SLATE - The Hass avocado is the fruit that likely comes to mind when you’re picturing the “perfect” Instagrammable avocado: dark and lightly textured skin, an almost ombre green interior with a precise “give”-to-firmness ratio, and a relatively small, dark pit. It’s “meal-size,” which, entranced by convenience and plagued by mushy brown avocados, we love. As demand for avocados in the United States has nearly tripled since the turn of the century, Hass has led the charge, Mary Lu Arpaia, a researcher at the University of California, Riverside, told me. Our fixation on Hass avocados over other varieties is unsustainable, said Robert Henry, a researcher at the University of Queensland who worked on the first successful sequencing of the Hass avocado’s genome. In a constantly changing climate, a reliance on a singular breed of avocado that produces crops biannually means we could be in trouble if it’s threatened by pests or diseases.
But if you’re looking for an “avacodo-y” avocado, a Hass is what you would generally go for at the store. The experts I talked to challenged consumers to expand their palates: Perhaps they love the nuttiness of a Hass on toast, but would want something sweeter in a salad; try an avocado from the Dominican Republic. In the next few years, you may even see Arpaia and UCR botanist Eric Focht’s newly released Luna UCR avocado breed on the shelves; it boasts a “sweet, sort of floral characteristic.” Imagine that with some vegetarian tacos.