The great avocado syndrome - turning good into bad, a modern epidemic.

By Victoria B.

Don’t you hate the way you can’t get a good avocado anymore? Years ago, I could buy 3 or 4 for the week, and every one of them would be green and delicious. Nowadays I buy one for the day and usually it’s rotten.

Sadly missed, don't let it R.I.P.

There are more avocados on the market, but fewer worth buying. I feel like a lemming on its way to self-destruction every time a buy an avocado these days. A silent chorus of suppliers chrooning Frank Ifield ‘I believe in you, You’re the kind of fool, who makes my dream come true.’

So what’s the story? Odds on they are picking them immature and then putting them in cold storage, giving them ice burn.  The rationale being that the suppliers don’t want them to over-ripen on the way to market – but, hello? It’s been years now that we’ve seen them inedible, so when will someone twig the current method’s not working? 

Whatever the new practice, the good have been turned into the bad and the product transformed into an inedible joke.

Many food products follow a similar history. Dips when they first came out were delicious, but now there are a confusing number of variations, all tasting vaguely the same, over-processed and off-putting.

Then there's sweets. This area has an unfortunately high interest for me. I’ve doubled my weight since menopause, I’m carrying around two bodies. My new body has gut-grinding clamourings for sweets. I had disciplined myself to one dessert per week: a vanilla slice supplied by a local bakery to the local Coles. To my horror I brought one home one day and found the crisp and clean-tasting icing which delicately balanced the custard had been replaced by a kind of dirty-looking, sluggish, wet gooey sugar. The wetness seemed to crawl down and be sucked up by the bottom pastry layer. Eating it with your fingers, previously a delicious kind of art form, had become a gumboots in mud job for the fingers.

One day at the Coles register, I broke loose about the problem to  the cashier and the queue of eight waiting customers.  Six out of the eight chorused their agreement. I kid you not. And let me be clear, the other two abstained because they had no experience of vanilla slices. One complainer said stridently “They can never leave good enough alone!”

So I’m not on my own in this frustration. According to that random trial group, 75% of us are fed up.

Other foods could be listed. It's interesting for instance to see how much sugar has invaded the savoury packaging market - see Sugar Shocker Foods. My question is: do the increases in sugar, other additives and changed processes really create more profit for the producer? And do the results really satisfy the customer?

A re-questioning needs to take place. I’m reminded of a documentary  I saw on the ABC on pesticides in farming. One farmer said ‘The increase in ingredients for a successful cocktail of pesticides is now so great that organic farming becomes competitive.’

And I've only just touched on the food - what else in our daily lives has been organised and administered from good to bad?