January 30, 2013
How Did Avocados Become the Official Super Bowl Food?
Making guacamole. Image courtesy of Flickr user shepaused4thought.
Guacamole and the Super Bowl. The two go hand in hand these days don’t they?
And yet, if you visit the California Avocado Commission’s website — brought to you by the state with 60,000 acres of avocado orchards — you won’t find any mention of “Guacamole Sunday.” Instead, a message on the site’s front page reads: “Our season has ended. Look for California avocados in stores from Spring – Fall.”
When I asked Will Brokaw, the California farmer behind Will’s Avocados about this seemingly odd timing, he was quick to point to the irony.
“The California avocado season is just barely getting going at that time of year,” he said. And while it’s great that demand is so high, which in turn raises sales numbers and wholesale prices for everyone, it’s a shame to see that demand at precisely the moment when Hass avocados – the most popular domestic variety – have yet to fully ripen. (The ones that do get picked in February are often watery, he says.)
“Everybody would be better off if the Super Bowl was delayed until early March,“ Brokaw added.
Well, maybe not everybody. In fact, as soon as I started looking into how avocados became the signature food for an event that takes place in the dead of winter, it quickly became clear that the Super Bowl-guacamole tie is a fascinating – perhaps disturbing – example of the way globalization has come to define the food on our plates.
Last year, according to the produce industry publication The Packer, about 75 percent of the avocados shipped within the U.S. in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl came from Mexico. Most of the rest came from Chile. And that translates to a lot of the creamy green fruits. This year Americans will eat almost 79 million pounds of them in the few weeks before the big game – an eight million pound increase over last year and a 100 percent increase since 2003.
None of this has been an accident. The avocado industry started promoting guacamole as a Super Bowl food back in the 1990s, shortly after the NAFTA agreement began allowing floods of avocados from Central and South America to enter the country in winter. By 2008, Mexico had become the largest supplier of avocados to the U.S.
The Christian Science Monitor wrote about the phenomenon in this 2009 article, Super Bowl success story: Mexico’s avocados.
In the central state of Michoacán, Mexico’s avocado belt, exports generated $400 million last year, and it’s now the second source of income for the state – after remittances sent from Mexicans living in the US.
“It has transformed this state, and put a hold on immigration,” says José Luis Gallardo, the head of the Michoacán Avocado Commission and a plantation owner who has watched the industry explode in the past few years.
While fresh avocados have been a staple of the Mexican diet for centuries, in the US they were mostly consumed in California or Texas, where they are grown.
Today, the fruit is as common in California supermarkets as it is in Kansas.
This is where I start to feel conflicted. On the one hand, I feel truly happy for the Kansans who now have access to one of the world’s most delicious, perfect foods. And I like knowing that so many people are serving guacamole at their Super Bowl parties instead of say, highly-processed cheese dip.
But the fact that the foreign avocado industry was able to create a new market for their product virtually overnight simply by pulling out all the stops on marketing the product as an established Super Bowl food also seems noteworthy.
Our increasing dependence on large monocrops and factory farms (think: vast swaths of almonds grown in California to feed Germany’s hankering for marzipan, or the pork produced in Iowa’s concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) intended for South Korea, Colombia, and Panama) comes with a steep price.
Until just a few decades ago, most Americans had a basic awareness of the way food and farming was connected to place, seasons, and the weather. Not only have we lost these things, but we’ve also lost touch with how and where our food is produced — a key piece of the puzzle when it comes to knowing that your dinner ingredients won’t be, say, recalled for salmonella contamination, filled with antibiotics, or covered in pesticide residue.
I can call up Will Brokaw — or grab him at the farmers market — and ask him how he grows his avocados (everything from how he controls pests, treats the soil, and uses water, to how he treats his workers). And while the growers in Michoacán, Mexico, may very well be using the exact same farming practices, I have no way of knowing either way. That disconnect may not keep most of us from buying winter avocados, but it should give us pause — just like the other windows into the vast complexities of our food system should.
And that “perfect Super Bowl snack”? It may not be quite so perfect anymore.
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I was pretty astonished to see this post come up in my RSS feed today, because my post on why guacamole is considered a Super Bowl food just went up at Table Matters this morning!
I do think that the NAFTA shift made avocadoes a great deal more visible and available, so it was both more possible and desirable to use them in snacks in or informal party foods (and not just the fancy crab dip at White House dinners). But that can’t be the whole story of how it became a January/February event food–even Mexican avocadoes are less plentiful in the winter than in the summer, although they do grow all year. I don’t really have an answer to that either, but I do think it’s a demand partly driven by the market, not just created by the marketers.
Hm, I’m not sure why my previous comment didn’t come through. Perhaps it got caught in a spam filter because of the link?
It reminded me of my favorite avocado dessert that I prepare quite often and my family simply loves it. And it could be called our traditional Super Bowl dish. This year, however, we’re gonna try some delicious organic food prepared in one of the restaurants in our neighborhood called the Magic Oven. We fell in love with the food they serve and so quite naturally it was our first choice but, of course, my dessert will remain an inseparable part of our Super Bowl night. :)
This article was going ok until the last two paragraphs including the final comment…concluding that “perfect” equals American grown is just ignorant.
The situation is a little more complicated. NAFTA was the North American Free Trade Agreement and didn’t involve Chile initially. Mexican avocados had been excluded from the US market, especially California and Florida, because of the danger of the importation of a weevil from Mexico. The original ban was also to protect growers. NAFTA allowed an opening of the market, and Mexican avocados were soon in stores everywhere.
I’ve traveled through the avocado growing areas of Michoacán. There are endless hillside covered with groves of the Haas variety. The climate is relatively cool and constant because of the altitude and being south of the Tropic of Cancer which tends to lead to year round production. Chile is different because it’s south of the equator and has the opposite production period compared to the US. The market used to be dominated by the Fuerte variety, which produces fruit in the winter, but this variety is gone from the market.
The avocado has its origin in Mexico and Guatemala. I’ve read in Mexican reports that the avocado is extinct in the wild. One still finds other varieties in Mexico, usually just called “criollo,” meaning locally native, but these are fast disappearing. For me the real problem is the monoculture and risk that certain genetic characteristics in other varieties will be lost.
My personal theory is that the indigenous people of Mexico invented guacamole as a way to prolong the consumption of avocados, which have a tendency to bruise easily and take on a rancid taste as the oil content rises at maturity. Guacamole is a great way to disguise this. It takes a fine avocado at its prime maturity to eat it plain out of the the rind. Now we have a triumph of native inventiveness and modern marketing. All I can say is, “¡Viva el aquacate!”
Let’s remember that most of the problems with contamination (those that made the national news) have been traced to farms in Colorado and California. Also that protectionism seeks to give the advantage back to foods that are generally lower in quality and have become unpopular with consumers (Florida tomatoes, for example, which are picked green and gassed to ripeness, tasting noticeably worse than vine ripened Mexican tomatoes). It’s true that consumers need to know how their food is grown, but the biggest problems seem to be right here at home.