Aztecs, Sloths, and the Dark Truth Behind Avocado Farming.
The pre-historic woodlands of Central America were home to giants. Without these lost beasts, avocados would not exist.
The Giant ground sloths (Megatherium) were the main avocado eaters. Often reaching sizes that could rival some modern-day elephants they roamed the archaic forests, picking avocados off trees and eating them whole, before defecating the seeds far from the tree, continuing the plant’s existence.
The berry and the beast existed until around 10,000 years ago when the giant sloths started to go extinct. Luckily for the avocados, this coincided with the arrival of humans in Central America. The new humans gradually picked up where the sloths had left off, continuing the spread of avocado seeds for thousands of years.
There is evidence of early avocado farming in northern South America from around 750 B.C.E. The fruit became a culturally significant and common food to ancient Mesoamericans (Central Americans). Many had home gardens in which they grew avocados and other plants.
Avocados in Mesoamerica
The Avocado appears in iconography from all over Mesoamerica
The Mayan civilization (In the Yucatan peninsula) used the glyph of an avocado to represent the 14th month of their calendar. The same symbol appears in the emblem of the Maya city Pusilha (In modern Belize). Because of this, the city was known as the kingdom of the avocado, with its rulers being called “lords of the avocado”.
The Maya believed that their ancestors were reborn as trees. Some people surrounded their houses with them and sometimes over relatives' graves. Many were accompanied in death by an avocado tree.
The avocado was also important to the various groups that made up the Aztec people (In modern Northern Mexico). Like the Maya, the Aztec city of Ahuacatlan was named after the avocado. The Aztecs called the fruit ahuacatl, meaning testicle, due to its appearance. Because of its shape, it was believed that the avocado gave mythological powers of strength and fertility to those who ate it.
By the 16th century, avocados were grown by Mesoamericans from Mexico to Peru.
The Rise of the Avocado
Then the Spanish arrived
In the 16th century, the first Spanish conquistadors discovered many foods Mesoamerica had to offer, including the avocado. They changed the Aztec word ahuacatl to make it easier for them to pronounce, calling them aguacate, which then became avocado in English.
They brought the avocado to Europe. But it stayed a rare commodity outside of the Americas for a few hundred years before it started to gain global popularity.
Throughout the 19th Century, the avocado began to be farmed worldwide. Most importantly in California, in 1926, a postal worker called Rudolph Hass, created a new variant of avocado partly by accident, the Hass variant. It had a slightly different flavor but crucially it lasted longer, had darker, bumpy skin that made it better for shipping, and grew for longer periods. As a result, the Hass variant became the most popular avocado to buy and sell. Today, 80% of avocados produced worldwide are Hass avocados.
With around 500 types of avocados produced today, the global avocado industry has grown so large that their production has become a deforestation threat in Mexico. Large amounts of limited water supplies are also used to grow the plants, not to mention the carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere by global shipping. While the Hass variant is easier to produce, growing the same type of avocado also makes them more susceptible to diseases and pests. As a result, the avocado industry is threatening itself and the environment.
There are ways of producing avocados sustainably and less destructively which some are trying to introduce, but unfortunately, these changes are not being made fast enough yet.
The rich history of avocados began with extinction, there is still time to ensure that it does not end the same way.
References
- The illustrious history of the Avocado (2017) by Erin Blakemore
- Domestication and Significance of Persea americana, the Avocado, in Mesoamerica (2009) by Amanda J. Landon
- Early history of the avocado (1963) by Wilson Popenoe and G. A. Zentmyer
