{"id":252275,"date":"2022-07-16T17:04:22","date_gmt":"2022-07-16T17:04:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=252275"},"modified":"2022-07-16T17:04:22","modified_gmt":"2022-07-16T17:04:22","slug":"the-unlikely-survival-of-the-humble-avocado","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2022\/07\/16\/the-unlikely-survival-of-the-humble-avocado\/","title":{"rendered":"The unlikely survival of the humble avocado"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Fascinating story here of how we got the avocado \u2014 something that was not a given by any means, as Maria Sharapova describes at The Marginalian<\/a> (formerly Brain Pickings):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In the last week of April in 1685, English explorer and naturalist William Dampier \u2014 the first person to circumnavigate the globe three times \u2014 arrived on a small island in the Bay of Panama. Dampier made careful note of local tree species, but none fascinated him more than the tall \u201cAvogato Pear-tree,\u201d with its unusual fruit \u2014 \u201cas big as a large Lemon,\u201d green until ripe and then \u201ca little yellowish,\u201d with green flesh \u201cas soft as Butter.” He described how the fruit were eaten \u2014 two or three days after picking, with the rind peeled \u2014 and their most common local preparation: with a pinch of salt and a roasted plantain, so that \u201ca Man that\u2019s hungry, may make a good meal of it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The most nutritious known fruit, the avocado \u2014 a member of the laurel family \u2014 should have grown extinct when the animals that fed on it and disseminated its enormous seeds did. Mercifully, it did not. It somehow managed to survive the Ice Age in Mexico and spread from there. But it also managed to survive its own self-defeating sexual relations. The tree\u2019s small greenish blossoms are an example of \u201cperfect flowers\u201d \u2014 the botanical term for bisexual blooming plants, which can typically self-pollinate. The avocado comes in two mirror-image varieties.

In some cultivars, the blossoms open up in their female guise each morning, then close by that afternoon; the following afternoon, they open in their male guise. Other cultivars bloom on the opposite schedule: female in the afternoon, male by morning. Ever since humans have cultivated it, they have tried to help the helpless romancer with various intervention strategies \u2014 grafting, planting trees with opposite blooming schedules near each other, even manually pollinating blossoms of the same tree. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The world\u2019s most beloved avocado \u2014 the Hass \u2014 is the consequence of human interference consecrated by happenstance in the hands of a California mailman in the 1920s. The year he turned thirty, Rudolph Hass was leafing through a magazine when an illustration stopped him up short: a tree growing dollar bills instead of fruit. He was making 25 cents an hour delivering mail while raising a growing family. The tree, he learned, was an avocado and its fruit were promised to be the next great horticultural boon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rudolph took all the money he had, borrowed some from his sister Ida, and bought a small grove of the leading commercial avocado variety \u2014 the Fuerte \u2014 with a few other cultivars sprinkled in. Needing the greatest possible gain from his grove, he wanted only Fuertes. Rudolph bought three of the lustrous dark orbs and planted them in his grove. They sprouted. When they grew strong enough, he grafted onto one of them a cutting from one of the mature Fuerte trees. The graft didn\u2019t take. He tried again on another of the seedlings. This too failed. Resigned, Rudolph abandoned the experiment and let his surviving seedling grow as it pleased. In a neglected corner of the grove, it quietly went on doing what trees, those masters of improvisation, do.

When Rudolph cut one open for his five young children, they declared those were the most delicious avocados they had ever tasted. Soon, the world would agree. The Hass family had patented the avocado within a decade. In the near-century since Rudolph\u2019s hopeful and hapless experiment, the Hass avocado has begun bringing in more than a billion dollars a year for growers, accounting for four fifths of the American avocado industry. But Rudolph Hass continued working as a mailman until he was felled by a heart attack months after his sixtieth birthday,<\/p>\n

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Fascinating story here of how we got the avocado \u2014 something that was not a given by any means, as Maria Sharapova describes at The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings): In the last week of April in 1685, English explorer and naturalist William Dampier \u2014 the first person to circumnavigate the globe three times \u2014 arrived … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The unlikely survival of the humble avocado”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-252275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252275\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}