SAMA HOOLE: The avocado was built to be eaten by a giant ground sloth, and our ancestors ate the sloth.

The avocado was built to be eaten by a giant ground sloth, and our ancestors ate the sloth. Its stone is the size of a golf ball. No animal alive in the Americas today can swallow one whole and carry it off to plant it somewhere else. For millions of years, something could. Ground sloths the size of elephants. Elephant-like gomphotheres. Toxodons built like rhinos. They swallowed the fruit, wandered off, and dropped the stone miles away in a heap of dung. Then people arrived, and within a few thousand years the giant animals of the Americas were gone. The fruits built for them should have gone with them. In 1982 two ecologists, Daniel Janzen and Paul Martin, gave them a name: anachronisms, fruits still being made for animals that no longer exist. The avocado survived because people started planting it. Around four in five avocados sold on earth today are Hass, and every Hass descends from one seedling a postman called Rudolph Hass planted in his garden in California in the 1920s and patented in 1935. Avocado toast is a fruit designed for a sloth, saved by the people who ate the sloth, copied from a postman's tree, and sold to you as the natural choice.

— Sama Hoole (@SamaHoole) November 8, 2026

The avocado was built to be eaten by a giant ground sloth, and our ancestors ate the sloth. Its stone is the size of a golf ball. No animal alive in the Americas today can swallow one whole and carry it off to plant it somewhere else. For millions of years, something could. Ground sloths the size of elephants. Elephant-like gomphotheres. Toxodons built like rhinos. They swallowed the fruit, wandered off, and dropped the stone miles away in a heap of dung. Then people arrived, and within a few thousand years the giant animals of the Americas were gone. The fruits built for them should have gone with them. In 1982 two ecologists, Daniel Janzen and Paul Martin, gave them a name: anachronisms, fruits still being made for animals that no longer exist. The avocado survived because people started planting it. Around four in five avocados sold on earth today are Hass, and every Hass descends from one seedling a postman called Rudolph Hass planted in his garden in California in the 1920s and patented in 1935.

Avocado toast is a fruit designed for a sloth, saved by the people who ate the sloth, copied from a postman's tree, and sold to you as the natural choice.