While avocado for Mexicans is a vital component, green gold, a national treasure, for international chefs it is a problem and they want to cancel it mainly because of the great impact it has on the environment.
Many people -including me- cannot imagine their life without this delicious fruit in their meals, since it adapts easily to any dish, be it sweet or salty; however, it is true that avocados have left a significant carbon footprint. According to the co-founder of the Mexican restaurant chain Wahaca, Thomasina Miers, for each avocado to grow, 230 liters of water have to be used!
In addition to all the environmental impact, it has due to the transportation from many Latin American countries to the rest of the world mainly because of its high demand for avocado toasts or other dishes.
This is because avocados must travel in containers with controlled temperature in order to delay the ripening process, therefore generating immense power consumption.
But, above all, avocado has a dark side and it is the drug trafficking in Mexico and how cartels control its production, but that is another story.
Why have international chefs stopped using avocado?
Due to all this great environmental and economic damage, several international chefs have made the decision to eliminate avocado from their dishes, some have even said to stop consuming it and opt for choosing local ingredients that are friendlier to the planet.
An example of this is the Wahaca chain of Mexican restaurants in the United Kingdom where they have replaced the avocado in their guacamole with a sauce made of green beans, green chili, lemon and coriander, which they called “Wahacamole”.
Alternatives to avocado
These are the ingredients that have mainly replaced the delicious avocado:
• Artichokes
• Zucchini
• Green bean
• Pistachios
Goodbye dearest avocado
Imagine a world without avocado has become a trend with the hashtag #noavocado (not avocado) through Tiktok, where thousands of recipes with alternative ingredients to this creamy fruit have been shared. Chefs from around the world such as Ireland, Toronto, and London have also begun to substitute this ingredient and try to stop the success of the fruit, as it would not be enough for those who grow it.
An Irish chef named JP McMahon took it away from his restaurant but he made something incredible called “Mexican blood diamond”, a kind of guacamole made with Jerusalem artichokes.
On the other hand, Santiago Lastra, a London chef, prepares a guacamole-style sauce made from fermented pistachios and currants.
Hopefully, these small actions or modifications will help the impact caused by this fruit to be less and less and that both deforestation and water scarcity give it greater visibility, not only for this fruit, but for everything we consume.
Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Laboratory for Agri-Food Analysis at Dalhouse University in Halifax, explains that there is currently a greater reflection on our spending on the environment through food.
“More and more consumers are seeing the planet in their saucers,” Sylvian concluded.
