Complex Numbers

The Devil's Avocat

Today is Star Trek Day, the anniversary of the day in 1966 when Star Trek was first unleashed upon a war-weary world. More about this later. Apropos of nothing, today's random article concerns the avocado.

Chance, Choice, and the Avocado: The Strange Evolutionary and Creative History of Earth’s Most Nutritious Fruit  
How a confused romancer that survived the Ice Age became a tropical sensation and took over the world.

Fun fact: the French word for avocado and the French word for lawyer is the same—avocat. I can only assume it's due to the latter's reputation for having a stony, unbeating heart.

In the last week of April in 1685, in the middle of a raging naval war, the English explorer and naturalist William Dampier arrived on a small island in the Bay of Panama carpeted with claylike yellow soil.

Where he immediately converted the natives to Christianity and enslaved them?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Dampier

Okay, maybe not, but he was a dick.

Dampier described the black bark and smooth oval leaves of the tall “Avogato Pear-tree,” then paused at its unusual fruit — “as big as a large Lemon,” green until ripe and then “a little yellowish,” with green flesh “as soft as Butter” and no distinct flavor of its own, enveloping “a stone as big as a Horse-Plumb.”

It is unclear to me whether he meant the horse plum, an American fruit; or horse doody. Probably the former, because horseshit tends to be larger than a modern avocado stone. Source: me, having shoveled way too much of it in my errant youth.

He described how the fruit are eaten — two or three days after picking, with the rind peeled — and their most common local preparation: with a pinch of salt and a roasted plantain, so that “a Man that’s hungry, may make a good meal of it”; there was also uncommonly delectable sweet variation: “mixt with Sugar and Lime-juice, and beaten together in a Plate.”

And thus was born that bane of the Millennial generation, avocado toast. What, you didn't think it wasn't cultural appropriation, did you?

"It is reported that this Fruit provokes to Lust, and therefore is said to be much esteemed by the Spaniards."

Huh. Usually a Brit would take this opportunity to rag on the French.

But far more fascinating than the cultural lore of the avocado are its own amorous propensities, uncovered in the centuries since by sciences that would have then seemed like magic, or heresy.

Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from heresy. (with apologies to Arthur C. Clarke.)

The most nutritious known fruit, the avocado — a mostly evergreen member of the laurel family — is a ghost of evolution that should have grown extinct when the animals that fed on it and disseminated its enormous seeds did.

Basically, from what I understand, megafauna would eat the things whole and then shit out the stone somewhere else, allowing for expansion of the plant's range. This sort of dispersal, scatological or otherwise, of seeds by animals ("biological agents") is an evolutionary adaptation shared by some other plants, in one form or another. Acorns and squirrels, e.g. As we will see here, we're the biological agents for the avocado.

Mercifully, it did not. Ample in Europe and North American[sic] during the Ice Age, it somehow managed to survive in Mexico and spread from there. But even more impressively, it managed to survive its own self-defeating sexual relations...

Which is more than I can say for some humans.

The avocado, however, is far from reproductively self-sufficient due to an astonishing internal clock, which comes in two mirror-image varieties.

And this is where it gets interesting, but I can't do it justice in quotes; check the article for details. Essentially, the plant is a hermaphrodite, and pollination is tricky.

The world’s most beloved avocado — the Hass — is the consequence of human interference consecrated by happenstance in the hands of a California mailman in the 1920s.

It's always the mailman, isn't it? Or the milkman, if there are still any of those around.

Waltz Fact: I only like Hass avocados. None of the others are nearly as tasty, to me.

The year he turned thirty, Rudolph Hass (June 5, 1892–October 24, 1952) was leafing through a magazine when an illustration stopped him up short: a tree growing dollar bills instead of fruit.

Math-inclined readers will note that this was exactly 100 years ago. Or you can just take my word for it.

By the way, that sort of illustration today would scream "SCAM" at me. It'd probably be an ad for NFTs or cryptocurrency.

The article goes on to describe the fortuitous happenstance that resulted in the best avocado.

When Rudolph cut one open for his five young children, they declared those were the most delicious avocados they had ever tasted.

One avocado for five kids? The Great Depression sucked.

This being America and that being the wake of the Great Depression, the Hass family had patented the avocado within a decade.

I think the article glosses over a 10-year growing and experimentation period, hence the sudden jump to the thirties.

After describing his “new and improved variety of avocado which has certain characteristics that are highly desirable” and listing all the ways in which “the present invention” differed from existing avocados — higher oil content, superior flavor, doesn’t drop from the tree or rot inside before ripening...

Except for the ones I get from the grocery store, which have an approximately 15 minute window between "hard as a rock" and "rotten." There's a green one sitting in my fruit bowl right now. If I'm lucky, it'll ripen later today. If not, it'll ripen in a couple of hours while I'm asleep, and then, by the time I'm ready to use it, will be black as a lawyer's soul. (That's a pun; see above.)

Today, every single Hass avocado in every neighborhood market that ever was and ever will be can be traced to a single mother tree grown by a destitute California mailman in 1926 — tender evidence that every tree is in some sense immortal, and a living testament to how chance and choice converge to shape our lives.

Oooh, poetic. No, it's immortal in the same sense we all are: our constituent elements (including the ones derived from avocados) get recycled, and maybe our legacy endures for a few years after we die. Unless you're a complete dick like Dampier, in which case your dickishness endures forever.

As this is Star Trek Day, I think it's a good time to unveil the collection of drink recipes, inspired by Star Trek, that I'm working on with PuppyTales . Right now there are only four recipes, but more are in the works; also, it could use more photos, but that would mean me actually making the drinks again and then taking pictures, uploading them into image items here, and then embedding them into the book, all of which is too much work for my hungover ass. But it'll happen, eventually.

BOOK

Ten Forward  (18+) The Bar on the Edge of Forever #2279836 by Robert Waltz