Avocado

When the gastronomes of the future come to choose the food that best represents our age, they will choose the avocado. The ubiquitous fruit is everywhere: in smoothies, on toast, served at breakfast, lunch and dinner, on t-shirts and all over social media. It represents our ingenuity in supplying exotic fruit to every corner of the globe all year round, our obsession with “clean” eating, our aspiration to eat brunch and our love of anything that — even passingly — tastes a little bit like butter. But it also represents our greed, our hypocrisy, our vanity and our overwhelming anxiety.

Oh the avo. The fruit that launched a thousand tweets. This millennial Holy Grail has done more to divide generations than anything save perhaps Brexit. It has been three years since Australian property developer Tim Gurner became a hate figure for suggesting in a TV interview that it was not economic difficulty that was keeping millennials from getting on the housing ladder but a tendency to spend $19 on smashed avos for brunch. Millennials vented their anger in the only way they know how—by twitter tirade. Perhaps it would have been more fitting to pelt Tim with over-ripe avos for his audacity. To eat avocado on toast in public is now as bold and unequivocal a statement one can make on their position in the contemporary culture wars.