Poor old avocado is having a really rough time at the moment.
It’s apparently the reason millennials can’t afford a home down payment, and the avolatte phenomenon has been branded one of the stupidest food trends of all time. Which is fair, because drinking a latte out of an avocado skin is borderline insanity.
As we reported last week, the debate surrounding the link between avocado toast and mortgages has gone global, making Australia an international laughingstock.
Time magazine jumped on board with an avocado toast calculator asking people to enter the details of their city and state to find out how many servings they’d have to skip to be able to afford a home.
“If you’re brunching in New York City or San Francisco, you could be looking at skipping roughly 10,000 and 21,000 avocado toast servings for a down payment, respectively,” wrote journalist David Johnson with amusement.
A journalist at Eater in San Francisco was so moved by the whole situation that she referred to smashed avo as “the devil on toast.”
Eater’s Ellen Fort continues, “somewhere along the way, the buttery fruit that is so deliciously slathered on toast got a real bad rap for being trendy, and expensive.”
But when you do the mathematical breakdown, is it really the avocado’s fault?
According to Tristan Chan, co-owner of Sticky Fingers Kitchen and Bar in Surry Hills, Sydney, the breakdown goes a little something like this:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BT0aoppjAup/“Avocados are retailing at $48 per box and there are 22 in a box which makes it just over $2 an avocado.”
“Our avo on toast is $15. It comes on two slices of sourdough with goats cheese, truffle honey and pistachio nuts. We put in half to one avocado per dish depending on the size of the avocado so 13 percent of the base cost of our avo on toast dish is attributed to avocado.”
“When you consider the cost of other ingredients, the base cost of an avocado is extremely high in comparison.”
“If someone wanted plain avo on toast, it’s $10, again it’s half to one full avo depending on size so it could potentially make up 10 to 20 percent of base cost of the dish.”
Then there is the cost of the labor, which is estimated to make up about 30 percent of the price — you need someone to order the avocados, prep the avocado and toast, take the order, serve the order, and then clean the dish it was served on.
Rounding out the cost are other overheads (e.g., rent and utilities) along with miscellaneous expenses such as paper supplies (menu), printing, advertising, accounting, insurance, flowers, cleaning services and a whole raft of other expenses that go into running a restaurant.
And that’s why your smashed av is expensive and you can’t afford nice things.