streaming consciousness…

The Avocado Problem, Crisis of Cuisine…

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This is a problem that won’t go away, getting worse and worse by the day, it seems, with solutions hard to find. Please write your Congressman and demand action. No, this is not about David ‘Avocado’ Wolfe, though he may have a dog in the hunt, so to speak (if you’re a Southerner by birth, or a recent convert, not likely, since the jobs are few). David himself seems to be laughing all the way to the bank. But I digress…

We all know what an avocado’s like when it goes bad, too soft, especially when you didn’t even know that it was yet quite ripe, you a victim of that ‘bad avocado smell’. Words can hardly describe it, as if they could describe any smell, synaesthesia best left to its own devices and the testimony of sense organs themselves. Suffice it to say that you’ll know it when you smell it, God forbid that you should taste it, that dark acrid smell of decay, bad timing and nutrient misuse. It seems to occur on the inner surface of the skin, so that’s one possible way to salvage the fruit, carefully avoiding the skin and removing any pulp in its contact, though if you’ve already smelt the fetid meat first, then good luck, as that smell pervades…

But the problem now is something completely different, though perhaps related if the GMO boy wonders have had their way with it, i.e. trying to solve one problem by creating another. No, the problem now is not premature spoiling along the skin, then seeping inward to infect the larger fruit, but in fact that the fruit never ripens at all—ever! Avocados are not the cheapest of fruits, either, so the gustatory disappointments quickly reverberate into the pocketbook…

There are few ways to deal with this, though heat seems to be the best, stir-frying or steaming or simply nuking the mother into the oblivion of soft edible mush, to quickly find its way on to sandwich or salad before it changes its mind and spoils skin-like while thumbing its nose to the gods of fruit/veggie DNA and the GMO dilettantes. This is an especially critical problem if you, like I, are wont to use avocados as a one-stop substitute to the use of mayo, the lack thereof a welcome subtraction from any otherwise self-sufficient sandwich. But I again digress….

Call your Congressman! Call your President! Call your mother and demand quick action! The touchy/feely/squeezy routine prior to buying guarantees no rewards. Those tough skins are tricky to test, though a probing direct prick to the interior probably works best. Once you actually cut it, then it’s much too late to continue normal development…

I’m so desperate I’m even considering giving the raw fruit to my Thai friends for possible inclusion into their repertoire of raw fruit recipes, as they have successfully done with green mangoes and raw papaya-based som tam. It can’t hurt to ask, though avos are no tradition there, a relatively new addition, in fact. I’m open to ideas, though my stomach is most open to a fresh, ripe, juicy avocado. I persevere, and am now looking for a Mexican connection, shouldn’t be too hard to find in Tucson. You can’t fool a local…

p.s. BTW did you know that Ethiopians use avos in smoothies? Try it sometime…