Pass the guacamole!

Some days are better than others for a closing thought…..today is one of those days…..anytime I can find silliness to write about is a good day.

Recently I wrote about the avocado thing….they were going up in price…..and that some people hurt themselves when cleaning an avocado…..

Avocado growers had a bad year. Avocado crops tend to vary, yielding more growth one year, less growth the next. A smaller crop is expected this season in Mexico as well as California, where a 44% decrease has been predicted. And a growers strike in Mexico last year did not help matters.

And then the ER visits….

Avocados are all the rage. So much so that Huffington Post recently called the opening of New York’s first avocado bar “painfully trendy.” Turns out avocados are also, quite literally, part of a painful trend. Emergency room doctors are reporting an increase in the number of amateur chefs winding up with serious “stab and slash” injuries as they attempt to cut through the soft flesh and remove the hard pit, reports the Times of London. The injury even comes with its own name: “avocado hand.”

“I had to go to the [ER] and get three stitches and I have lost most of the sensation in my finger,” Freya Watson, a TV producer in London, tells Vice’s Munchies. “When I was in the [ER], there was a woman with the exact same injury.” Sure enough, people are posting pictures with hashtags like #avocadoinjury, and Simon Eccles—secretary and former president of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive, and Aesthetic Surgeons—tells the Times he sees four patients a week with avocado hand. So if you’re unskilled yourself, maybe watch a few tutorials before attempting to dissect

Avocados have become a fad…..something simple like avocado toast has become an internet thing……

Headlines about avocado toast are everywhere, but this time it’s more about economics than food trends. It began when an Australian property mogul went on Australia’s 60 Minutes and scolded millennials. “When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,” Tim Gurner harrumphed, per CNN Money. Let the reaction begin:

• The New York Times‘ DealBook does some fact-checking, and it doesn’t come out well for Gurner. Millennials are no more likely to spend on travel and dining than other generations, and it would take a serious amount of avocado toast to put a dent in a down payment these days. Besides, homeownership isn’t necessarily a slam-dunk as a wise financial move.
• Time is out with an avocado toast calculator. You plug in your city, and it crunches data to figure out how many servings of avocado toast (at $8 a pop) you’d have to skip to afford a down payment in your area.

• The backlash has been furious, and Gurner tells news.com.au that he didn’t expect it. He says his “comments were part of a much bigger discussion on how people can get into the market and the necessary planning and policy regulations that I believe are required in order to generate any real change.” And he acknowledged that it’s “incredibly hard” for people to enter the housing market.

• Still, casting luxury-ish food items as part of the problem isn’t particularly original, writes Maura Judkis at the Washington Post, who notes that Starbucks lattes were the old culprit. The problem is that the economic theory is “garbage,” she adds, citing this older takedown of latte economics in Slate.
• The real reason millennials can’t afford homes? Rising house prices and student debt, plus stagnant wages, writes Jessica Roy in the Los Angeles Times.
• Gurner, who is 35, isn’t even the first prominent Australian to make the avocado toast analogy. BuzzFeed took note of this column last year.
• A millennial responds, via Mashable: “I’d much prefer to eat avocado on toast while sharing an apartment with 10 mates, if having money and five houses turns me into a smarmy rich dude that lectures my own generation on how to be a smarmy rich dude. Cough, Gurner, cough.”
• Whether or not Gurner is right, one thing seems like a safe bet: The price of avocados is probably going nowhere but up, thanks to demand in China, reports the Independent.

Would you think the fad would end there?

No freakin’ way!

We don’t anticipate Keurig coming out with guacamole pods anytime soon, so in the meantime, we’ll have to make do with a new concoction brewed up by Australia’s Truman Cafe. That concoction, per BuzzFeed, is the avolatte, or avocado latte, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a creamy, piping-hot latte poured into a slightly less creamy, hollowed-out avocado. The world was first alerted to this java sensation just over a week ago, when staff from the Melbourne cafe posted a short video on Instagram of a staff member pouring steamed milk into the coffee-carrying avocado. “[Combining] two of Melbourne’s obsessions – lattes and avo,” read the accompanying caption.

The Telegraph, which wonders if this is “the latest hipster coffee trend,” notes that the avolatte joins a long line of coffee-inspired oddities, including a turmeric latte, a “bulletproof” coffee whipped up with butter, and, of course, Starbucks’ Unicorn Frappuccino. Commenters immediately reacted to the Truman Cafe’s creation with their own combination of disgust, awe, and eye-rolling. “As Mumford & Sons as it gets,” one poster wrote, per BuzzFeed, while another opined: “I just drank a latte out of an avocado and it changed my DNA I’m Caucasian now. Don’t talk to me unless you own at least 7 turtlenecks.” The Truman Cafe tells BuzzFeed the drink was meant as a joke and is not an actual menu item. (An all-avocado cafe is coming.)

You are now caught up on the silly shit hipsters do for attention….happy?

Time to be off like a dirty shirt…..you guys please have a good evening and a better tomorrow….Peace and love….chuq