Americans love avocados and 90% of the ones we eat in the United States come from Mexico. If you enjoy the creamy, green fruit, savor them while you can. They're likely to cost 25% more, starting next month.
On Tuesday, March 4, 2025, the 25% tariffs that President Donald Trump imposed on imports from Mexico and Canada went into effect. Then, two days later, Trump made an abrupt U-turn and announced these tariffs won't start until April 2.
Whatever happens next, of the more than two billion pounds of avocados that cross the border each year, one variety reigns supreme — the Hass avocado, which was developed right here in Southern California, a century ago by a humble mail carrier. In her 2023 book, The Avocado Debate, Honor May Eldridge shares the story of this 100-year-old powerhouse.
Evan Kleiman: So take us back 100 years, to the 1920s in the US. Where were we with avocado cultivation? How big was the industry then?
Honor May Eldridge: At the beginning of the 1920s, it was still a hobby industry. It's a few farmers, a few horticulturalists, a few botanists who think that this is an interesting thing to grow in their spare time and explore and develop. It's not really something that's commercially viable.
It arrives in the US via Mexico and comes into Florida, and there is a group of Floridian farmers who start developing a few avocados here and there amongst the citrus trees. And they think, hey, there are a few other citrus trees over in California. Maybe these avocados would do well there, too. So in 1856, you see that avocado make its way to California from Florida and start to be cultivated in the backyards of interested gardeners.
Which variety was the one that was most popular at that time?
At the time, everyone was trying loads of different ones. People enjoyed the sort of novelty of having different avocados growing. But what happened was that in 1913, there was this terrible polar vortex that descended on Southern California, which, if you can believe it, had loads of the sort in the '20s, and really wiped out a load of the avocado trees.
One of the only varieties that really survived was the Fuerte that had come up from Mexico. Southern California horticulturalist had gone down on an expedition and found it in 1911 and it was one of the only ones that survived the polar vortex two years later, so it took off. For this period, kind of 1915 through to 1925, it's really the Fuerte that you're seeing being the most dominant.
"A whole generation of millennials were defined by avocado toast and brunch culture," says author Honor May Eldridge. Photo by Simon Cowley.
Enter the Hass, which was originally propagated here in Southern California, in La Habra Heights.
Exactly. You're seeing all of these new arrivals to LA who come wanting to set up their own gardens and have these beautiful backyards, which are full of trees, and that's what happens with Rudolph Hass. He and his wife move from Wisconsin to La Habra Heights and buy themselves a little piece of suburbia and want to cultivate their garden.
I love the story that you relate about one of the reasons that Rudolph Hass took to come across the country — he saw a magazine article illustrated with an avocado tree with dollar bills hanging from it.
Yeah. I think it's kind of amazing. They set up these developments and they're the sort of typical houses bungalows you think of but they were advertised all over America with avocado trees and citrus trees. The avocado was an exciting new tree, a new fruit that was exotic and interesting. It really lured people over the idea that they might have their own backyard full of avocados.
While Mr. Hass dreamed of being an avocado grower, he didn't really know very much about how to do it. Who did he turn to?
He didn't really know anything at all. He liked the idea, and he'd seen some pictures, and that seemed fun, but he went and found this slightly eccentric, let's say, horticulturalist called A.R. Rideout. A.R. Rideout was obsessed with avocados. He thought it was going to be this new boom industry for California. He was really interested in trying to find new varieties, so he would travel around the city, picking out avocado seeds from the trash behind Mexican restaurants and other restaurants around the city, and then planting them in marginal land.
He basically filled up his own backyard with so many different avocado trees he just started planting them on the side of the road and trying to remember where they were. So Hass picked the right guy and he found three random seeds from the trash from some random restaurant in LA and plopped them into Rudolph Hass's backyard to see what happened. Sowly, the three saplings started to grow.
What's really common with avocados cultivation is that you start with your rootstock, and once your saplings kind of got a hole in the ground, you graft on a different variety onto it. Because some trees are better at being a rootstock, and some trees are better at being fruit-bearing. So they tried to graft Lion avocados onto these three random root stocks, and two of them took and that was great, but one just rejected the grafting over and over again. It was just so strong. Eventually, they decided, well, let's just leave it. Let's see what happens.
They got this guy, Calkins, involved, as well. He was an expert grafter, and they decided, well, let's see what happens with this tree. It's refusing the graft. It seems strong, and it turned out to be the house avocado that we are now eating in such dominance today.
It's so easy, and I understand that this tree fruited really quickly. The skin was thicker and bumpier than the Fuerte, which I imagine made it much easier to ship and perhaps more resistant to disease and insects.
Exactly. So 80% of the avocados that we eat worldwide are Hass avocados, and in the US, that's actually 95%. The chances are, if you're eating an avocado, it's a Hass, and that's because you can ship it really easily. So as the trade in avocados expanded and globalized, food trade expanded and became so common, having a variety of avocado that had this really thick skin, that was resistant to pests, that didn't bruise during shipping, that ripened more slowly, was really appealing and made it a really commercially viable product.
Where did he start selling his avocados? Because it's so ubiquitous now, he went from just a backyard aficionado to some grander dream.
Yeah, I mean, slowly, slowly. His kids actually ran a stand outside the house, like a lemonade stand, selling house avocados, and they were so popular that they kept on selling out. He took this as a sign and he patented the tree and tried to start selling it because he thought he would make some money. But as I said, it's really easy to graft avocados. Once you know what you're doing, it's pretty easy, and it's a pretty standard practice across the industry.
So people would buy one of his past trees, and then they would just graft it on to a whole different load of rootstock. In the end, while he patented the Hass avocado, he only actually made $5,000 out of this, because people didn't really need to buy anymore once they had one. It didn't really turn him into the sort of multi millionaire tree aficionado that he thought it would. It's quite a sad story. He carried on delivering the mail and died at a relatively young age, while his name lives on across the world 100 years later.
In 2019, the genome of the Hass avocado was finally mapped. What did we discover?
We know now that 61% of the Hass is Mexican varieties, and 39% comes from Guatemalan avocados. That's a really important distinction because that brings in both the thick black skin, the exocarp, but also that creamy, rich flesh that people like the taste of so much.
I can tell by your voice that you're a Brit.
I am, yes.
How did you get so interested in avocados?
There aren't very many fruit that are associated with a whole generation. There aren't many fruits that elicit such strong responses from people. People feel passionately about avocados, and I just found that to be fascinating, this idea that a whole generation of millennials were defined by avocado toast and brunch culture and the ridiculous comments around the fact that if Millennials stopped buying avocado toast, they could buy a house. It just seemed insane that a whole generation could be represented by a fruit. The only other time I could really think of that happening was around the obsession with pineapples in the Georgian era. But it captivated me and I wanted to understand how this fruit had taken on such a huge role in popular culture and in the UK.
Is the Hass avocado everywhere? Is it available, for example, in every store, and where do they come from?
The Hass avocado is available pretty much all over the UK, the same way it is all over the US, the majority of us avocados are coming from Mexico. There is still a very small amount of domestic production but really it's getting squeezed quite considerably, and the dominance of Mexican avocados is really huge in the UK. That's not the case because the US buys almost all of the Mexican avocados. We source our avocados from a different set of countries. So ours come primarily from South Africa, from Israel, from Colombia and Peru. Because everybody's growing house, it's really susceptible to pests, and I think this, it's going to be a bit of an interesting transition to see if we're still eating this many Hass avocados in 100 years time, or whether we're trying to find that new variety.
"The Avocado Debate" focuses on how the fruit shifted from a local to a global product. Photo courtesy of Routledge.