-scale irrigation and agriculture, particularly around Los Angeles, and the fact that early farmers in the area became rich.  The second trend was large scale land speculating in the same region.  Land speculators, who bought thousands of acres at once, carved that acreage up into smaller lots, and sold them for profit, pushed the idea that anyone could buy some land (from them, of course), plant a few avocado trees, and become rich.  Lots of people took the first two steps, but not that many went on to the last step.

The problem was that as more and more people bought land in the 1920s and 1930s and planted avocado trees on their way to becoming rich, the avocado supply exploded and the price per pound plummeted.  In 1929, California growers produced only 800,000 pounds of avocados and received $.32 per pound for them; two years later they produced 3.3 million pounds and received only $.08 per pound. (page 140)

Exacerbating the problem was the fact that uses for the avocado in cooking never really went beyond the early idea of using avocados in salads.  Today, the main use for avocados is as an ingredient in guacamole, but as Jeffrey Charles points out, avocado advertising through the 1970s steadfastly avoided the idea that avocados had any connection whatsoever to Mexican cooking.  The avocado marketers wanted to portray avocados as an upper-class food, something you might serve when company came over, but during that time period Mexican food was generally considered to be low-class.

Obviously, there are a couple of ironies there, including the fact that the avocado comes from Latin America, was largely picked and packed in California by Mexicans and Mexican-American workers, and hispanic communities, then and now, were far and away the largest consumers of avocados.

Avocado consumption has increased over time, but it is still something of a niche food.  As Charles writes, “The avocado’s place in the national diet is now well established, if predictable: it occasionally appears in salads and sandwiches but most often it will be pureed and consumed with salty snacks.” (page 150)  The most typical dish avocados are used in is guacamole, and consumption of avocados peaks around two different days: Super Bowl Sunday and Cinco de Mayo.  As of the writing of his article Charles reports that avocados are still largely produced by small growers rather than huge concerns.  Those growers are still likely hoping that some great new recipe development or cultural trend will come along to allow them to sell more and more avocados and become as rich as those early land speculators told them they could be.