[whatshisface]

It's a would vs. could thing. To grow that many avocados in the US you would have to plow up whatever is growing there now, crops that are more profitable. That would require raising the price (to beat out the opportunity cost) and potentially accepting a lower quality (avocados aren't like polyethylene, and they'll come out differently depending on the location and the variety the local pest profile and climate require).

Importing them from Mexico lets consumers have a good quality avocado at a low price. Offering someone a good deal raises demand for that deal relative to offering them fewer, lower-quality eaches at a higher price.

[virgilp]

No, parent comment is absolutely correct. This article is crap.

> (Question in title:) Why America now eats a crazy number of avocados

> (Answer in article:) And the reason avocados have exploded in the U.S. is that most of them are no longer grown in the U.S.

How does that make any sort of sense? You could say "it's because they've become very cheap", sure. But if they were grown outside US, and at higher prices, would you accept that as a valid "reason why avocado consumption has exploded"? It would imply that americans must actively hate domestically-grown avocados, with passion.

[whatshisface]

If you had a village in the desert, and one day someone built a water pipeline, the average water use would go up "because" it was coming from someplace other than your village's small oasis.

[virgilp]

There's no mention of "cheap" or "cheaper" in that article. None. I tend to agree that's what they meant, but I for one resent that it's not spelled out/ it's implied. The _cause_ is lower price, it's not source of the product. Is it lower price because it's imported? Sure, probably. But damn it, spell it out - you can even make something interesting out of it (chart consumption vs price, dunno). And let me tell you - I'm not even convinced they got the causality right, even _if_ that's what they meant. It's basically a meme that boomers were telling young people that they're poor because they eat avocado toast - which implies that it got popular (in a niche) before it got cheap. Sure, there's a positive feedback loop in there (more interest -> more import -> economies of scale -> lower prices -> even more interest), but I think they missed the "why".

> the average water use would go up "because" it was coming from someplace other than your village's small oasis

No, absolutely not. It would go up, in your example, because it was more readily available. The source has nothing to do with it except indirectly - the availability has everything to do with it.

[watwut]

> It's basically a meme that boomers were telling young people that they're poor because they eat avocado toast - which implies that it got popular (in a niche) before it got cheap.

I do not think this follows. Some boomer oped writers blaming avocado toasts for young poverty does not imply there is causality between the two. Some boomers love to blame whatever is new for them and they do not bother to check prices or actual levels of consumption.

[virgilp]

Oh, I'm not claiming that to be "evidence" - merely saying that there are hints that alternative explanations are worth exploring/investigating. "There's no smoke without fire" thing - sometimes there absolutely is smoke without any fire (especially when creating smoke was the intent), but it's still worth to consider the hypothesis that observed smoke might have been caused by a fire.

[watwut]

Sometimes, and I think here too, the claim is more of "the fire and the cow-eating-the-grass are unrelated".

As in, whatever avocados young people were eating and buying, the expense is unlikely to be comparable with the cost of housing, education, healthcare (if they have health issues already) etc.

[whatshisface]

In a sense, you're looking at ABC and saying that A cannot come before C because B comes before C.

[virgilp]

That's not how things work when you talk about "cause". There's all sorts of examples even in scientific studies - lots of negative effects were assigned to coffee that were not really related. Until someone was about to publish a correlation between coffee consumption and lung diseases, and paused for a second to say "wait a goddamn minute, could there be a correlation between coffee consumption and smoking? Like, people also smoking a cigarette when they drink their coffee?" It's not A before B before C, coffee was never the cause for respiratory disease. Just like "import" is not the cause for avocado popularity.