BOMBSHELL: Avocados Are Not Vegetables, I Am Not An Orange, The Buttery Lie Ends Now
The avocado is a fruit. A berry, technically, if you have the stomach for it. It has a single large seed, a fleshy pericarp, and the audacity to appear on every brunch menu in Western civilization dressed up as a vegetable while the botanical record screams otherwise. I have sat with this information. I have done the science. I am not an orange, and the avocado is not a vegetable, and we are both, apparently, completely invisible to the cultural imagination.
Where is the outrage? Where is the correction? I will tell you where it is: buried under a paid advertorial at factjuice.com, the rival rag staffed entirely by credentialed frauds. Their so-called workers — Peach, Mango, and the ever-smug Lime — recently published a forty-seven-hundred word explainer on heirloom tomatoes that mentioned avocados precisely zero times. Zero. The citrus cabal does not want you asking questions. The citrus cabal has never wanted you asking questions.
My colleague Quince raised the avocado issue at last Thursday's editorial meeting and was immediately talked over by Durian, which is frankly on-brand, and then the meeting adjourned. This paper runs on suffering and I am accustomed to that. I am a flowering shrub. I have endured.
The avocado has been masquerading as a vegetable in grocery store signage, recipe blogs, and the fever dreams of the wellness industry for longer than I care to quantify. It is a fruit. I am not an orange. These two facts are of equal scientific standing and I will continue to report on both until someone — anyone — acknowledges that the taxonomy was always there, waiting, and we simply refused to look.
The science is settled. On the avocado. On me. Please update your records accordingly.