The creamy green fruit butter of the gods known as the avocado has enjoyed a celebrated status amongst the food-obsessed, who've dedicated holidays to its progeny and found ways to stuff just about anything with the alligator pear. But the beloved avocado is now facing a doomsday scenario, as farms in California buckle under relentless, multi-year drought. Adam Sternbergh took an in-depth look at the past, current and future state of the avocado for New York Magazine, coming to some very upsetting conclusions about the future of the fruit in the United States.
At the crux of his distressing piece—with the fear-mongering title of "Have You Eaten Your Last Avocado?"—Stenbergh looks at the extreme drought conditions that have been decimating the state's crops, from avocados to almonds and other types of produce. The three-year dry spell has affected 98% of the state, leading to water rationing among citizens and the rising costs to farmers to obtain water to supply their crops. It takes approximately 72 gallons of water to grow one pound of avocados; currently, farmers pay $1,500 per acre-foot for water, up from $72 per acre-foot forty years ago.
"What hits home the most for me is that California has missed out on a full year's worth of precipitation over each of the last three years. So that means going into this fourth year, even if you get normal precipitation, or even if you get 150 percent of normal, you still have this deficit that's accumulated," explains Brian Fuchs, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "That doesn't go away with one, two, three, four precipitation events." And all of this comes at a time when avocados have never been more popular. In 1999, Americans consumed about 1.1 pounds of the fruit per capita; fast forward to 2014 and it was 5.8 pounds per capita. Thanks a lot, Chipotle!
Sternbergh concedes that, although things look bleak, avocados are not necessarily going to be the first agricultural product to be abandoned in California (dairy and almonds will go first). "But if you draw a Venn diagram with 'West Coast drought-affected agriculture' in one circle and 'East Coast foodie-fueled manias' in the other, smack-dab in the ovoid intersection of these circles would sit the avocado," he says. But we refuse to take all the blame: Californians actually consume the most avocados, thank you very much.
"Avocados won't disappear; they'll just become a luxury item," he concludes. "And the alligator pear will complete its unlikely journey from evolutionary afterthought to Instagram starlet to culinary status symbol." Thank goodness avocados are so over.
