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Part 4. The avocado in your refrigerator was designed for an animal that went extinct 13,000 years ago. The fruit evolved its fat-rich flesh and enormous pit to be eaten whole by Pleistocene megafauna: giant ground sloths that weighed up to four tons, gomphotheres that carried four tusks, glyptodonts that were essentially armadillos the size of a car. These creatures would swallow a whole avocado, digest the flesh during a long walk, and deposit the seed far from the parent tree. The fat fed them. The seed survived. The arrangement worked for millions of years, until the megafauna went extinct around 13,000 years ago. Botanists call the avocado an "evolutionary anachronism." No living wild animal can disperse its seed today. The pit falls to the ground, rots near the parent tree, and the plant loses. By the logic of natural selection, the avocado should have disappeared with the sloths. What saved it was the people of Mexico. Indigenous communities in what is now Puebla began cultivating avocados around 5,000 BCE, more than 6,000 years after the megafauna vanished. The pit is still there, still enormous, still carrying specs for an animal that no longer exists. In evolutionary time, 13,000 years is too short to matter. The avocado is still waiting. The word guacamole comes from ahuacamolli, a Nahuatl word meaning avocado sauce. That sauce now drives a $3 billion annual export industry. Mexico, and specifically the state of Michoacán, produces around 80% of all avocados sold in the United States. A truckload leaves the state every eight minutes. Avocados now outpace both tequila and beer as Mexico's most valuable agricultural export, generating roughly $9 billion in annual revenue as of 2021. The industry attracted cartel attention in the 1980s. Farmers in Michoacán face annual extortion demands of $150 to $250 per hectare. In 2022, two US avocado inspectors were assaulted and detained at a police roadblock in the state; the US paused all imports for a week, and the price of a carton of avocados jumped 40% within days. The avocado survived the Ice Age because people loved it enough to plant it. Five hundred years later, people love it enough to go to war over it.

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