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Avocado

From Wikiquote
An avocado

The avocado (alligator pear or avocado pear) is a tree (Persea americana) of the laurel family (Lauraceae). Avocado trees produce a large, usually yellowish-green or black, fruit of commercial importance. Some sources describe the avocado fruit as a ’’berry’”, but other sources describe the avocado fruit as a “drupe”.

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  • Avocado (Persea americana Mill.) is a tropical and subtropical fruit that is native to Mexico and Central America; avocado is gaining increasing worldwide acceptance and has received extensive marketing and a wide distribution due to its relevant nutritional benefits for human health. Mexico harvests more than 30% of avocados worldwide, representing the main producer and exporter of avocado, which has become a crop of high interest and has great economic impact on Mexico.
  • The avocado has, since the time of Columbus, spread from its home in America entirely around the Tropics. That such an important food plant was confined to the American continent until the post-Columbian contact with the Old World, while numerous other plants, such as the yam, taro, and sweet potato, had already spread to parts of the Old World, was probably due to the fact that the avocado will not easily survive long voyages, while most of the tropical root crops have much greater vitality.
    The fruit spread but slowly before the last century, but in recent times its culture has rapidly increased, and it is now cultivated in most of the countries that are suited to its growth. It has been cultivated in India since about 1860, and has reached the islands of Madagascar, Reunion, Madeira, the Canaries, Samoa, and Tahiti. In Natal and Australia it is just gaining a foothold. Its cultivation is increasing in Algiers. In 1882 it was reported as growing in southern France along the shores of the Mediterranean. Some of the trees had flowered, but apparently none had fruited at that time. In southern Spain, however, the tree fruits, and is cultivated to a limited extent.
  • The more than 200 cultivars of cultivated avocado are classified into three distinct races: West Indian, Guatemalan, and Mexican. Each race has unique ecological adaptations and identifiable characteristics (Bergh 1975b; Knight 1980), although interracial hybrids do occur. All three races share many similar growth and flowering behavior characteristics.
  • To Mexico City, Puebla, and Atlixco in 1911 came the twenty-one year-old American, Carl Schmidt. Schmidt was employed by the West Indian Nursery in Altadena, California. His task was to search the Mexican marketplace for avocados of outstanding quality and to locate the trees from which they came. He cut budwood from the best trees, numbered each, and shipped them by Wells Fargo to Altadena. Many buds refused to adapt to the soil and climate of California; but number 15, which Schmidt cut from a tree in the garden of Alejandro Le Blanc, flourished. When it survived the great freeze of 1913, its strength was officially recognized and it was given the name 'Fuerte'—Spanish for vigorous and strong. The 'Fuerte' tree that Schmidt found in Atlixco became the mother tree for California's avocado industry.
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