Chattel slavery is something that has plagued people around the world. It's not just limited to one group. And now, governments have figured that enslavement is more easily managed with free-range cattle - taxing people's incomes and keeping them enslaved to the state.
Avocado toast is the closest modern brunch comes to a sacrament, which is funny, because behind a good deal of it sit illegal logging, drained rivers, and men with guns.
Mexico grows three-quarters of America's avocados, almost all from a single state. Growing them is thirsty work: around 800 litres of water per kilogram. One avocado drinks what you would use in a twenty-minute shower, in a region with no water to spare.
So the orchards quietly tap the springs and streams the local villages rely on.
The land they grow on was forest. Investigators have logged 40,000 to 70,000 acres cleared across Michoacan and Jalisco, much of it illegal, with one study clocking a near-60% loss of forest cover. Pine forest out, monoculture in, stripped hillsides sliding into the valleys below.
Then the cartels arrived, because this is wildly profitable. They extort the growers, run their own orchards, and finance the clearing. Nobody called it blood guacamole for the colour.
So enjoy the little green fruit that announces what a thoughtful person you are. You wanted a moral statement. You bought a supply chain with a body count.
Lose the halo. It was always the heaviest thing on the plate.
โThe banksโฆwill deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conqueredโฆ. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.โ
โ Thomas Jefferson