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savor
A quick History Lesson of the Alligator Pear”
Millennials, as it turns
out, didn’t in fact discover
the avocado. It has been
cultivated since 5000 B.C.
and was believed to have
been grown and eaten by
Mesoamericans. As a mem-ber
of the laurel family, the
Persea americana is related
to the spices cinnamon, bay
and sassafras.
The first documented
account of the avocado was
from Martin Fernandez de
Encisco, a 15th-century
navigator and conquistador
from Seville, Spain. He first
wrote about a fruit he had
eaten in Colombia and went
on to describe the “marvelous
flavor” that tastes “like butter”
and is “so good and
pleasing to the palate.”
Avocados made
their way to the
Caribbean,
Southeast
Asia and the
Pacific. The
first men-tion
of
avocados in
English was in 1672
by W. Hughes, physician to
King Charles II, after visiting
Jamaica.
“What’s Cooking
America?” tells us that the
modern English word for
avocado came from the
Spanish word avogato, which
later became “alligator pear.”
George Washington encoun-tered
“agovago pears” on a
trip to Barbados in 1751.
The avocado, with its
hefty price tag, was a lux-ury
food restricted to the
upper echelons of society
in 20th century America.
According to legend and the
Smithsonian, Mr. Rudolph
Hass, a Los Angeles mail-man,
purchased a seedling
from a farmer in 1926. His
children convinced him to
patent the Hass avocado,
which soon became the
bestselling avocado variety
in the country (making up
95 percent of the avocados
eaten today). The original
Hass tree stood in La Habra
Heights, California, bearing
fruit for almost 70 years.
As the Hass avocado
became more readily cul-tivated
by farmers, prices
decreased and mainstream
society finally took
notice of the alli-gator
pear.
They didn’t
reach popularity
in America until
1965, when new
laws meant that
Latin Americans
began immigrat-ing
into America
and brought with
them their beloved
avocado recipes.
By 1990, avocado farm-ers
were struggling to sell the
gnarled, green-skinned fruits
and so devised a single golden
advertising campaign. An
ad shown during the Super
Bowl catapulted the popular-ity.
The California Avocado
Association paid for an adver-tisement
that prominently
featured guacamole, and as
the condiment’s fame skyrock-eted,
so did avocado sales.
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