Monique Parsons
Subject: Loving Avocados
Bio: Journalist, Radio Producer, and Co-Author of the book Green Gold: The Avocado’s Remarkable Journey from Humble Superfood to Toast of a Nation
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and culture.
Today’s topic is Loving Avocados.
Our speaker is Monique Parsons who will discuss her new book Green Gold: The Avocado’s Remarkable Journey from Humble Superfood to Toast of a Nation.
Monique and her husband David Wecker have been very good friends of mine for the past 25 years. Monique grew up on an avocado farm in Santa Barbara California and has spent a lifetime eating healthy unsaturated fat from her own avocado trees.
Monique, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Monique Parsons:
My co-author Sarah Allaback and I have been friends since third grade. We grew up in Southern California eating a lot of fresh guacamoles because my grandmother grew avocados. And thanks to one of our neighbors, we continue to grow them. Our neighbor manages our organic Hass avocado orchard near Santa Barbara.
Sarah and I both went in the eighties to Princeton, and we were surprised at how difficult it was to find a good avocado in the East at that time. Many of our classmates hadn't even heard of them.
In the 80s, the average American ate less than a pound of avocados a year. Today they're everywhere in fancy restaurants and sushi bars, Dunkin’ Donuts, every grocery store. Americans are now eating 3 billion avocados a year more than nine pounds per person.
The avocado became an image on all sorts of healthy products. But the New York Times ran an article not too long ago about the fading dreams of the millennial generation and it was illustrated with a photo of a decaying avocado. So, we wanted to know how this all happened. Green Gold, our book, is about avocados. It's a story about the people behind the phenomenon.
It's about the search for the perfect avocado that can launch an industry, but it's also for a holy grail, the wild avocado and the origin of the species. We cover about a hundred years of history in this book.
We structured the book around two superstar trees. The first is the Fuerte, which is a Mexican avocado that immigrated to California in the early part of the 20th century, and then the Haas avocado, which is what we all eat today. That's an American born avocado grown in Los Angeles that immigrated to Mexico.
Surprisingly, our story begins in the Midwest. In the early 20th century, there was an entrepreneur Fred Popenoe from Topeka, Kansas, and he fled financial scandal there and moved his family to Costa Rica for a time where he managed a failing gold mine. He ended up in Southern California where he started a nursery in 1906. Fred is mostly important because his son Wilson sparked his interest in avocados. In the early 20th century, the USDA was experimenting with avocados in California and they wanted to find the next big thing after citrus and the Popenoe nursery became a government testing site and the Popenoe became wrapped up in this race to discover the perfect avocado.
Avocados are like people. When you plant a seed and try to reproduce, you never know what you're going to get. Every seed's unique. So to propagate a favorite variety, you need to clone it and you take a cutting and you graft it onto another tree.
The Popenoe sent a man to Mexico to look for promising varieties and brought back the Fuerte avocado in 1911. This was a tree from the State of Puebla. It grew delicious fruit in the winter. It stayed green when ripe. This eventually became the most popular avocado in the United States for 50 years. And the Popenoe were instrumental in establishing the California Avocado Association, which was a community organization that became the catalyst for the industry.
In 1915, avocados were luxury items sold called alligator pears, which was a bastardization of the Aztec and Spanish word for avocado. The association spent two years developing the criteria for avocados that could be marketed to the public. Out of these 85 documented varieties, they came up with a list of eight and the Fuerte ended up winning this race and becoming the most popular avocado in California. At the same time, California issued a quarantine on Mexican avocados. There was concern about a weevil that was getting into the seeds in Mexico. And this became a federal ban on avocados for 80 years.
The Mexican industry tried to convince the USDA to end this quarantine and let them sell avocados in the United States. Around the time of the NAFTA negotiations was when the quarantine began to lift. California avocado farmers really fought this. They did get Congress to pass a law that created a marketing program called the Haas Avocado Board. And this law requires a 2.5 cents fee for every pound of avocado sold and requires that money to be spent on marketing. And because of this law, the Mexican industry, which now sells close to 90% of the avocados in the US, they're required by U.S. law to spend tens of millions of dollars building a love of avocados in the United States. In 2015, they had enough money to pay for their first Super Bowl ad.
Larry Bernstein:
I've only been to one avocado farm in my life and it was yours. This is a personal story. Tell us about your history in California and this land.
Monique Parsons:
My great grandfather bought the farm I grew up on in the early part of the 20th century. And there had been olive groves on it. My grandfather was planting row crops and starting a chicken business. When my grandmother started planting avocados there in the fifties, she was part of this quest to find interesting varieties of avocados for California. I grew up as an avocado tree climber. They're wonderful trees to climb. In the seventies, my father ended up going deep into avocados.
Larry Bernstein:
Before I started high school, I read the Mutiny and the Bounty trilogy. Captain Bligh was hired to get breadfruit plants from Tahiti and take it to South America to plant trees there. The Bounty was especially designed to hold and transport those plants. They landed in Tahiti traded some trinkets for the breadfruit and put it on the boat. And only because Fletcher Christian had started an affair with a young woman on the island that resulted in a mutiny. This idea of bringing plants to different countries to take advantage of the climate and growth is not new. It is ancient. Tell us about how the avocado followed similar paths as the breadfruit.
Monique Parsons:
That's exactly right. There's a very ancient tradition of people going around the world and finding interesting plants and trying to figure out what's going to grow back home. The avocado first came in casually from Mexico. It was brought up early 20th century also from Chile, Guatemala and Honduras and through all these cloud forests in Latin America where they're indigenous. The avocados native home is volcanic soil and high mountains, not California at all.
Larry Bernstein:
I invested years ago in Monsanto and the head of research said to me, we want more corn and low variance in terms of the quantity of it.
If there's a drought, they don't want to lose the farm. We had fast-growing corn but it has a very small root system. If there's no rain in June, we're dead. So, they said, why don't we cross a fantastic root system plant with a superb grower and then we're good to go. And then we started working on ability to withstand pesticides so corn would be Roundup Ready. Let's apply that set of concepts to the avocado. Tell us about how they've been working in engineering and how it's different from some of the genetic work that's done for corn.
Monique Parson:
In addition to the USDA, the University of California has been really important. The difference with the avocado is it takes three to five years for a baby tree to produce fruit. Unlike something like corn where every year you're churning out your new crop, this is a game for a patient farmer. It takes time for those trees to grow. I toured a test orchard in Irvine, California that's owned by the University of California where they have blocks of trees that they'll plant seeds just to see what comes up. It takes years to develop a new avocado variety, but there's a lot of experimentation in grafting.
Larry Bernstein:
Take us through an example of how they combine multiple different plants together.
Monique Parsons:
There's one Haas avocado tree growing in La Habra Heights in LA County, and they want to propagate that. They tape clippings and the best time to do that is before the tree is in full flower. You want very flexible little shoots. They clip from the tree and then you graft that onto a seedling. You take another avocado seed that's growing in a pot. You clip that once that starts to shoot and then you attach the two pieces together. In the old days, that was done with chewing gum, but there's special grafting tape now. One of the women in the book that I interviewed worked at this nursery for 50 years who can do 900 trees a day.
The University of California is trying to develop root stocks that are resistant to salinity and to heat. The battle against root fungus, which is a relative of the one that wiped out the potatoes in Ireland. My father's trees died because of this root fungus called Phytophtora Cinnamomi. But now farmers have root stocks have been developed to resist it.
Larry Bernstein:
Just to clarify that, some specific avocado plants are spectacular at not succumbing to root rot. And they graft in that root system into the trees.
Monique Parsons:
Exactly. It'll be a seed that gets the whole thing going. And then the cloned root, and then the cloned scion, which is the fruiting variety. Every California avocado we buy in the United States is a result of three different avocado trees working together. Hank Brokaw developed this clever system to make that work at scale.
Larry Bernstein:
I would distinguish that from the Monsanto corn example where they manipulate at the genetic level. and then they would paste it into a genetic code. What you're describing is more old school.
Monique Parsons:
Yes. And the genetic work that you're describing is starting to happen in the avocado world. Scientists have been successful in developing lettuce that doesn't brown. How wonderful would it be if we could get avocados that didn't brown. They're working on that and there's been some success, but avocado's very difficult to grow in a lab.
Larry Bernstein:
Let's talk about industrial agriculture as it relates to the avocado. In the book you mentioned that once an avocado has been picked, it gets into this industrial scale where they use 16 different optics to evaluate the quality of the fruit. If it fits a certain size, doesn't have those nicks, isn't showing rot, it will get packed up into similar sizes and shipped out. Those that don't fit the necessary requirements gets kicked to the side for another use. Tell us about that industrial process.
Monique Parsons:
I got to tour the packing house at the headquarters of the oldest avocado company in the United States. It was amazing to see all the automation in Santa Paul, California. All the cameras and the weights and the shoots going down, it felt being in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
They also have very high-tech ripening rooms. Ethylene gas is emitted naturally from fruit to help it ripen. But if you put the unripe avocados into a little garage size room fill a mix of ethylene and oxygen in there. They can precisely spit out avocados that will be ready in a week or two days or one day.
Larry Bernstein:
I thought it was interesting about that many of our avocados are produced in South America. I always imagined it was either California or Mexico.
Monique Parsons:
It's the trees, indigenous to Latin America, especially higher elevations, volcanic soil. It has to do with the nutrients in the soil with the climate with the amount of rainfall. They grow wild there.
University of California Plant researchers spend a lot of time around the mountains of Honduras. El Salvador and Costa Rica looking for wild avocado trees hoping that they could find specimens that they could then graft with ones back in California to make hardier trees that would resist disease.
Larry Bernstein:
Rick Bayless started a restaurant in Chicago called the Frontera Grill, which I first went to in 2000. He's a very creative chef and using ingredients in new ways, guacamole spiced up and chips. We normally associate avocados and guacamole with the Tex-Mex craze. Tell us about what Rick Bayless accomplished, how the avocado has influenced cuisine in the United States.
Monique Parsons:
Rick Baylis was very generous and spoke to me. I had an interview with him for this book and before he became a celebrity chef, he was on his way to getting a PhD in anthropology.
He was a real student of culture. He continues to take a deep dive into understanding Mexican cuisine. When he started his restaurant in Chicago, it was very difficult to source avocados year-round.
The California season is January through August, but then he was scrambling the rest of the year to get avocados. Rick Bayless introduced Mexican cuisine to a wider audience, but of course there were enormous and growing Latino population in the United States.
There's a lot of understanding now that a healthy fat that's in avocados. There was a big study in 2015 that the American Heart Association sponsored and the has avocado board helped fund that showed that people who ate an avocado a day, no matter what their diet was otherwise, that their cholesterol trended down.
Larry Bernstein:
Avocado oil, avocado ice cream, avocado smoothies, tell us about other uses for the avocado.
Monique Parsons:
Most of the fruit that we see is going into our supermarket. Grade two means it might have a blemish on it that's bigger than your thumbnail and may end up at Chipotle because they don't care what the outside of the avocado looks like. They're just scooping it out and making a whole lot of guacamole. A lot of them are just cosmetic flaws that would get an avocado graded down.
The University of California has a big study going on now about how to develop pure avocado oil because avocado oils we see in the store these days are blended with other oil and not pure.
Larry Bernstein:
What is the recent appeal of avocado toast?
Monique Parsons:
I had it for lunch today as a matter of fact. At the first meeting of the California Avocado Association in Los Angeles, they served avocado toast, 1915. It's trendy, but it's actually not new.
Australians often get credit because they grow a lot of avocados and there are these wonderful Australian cafes that spread around the world in the early 2000s. And avocado toast was on the menu.
Larry Bernstein:
I like to end each podcast on a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about as it to the avocado?
Monique Parsons:
I'm optimistic about the work that's being done to develop new avocado varieties that could give more choices to consumers.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Monique for joining us.
If you missed the last podcast, the topic was Innovative Abundance – Making Government Work.
Our speaker was Derek Kaufman who started a new think tank called Inclusive Abundance that is working on policy prescriptions to make government more efficient.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website
whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Innovative Abundance — Making Government Work, here.
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