The Avocado: Official Fruit of the Internet Age…and Millennials

On one of those lazy Youtube-surfing days anyone with a stable net connection tends to have in this century, I chanced upon this video featuring a comedian (I can’t remember anymore who) joking about American millennials and, among other and of all things, avocados. Now while I was able to grasp the connection with the other items he mentioned (which most probably included house music, skinny jeans, and social media posts), the avocado matter left me somewhat perplexed at the time. My guess was that it probably had something to do with how millennials tended to be more health-conscious and anti-corporatist in their food choices, opting for gluten-free, organic, locally grown produce instead of the preservative-rich and chemically induced food items that are so readily available to us via fast-food chains, convenience stores, and grocery shelves. However, my theory still didn’t feel all that satisfactory, and I decided to do a little more digging to find out exactly how Gen Yers established an inextricable link between themselves—or ourselves—and that suddenly trendy subtropical green fruit.

So the first few results that popped up when I typed in “avocados and millennials” on Google pertained to self-made Australian millionaire and real-estate mogul Tim Gurner who, in May 2017, during an interview on 60 Minutes, called out millennials for spending way too much of their money on “smashed” avocados costing nineteen dollars (along with “four coffees at four dollars each”) at the expense of future home ownership. After this rather blunt point, he then went on to narrate the hard work and long days he had to put in since he was nineteen to get to where he is now. This same routine, which he practiced for seven days a week without question or debate, eventually paid off, and soon he was able to afford his own house (though he doesn’t specify at what age).

Unsurprisingly, the businessman’s statements sparked backlash aplenty, particularly from the demographic he disparaged (and which, one may argue, given Gurner’s thirty-five-year age, he may still be squeezed into), and on the medium most accessible to them: the internet. @SRRSkelley tweeted sarcastically, “I spent all my money paying rent on my apartment, or maybe for my bus pass. I’m such a bad millennial.” Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett wrote a whole op-ed for The Guardian titled, “Stop spending money on avocados? Good idea, I’ll have a house deposit by 2117,” with the subhead, “A millionaire has decided that millennials can’t afford to buy a home because of our crippling brunch habit. Where to start…” Gurner’s comments, Cosslett says, are just the latest in a string of victim-blaming remarks that serve as “a convenient proxy for justifying a society that remains deeply unequal.” The inequalities she mentions include findings by economists that reveal older generations indeed had better access to free or heavily discounted education, cheap property prices, and stable, unionized employment, whereas millennials, despite many being armed with college degrees, are often hard-pressed to find a decent job that pays well and can barely afford rent for even the shoddiest apartments in town. Linda Qiu and Daniel Victor, meanwhile, conducted their own fact-check for The New York Times and found that, even if millennials did cut back on their avocado habits as Gurner suggested, it would still take a staggering 113 years before they could even afford so much as a down payment for a home. Needless to say, Gurner did respond, reiterating his narrative that depicted him as a living example of how hard work over a couple of years results to success in the long run.

Apart from serving as a firm reminder of how comments upholding one’s moneyed self as the ideal can incite much vitriol nowadays, especially with an economic system that appears to leave a good chunk of the populace out in the cold, this back-and-forth between Gurner and his critics also illustrates just how astounding avocado’s entry into the popular imagination has been in recent years—more so than any other fruit in fact. (Note that while Gurner also mentioned coffee in his critique, much of the flak focused on his fruity gibe.) The “smashed” avocado Gurner spoke of in his interview was a clear jab at what is perhaps the most popular avocado dish among trend-conscious Westerners: the avocado toast. Although it hasn’t gained as much of a cultural foothold here in the Philippines in comparison with, say, avocado milk shakes or avocado ice cream, avocado toast is basically a mushed version of the fruit sprinkled with salt and smeared onto a piece of regular or—if you want the full millennial experience—gluten-free bread. (Side note: a quick keying-in of the phrase “avocado toast in Cebu” will yield only one prestige resto where it’s a recommended dish of theirs.) The end result is a brunch snack that, at its most presentable, makes some very nifty Instagrammable post (#avocadotoast), and which one can eat in “prim fashion,” as Nathan Heller of The New Yorker says, with a knife and fork, or with one’s bare hands, “without drippings or squirts” of other such similar foods, like for instance, a P, B, and J sandwich.

However recent the hankering for avocados may seem, this fruit’s pervasiveness in the modern cultural landscape and across the internet began back in the 1990s, with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA for short), a trilateral trade bloc signed by Canada, the United States, and Mexico, which essentially loosened trade regulations among the three signatory countries and made the flow of goods across the continent much easier. Thus enters avocado! The fruit, native to Mexico and a novelty throughout much of the northern corners of America at the time, flooded supermarkets all across the US. By 2005, over 67 percent of the Mexico-imported variety of avocados was given shelf space over domestically grown ones, whose prolific albeit seasonal cultivation was limited only to states within the subtropical belt, like California and Florida. In 2014, that number had ballooned to a whopping 85 percent! This influx of avocados into supermarkets, coupled with advances in cultivation techniques that allow this incredibly fickle fruit to persevere in unideal conditions, along with the its association with healthfulness among a tech-savvy generation sincere in their efforts to curb the bad fast-food habits perpetuated by their culture-exporting country, combined into a perfect storm that propelled the avocado to its present-day prominence, both on the internet and, as millennials would say, IRL.

Of course, as with anything else that catches fire on the net and gets translated into the real world as a fad, this avocado hype is bound to level off at some point. In fact, there is already some data, courtesy of Julie Verhage of Bloomberg Markets, that shows how avocado prices have seen unusually high price surges in the last few years, largely thanks to the fruit’s unparalleled popularity among Gen Yers. “Hipsters have been blamed for polarizing trends from jeans to facial hair,” Verhage writes. “Now they’re making it more expensive to enjoy breakfast.” One of her graphs illustrates how a twenty-two-pound box of Hass avocados from Mexico’s biggest avocado-producing state costs double than what it was only a year earlier. Conversely, Jayne Orenstein notes in the Washington Post that searches for the term “avocado toast” only continue to rise, so it does appear that this “peak avocado” period is here to stay for now. Only time will tell if price surges will exacerbate even further and incite millennials and even the generation of consumers after us to consider another fruit that has all the health benefits, convenience, and #foodporn-ability that avocados enjoy at present.

Works Cited

Coslett, Rhiannon Lucy. “Stop Spending Money on Avocados? Good Idea, I’ll Have a House Deposit by 2117.” The Guardian, Guardian Media Group, 16 May 2017, <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/16/avocados-own-house-baby-boomer-millennials-deposit-brunch>. Accessed 24 Sept. 2018.

Driscoll, Brogan. “Millionaire Warns Millennials: Stop Buying Avocado Toast if You Want to Become Homeowners.” Huffpost, Verizon Communications, 16 May 2017, <https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/millionaire-warns-millennials-to-stop-buying-avocado-toast-if-they-want-to-become-homeowners_uk_591abe5ae4b05dd15f0adb69>. Accessed 24 Sept. 2018.

Ferdman, Roberto A. “The Rise of the Avocado, America's New Favorite Fruit.” The Washington Post, Fred Ryan, 22 Jan. 2015, <www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/01/22/the-sudden-rise-of-the-avocado-americas-new-favorite-fruit/?utm_term=.ccacb14260f1>. Accessed 24 Sept. 2018.

Heller, Nathan. “A Grand Unified Theory of Avocado Toast.” The New Yorker, Condé Nast, 13 July 2017, <www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/a-grand-unified-theory-of-avocado-toast>. Accessed 18 Sept. 2017.

Margan, Max. “Tim Gurner Hits Back after He Was Slammed by Millennials.” Daily Mail, DMG Media, 16 May 2017, <www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4510348/Tim-Gurner-hits-slammed-millennials.html>. Accessed 24 Sept. 2018.

Orenstein, Jayne. “How the Internet Became Ridiculously Obsessed with Avocado Toast.” The Washington Post, Fred Ryan, 6 May 2016, <www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/06/how-the-internet-became-ridiculously-obsessed-with-avocado-toast/?utm_term=.e9a1d827e222>. Accessed 24 Sept. 2018.

Qiu, Linda, and Daniel Victor. “Fact-Checking a Mogul’s Claims about Avocado Toast, Millennials and Home Buying.” The New York Times, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., 15 May 2017, <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/business/avocado-toast-millennials.html>. Accessed 24 Sept. 2018.

Verhage, Julie. “Blame Hipsters for Making These Foods More Expensive.” Bloomberg Markets, Bloomberg LP, 4 May 2017, <www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-03/from-unicorns-to-avocado-toast-hipster-fads-jack-up-food-prices>. Accessed 24 Sept. 2018.