The weird fruit that Hass it all

Half an avocado (about 34 gm) contains only 0.2 gm of sugar. This is rather baffling, considering that the avocado is a fruit. Fruits tend to be sweet, in order to entice animals to consume them and thus help spread their seeds.

So why does the avocado have so little sugar, such high fat content, and its exceptionally large seed? The answer is as simple as it is intriguing: It evolved to cater to animals that no longer exist.

Scientists believe that the fruit flourished in the Cenozoic era, and helped feed supersized mammals such as the mammoth and giant sloth, who swallowed it whole and excreted the seed later, at a fair distance from the mother plant.

At the end of what is popularly known as the last ice age, about 13,000 years ago, this plant should have gone extinct. What likely helped it survive is its heterozygosity. Let’s look at what that means.

My husband loves avocados, but rails against the prices. He recently decided to bury an avocado in our garden, and nurture it into a tree. Even if it takes seven years to bear fruit, he says, it will be worth it. The thing is, the kind of avocado we eat isn’t typically grown like this.

The reason is that the avocado plant has not evolved to prioritise flavour and texture. Instead, what gets passed down over and over, reinforced in overlapping genomic markers, are traits such as cold tolerance and resilience to certain pests. The flavour of the fruit, as a result, varies wildly from tree to tree.

So, farmers tend to not trust raw seeds; they rely on cuttings from a tree that has already yielded tasty fruit.

All Hass avocados, for instance — and these account for 80% of avocados consumed worldwide today — can be traced to a single tree planted by Rudolph Hass, a postman in California, in 1925.

Grafts wouldn’t take on his plant, so he let it grow, and it bore fruit that was creamier and tastier than any avocado he had eaten. He patented the variant, a patent that expired upon his death, in 1952. Anyone can now grow a Hass from a cutting.

There are more than 1,000 avocado varieties cultivated in this way around the world. The most recognisable include the Fuerte, Gwen, Pinkerton and Zutano. Some are smooth on the outside; others, wrinkled; some are green, others purple or black.

Rewinding to a sort of beginning, the first domesticated versions of this fruit were grown by tribes in present-day Mexico about 5,000 years ago. By 500 BCE, the fruit had the beginnings of its modern English name: ahuacatl, the word for testicles in the Aztec language of Nahuatl. Spanish conquerors pronounced it aguacate.

By 1915, traders were trying to pitch it to Californians with a trendy nickname; for some reason, they settled on “alligator pear”. Thankfully, the tag didn’t catch on. Also thankfully, the fruit did.

Nutritionally, the avocado is quite incredible. The flesh is 72% water, 6.8% fibre, 2% protein and 15% fats. It is versatile and can be used in a variety of ways. Worldwide, sales hit an estimated $10 billion in 2021; research platform Statista estimates that the figure will double by 2026.

Demand, and prices, are so high that gangs target avocado orchards around the world. Cartels in Mexico target extract protection money from traders in exchange for safe passage for the fruit.

Meanwhile, in our backyard, there’s about a 1 in 10,000 chance that, in seven years, the tree we’ve planted will begin yielding delicious fruit. My husband is hopeful. He may have found the next Hass, he says. I guess you never know... until you know.