There’s often a division in the raw food world (and other health spheres) when it comes to fat versus fruit. Cultivated fruit gets plenty of flack for being sweeter and less nutritious than its wild counterparts—changes attributed to human intervention and centuries of selective breeding. And the issue of ‘man-made’ modern fruit sometimes becomes an argument for limiting its consumption and eating low-sugar fruits instead, like avocados and tomatoes.
I’ll be writing about the wild/cultivated fruit issue in a later post. In the meantime, I find it interesting that avocados—one of the most popular fat sources on a raw food diet, and the staple of many low-sugar raw cuisines—have managed to dodge criticism about their humongous size. I guess it’s hard to picture avocados being anything other than the plump, fleshy fruits we see in common cultivars like the Hass. But what most people don’t realize (even fruit-and-vegetable-savvy raw foodists) is that commercial avocados are a far cry from what they were originally. In fact, without deliberate cultivation by humans, avocados are small, fibrous, large-pitted, and yield only a tiny layer of that creamy green flesh we all know and love. It’d easily take ten wild avocados to get the equivalent flesh of one Hass, if not more.
That isn’t to say we should avoid avocados or that they’re bad for you—certainly not! But for folks interested in eating foods that are close to their natural state, it’s helpful to understand that these so-called “alligator pears” have been bred specifically for their size, fat content, and copious edible flesh. They aren’t quite so luxuriant in the wild.
Curious what these uncultivated avos look like? Check out the pictures below, and click ‘em for a larger view.
(Images are courtesy for avocadosource.com)
Wow, I had no idea that they were so cute and small and non-avocadoey in the wild! Thanks for enlightening me to the truth about avocados. Those GMO people do amazing things. Of course, I prefer my foods natural and GMO-free, but I do love a good plump hass.
Selectively bred and GMO are quite different, so don’t get too wound up about them
Fascinating! Who would have thought that the avocados to which everybody’s accustomed are monsters?! I would love to see this information disseminated.
Thank you : )
Epic, I learned something new today. Nice article =)
Taylor
Very neat!
What about “florida avocados”?
My friend has a nice avocado tree…they are not “bred”. But they are ahuge with a huge pit and lots of “meat”. The meat is much more watery then the hass variety.
Marc
This info was very interesting indeed. I must not agree though that the avocado nowadays is GMO so to fit in our well known sizes. Yes, there are several interventions of people over the plants, fruits and veggies, but not all of them are touching directly the gens of the cultures. For example in our home country Bulgaria we have a tradition to attach pear tree to an apple tree etc, which at the end in a grown phase gives apples and pears. This is not a GMO but just a symbiosis of two trees that can live together.
The evil GMO we know and we are all aware these days was introduced as a good intervention to help feed the planet etc. however this was really a nasty game of someones to fit up their pockets with money. Just as an example you can get the tomatoes from USA that can be grown up only one year after what you MUST buy the seeds again from the same farms and manufactures if you want to have it the next year. They say it happened accidentally however I do not believe that such a precise genetically modification allowed a mistake and so far nobody is fixing it
In a good word of the avocado, it is one of the fruits that is less touched from the point of fertilizers etc. This would simply mean that even if you cannot afford to buy it from the organic stores across the countries, it will in no way harm your health but only bring you the joy, happiness and tons of useful fats. The problem of buying it not organic (not everyone can afford it so far) is that acting like this we are not supporting organic farms and producers that do care about the planet and humans health (here we must exclude those gold seekers that are producing organic only to have it well sold etc.)
Okay, why do people see that a fruit doesn’t look like its ancestors and immediately scream “Omigod, GMO!”
Plant breeding has been going on since the dawn of agriculture. Look at the vast array of potatoes. Look at tomatoes–they were bred from an ancestor that actually made people sick.
GMO is very recent. Selective breeding in ancient. Please, folks, don’t confuse the two.
Every form of produce that we consume has been selectively bred over a few thousand years, and very few of them look all that much like their ancestors. In fact, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, and cabbage all come from a single ancestor plant.
Great Danes and poodles don’t look much like their ancestors either, but that’s breeding, not the insertion of foreign genes.
You took the words out of my mouth. GMO is a (very) recent innovation and is mostly used to enhance pesticide or (more likely, herbicide resistance). But manipulation via crossbreeding (and grafting) has been going on since the dawn of agriculture (hell, it IS the dawn of agriculture, duh) to enhance the quality of the food, the pest resistance, and the yield.
If you are messing up your body with corn oil and HFCS, my money says it’s the Omega 6′s and the fructose, not some magic GMO gene. GMO corn takes less herbicide and hence less residue on the finished product! Why are we hallucinating zebras in the middle of a wild mustang stampede?
Correlation is not causation and post hoc does not mean propter hoc.
I have to point this out: Selective breeding IS genetic modification. That’s sort of what selective breeding means. It’s oldest known method of genetic modification.
I think you’re thinking of transgenics. Yes, that’s another, more recent method of GM. Modern day avocados have been genetically modified. They were just modified in the old-fashioned way, outside of a lab.
A great deal of the food we eat is GMO. We just don’t describe it this way normally, but when talking to the paleo-diet people, selective breeding might seem almost as bad as transgenics.
They’re not wrong. It’s just a different way of looking at it.
I spent a wonderful weekend at a bed & breakfast in Tyre, Lebanon which had a huge orchard with some wild avocado trees. I was offered a few avocados from that tree and yes, they were smaller than the haas but their flavor was unmatched. I was told that the avocado (wild) has a lot of other benefits, skin, pit etc.. was wondering if anyone had any info on that.
Except for the Mexican varieties, the skin, leaves, and seed can be harmful and fatal to animals and humans. There is some research, but not too much, explaining in detail.
[...] The ratio of pulp vs. inedible stuff. Wild fruits tend to have thicker peels and bigger seeds, strings, rinds, cores, and other gnarly bits relative to the amount of edible flesh they yield. Even when sugar composition doesn’t differ dramatically between the edible parts of wild versus cultivated species, a single wild fruit will generally provide a lot less edible material than a cultivated fruit of the same size. This is one area where humans have definitely left our signature in fruit breeding: We like our cultivated fruits to be seedless (or at least low in ‘em), easy to bite into, easy to peel, and abundant in edible flesh. Due to their extra roughage (and sometimes-scary exteriors), wild fruits can be more of a challenge to eat. (This doesn’t just apply to sweet fruits, either: See my earlier post on wild avocados.) [...]
Denise,
From my research I think the same could be said of the modern coconut versus the ancient coconut.
Almost nothing we eat today are original and unadulterated by selective breeding and almost nothing in its original form is capable of feeding 7 billion people. When mankind built the first city 15 thousand years ago or so, they probably had been cultivating and selectively breeding crops and animals for centuries before that.
Nice blog post about Avocados and GMO http://avocadodiva.blogspot.com/2012/06/are-avocados-gmo.html
[...] The ratio of pulp vs. inedible stuff. Wild fruits tend to have thicker peels and bigger seeds, strings, rinds, cores, and other gnarly bits relative to the amount of edible flesh they yield. Even when sugar composition doesn’t differ dramatically between the edible parts of wild versus cultivated species, a single wild fruit will generally provide a lot less edible material than a cultivated fruit of the same size. This is one area where humans have definitely left our signature in fruit breeding: We like our cultivated fruits to be seedless (or at least low in ‘em), easy to bite into, easy to peel, and abundant in edible flesh. Due to their extra roughage (and sometimes-scary exteriors), wild fruits can be more of a challenge to eat. (This doesn’t just apply to sweet fruits, either: See my earlier post on wild avocados.) [...]
This article stuns me. I was in rural Kenya in 2000 and eating avocados the size of small footballs by the side of the road; loads of street sellers salting them and selling slices. Plenty of flesh; enormous fruits… I don’t mean to be rude but did you miss something or am I mistaken? I don’t think so as I brought one back through customs to enjoy back in England. Delicious.
Are you racist? You somehow asume that people in Kenya aren’t able to do selective breeding.. “It all began in Africa”
(I realize I should have replied in a different way, so I reply again)
you wrote; “did you miss something or am I mistaken?”
Yes, it seems that you are mistaking the avocados in Kenya with wild avocados. They were selling cultivated/selective bred avocados in Kenya. Not wild avocados.
(I tried to imagine why you thought they were wild, and my imagination went wild too, haha, so that’s why I thought it was kinda racist to think that Kenya is full of wild things and that you mistakingly thought that Kenyans are not able to cultivate avocados)
schi sandra, your entire response was just stupid. i hate when people leave stupid comments like yours.
It was less stupid than the post I replied to.. Are you able to point out what exactly you claim to be stupid, or shall I just asume that it is empty lies from you? Do you believe that selective breeding only exist outside Kenya? Do you believe that “It all began in Africa” is not true? Where do you believe selective breeding started?
anyway, I don’t mind that you like to spread hate, I know it helps your ego in some odd way.. I’m not into “ego competition”, so I’m not going to throw more hate back on you, sorry.. I know I’m “supose to”, but I won’t.. Keep it objective..
(damn, I’m being “too much” here, replying to myself now, hehe) ..I just like to say that “It all began in Africa) was a bit cryptic and/or misleading thing to add.. The quote just popped into my head, thinking that it all began in Africa, then selective breeding probably also has it’s origins in Africa. It didn’t exactly happen in that order, so it’s a bit misleading of me to use that quote..
btw…avocados came from south america. hence the name.
A foolish man speaks before he thinks, a wise man thinks before he speaks…
So are you trying to claim that avocadoes doesn’t exist in Kenya, or that people in Kenya are not able to do selective breeding of avocadoes? Do you believe that avocadoes in Kenya are 100% natural, not put there by humans and not breeded in any way?
Some people claim that avocados (I guess that’s the correct spelling, not “avocadoes” like I wrote in my other post, hehe) doesn’t exist in the wild, or rather; the wild avodado is so far from the cultivated avocado that it’s definetly not wild avocados “the size of footballs” aparently existing in Kenya..
[...] post, in which my own photographs are used/cited. I have found a few of similar posts of hers (i.e. Wild Avocadoes), that while neatly appearing technical, lack the academic substrates. In this case, her subject [...]
[...] that despite our love of the avocado (specifically, domesticated cultivars with lots of flesh; wild avocado fruits have a thinner layer of green deliciousness surrounding that pit), it is not “meant” [...]
[...] that despite our love of the avocado (specifically, domesticated cultivars with lots of flesh; wild avocado fruits have a thinner layer of green deliciousness surrounding that pit), it is not “meant” [...]
wow who knew thanks for sharing those photos I have uncultivated avocados I didn’t realize that the year old so little meat.