In December 2006, back when climate change was still best known as “global warming,” researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory published a study that predicted dire outcomes for California crops. “[A]lmonds, table grapes, oranges, walnuts, and avocados show moderate to substantial yield declines,” wrote David Lobell, the study’s lead author. In particular, the “substantial” designation was reserved for avocado crops, which were predicted “to yield 40 percent less than current harvests” over the course of the next four decades, owing to, among other things, a changing climate.
Almost exactly 10 years later, several noteworthy things have changed: The earth has seen the hottest months and years on record, there is now the specter of a decades-long megadrought in California and the Southwest, and the avocado has experienced a mushy, meteoric rise to culinary favor in the United States. “In the 1990s, the average American ate about 1.5 pounds; in 2012, he ate 5 pounds,” my colleague Olga Khazan wrote in The Atlantic last year. Once known as the “alligator pear,” Khazan added, it had gone from a pricy, esoteric foodstuff that the wealthy served with lobster to a cheaper, ubiquitous fruit, especially as many Americans stopped stigmatizing fat-rich foods.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: The Atlantic
