Baby avocados: How a mighty fruit lost its charisma in Europe

I know plenty about avocados. I grew up under many. I mean this literally. There was a mature tree in our village home in Kenya, with a canopy wide enough to shade a gathering of ten adults having a baraza. The kind of tree that had never known pruning in its entire existence. Even the children did not bother to climb it because the lowest branches began at a height that required simple tip toeing to reach them. Twice a year it produced avocados  of a size and quality that I now understand to be, by European standards, unimaginable. 

They were large, oval, purple black and smooth skinned. They felt heavy in hand. They ripened on the tree and when they fell under their own weight, they could cause genuine harm if the moment found you standing beneath them.  

There was no avocado etiquette. 

When you sliced them open, they separated perfectly like a boiled egg, evenly ripe, yellowish buttery, the seed the size of a lady’s clenched fist. When you scooped it out, it emerged completely, leaving the peel behind. We ate them with everything. From breakfast to dinner. It was part of the cuisine and I didn’t even realise the sophistication until my later encounters with the hype around guacamole in high end restaurants. 

In my village, they were not even sold. They were like guavas growing wild and unsupervised. Most of the fruit fell to the ground, smashing on impact and slowly rotting away, leaving behind fresh seeds that sprouted into seedlings in the next season.  

We fed them to pigs and goats and even dogs picked up a taste for them.  

I give you this background so that you really understand the full context of my traumatic avocado encounters in Europe. It was a genuine case of culture shock. What passed for an avocado in the cold north nearly broke my heart. 

The fresh produce aisle are the first rows you encounter when you enter the average supermarket. It is where I first spotted the baby avocado. A little green pimpled hard stone that was selling for a premium.

The price of this measly fruit was three euros and 19 cents. That is just over Sh200, enough money to launch you into avocado heaven if you source fruit from the market.  

There was no way I was going to be party to this injustice. I had already given up on imported tropical fruits for two primary reasons. Nothing tasted like the original and the prices were just insulting.  

To add insult to injury I would later discover that the shrivelled baby avocados found in Netherlands supermarkets were imported from Kenya. Here they were considered something of prestige. 

For the first couple of months, I just walked past them in the supermarket, avoiding eye contact. It was too painful to look at. I thought long and hard about strategies that would protect my kids from miseducation after the unintended exposure to these pathetic and malnourished varieties, plucked young. I started thinking about aligning holiday seasons back home with the avocado fruiting season, so the kids could experience nature at its finest.  

The first time I succumbed must have been due to a mixture of genuine curiosity and absentmindedness and I regretted the serious lapse of judgment the moment I got to my kitchen. I had set off to buy a broom and was waylaid by another row of perfectly arranged baby avocados, advertised as ready to eat. The price had not changed. The netting had not changed. But my attitude had changed that day. 

Chicken pox 

The first thing I noticed was how hard it was. I could use it as a door knocker or to play cricket. It had no smell. Not even the smell of ripening. It was polished, shiny like all that mattered was its appearance, and its pimpled surface was like a bad case of chicken pox. When I finally sliced it open, the measly thing was rotten, the entire interior was coated in black. I could barely salvage anything and I felt scammed.

For the following months, I walked past the produce aisle that stocked avocados with a look of contempt on my face. The avocados were always there, netted, hoping to be noticed but I held my position. They didn’t deserve my attention. 

I vowed to never touch them again but I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Perhaps, it was driven by an act of solidarity. There was some familiarity to the plight of the avocado. The fruit was innocent. It had arrived here against its will and had to adapt to this consigned identity. 

I thought about the infantilization of the avocado. How this mighty fruit had been downgraded, stripped of all its charisma and bred for the convenience of people who had no real commitment to eating avocados. This is what the West had been doing to our people. Plucking them in their prime, dislocating them, engineering their ripening and having their value tagged to exotic appeal.  

Maybe it was peer pressure that led me back to that produce aisle. That month, I had tried a fasting regime and the experts advised that the best way to break the fast was with an avocado. When I got to the shelf, I made a little prayer recalling my lost euros from the last encounter and then squeezed the fruit with my fingers trying to channel my best indigenous knowledge of deduction. I was applying bio mechanical logic to check for ripeness, looking out for that slight squish that indicated that the avocado was creamy and ready. 

When it landed on my kitchen counter, I was impressed by my deduction skills. The fruit was evenly ripe and soft. And it did indeed taste like avocado. I took three scoops and it was gone. I was left with the empty skin and seed.  

Then a thought arrived, of putting the seed in a glass of water, to show my kids but they would probably ask to plant it and I would have to tell that it wouldn’t grow in this part of the world and then they would ask, why, and I would end up ruining a simple nutrition lesson by philosophizing on the diaspora experience through the perspective of an avocado and what happens to people when we forget the actual value of the places we call home.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available for purchase on Amazon for the Kindle