Just for a moment, I want you to picture the humble avocado. A supermarket staple,

staple, sometimes a guilty pleasure.

Delicious on a chip, star of the eponymous toast.

Mostly I think of avocados is unavoidable.

Slates Alec Salmon, he gets that.

But one of the things he wants you and me to know is that the modern ubiquity of the avocado has been completely engineered.

The rise of the avocado as a fruit is like really one of the great advertising stories of the modern era.

The affiliations that we have, like, you know, the notion of like a superfood,

which is like a totally made-up designation, right, but all of us,

I think like, you know, would say like, oh, that's what an avocado is it's not even a thing but

But I want to believe Alex. Oh right of course and it's like it's such an interesting

backstory because for like a hundred years there is an immense amount of of money put into

advertising avocados and they were constantly rebranding them because Americans

hated them.

Alex's the first problem turned out to be the avocado's name.

Some people called it an aquacotta.

Others went with alligator pair.

Neither of those things seemed to excite customers.

Then there was the issue of telling Americans how to eat the thing.

In the 1920s, an ad featured a sliced avocado on a China plate,

dubbing it the aristocrat of salad fruit.

It turns out Americans wanted something a little less delicate.

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