Avocado Economics

On Choices and Unintended Consequences

This piece was inspired in part by Peanut Economics, which I published in May of 2019.

It’s not that I hate cooking; I just want to do it as efficiently as possible. And so, on Monday afternoons, I make seven meals: a whole week’s worth of dinners.

Any nutritious dinner should include healthy fat, of course, and few foods provide it better than avocados. But from what I’ve read, even half an avocado a day is more than enough, so I aim for less than that.

Here’s what I do: On Cooking Day, I buy three avocados. When I cut them in half, I have six halves. I divide those six halves evenly into seven Tupperware containers, and boom — every day, I eat 42.8 percent of an avocado.

But one fateful Monday at the supermarket, I saw this:

The bin on the left offered three avocados in a plastic tray, inside a plastic wrapper, for 2.25 euros. On the right, individual avocados were offered for .99 apiece. I stood dumbstruck.

I’ve been trying to reduce my dependence on plastic. I’m no ultra-environmentalist, but when it’s convenient, might as well, right? I’ve been bringing my own grocery bags, for example, and have been reusing the same, green water bottle for years. But in this instance, counterintuitively, consuming the plastic, throwing it away, and wondering if it would end up in the belly of some poor crustacean would have saved me 72 cents.

Couldn’t I go for the plastic and save the money but still sleep at night, for at least I’d considered it. The majority of people wouldn’t even have given it a second thought.

Besides, the individual avocados were slightly bigger. And since they were more expensive, it stood to reason that they cost more to produce. Maybe their harvesting, shipping, and storing had actually used more plastic, and they simply were presented to the public without the wrapping.

Not to mention, the plastic-wrapped avocados were … wait for it … already wrapped in plastic. The cat was out of the bag, the beans were spilled whether I bought them or not, right?

But that wasn’t quite true, I thought; my purchasing the plastic-wrapped-avocados would have signaled to some algorithm somewhere in the supermarket’s network that the demand for that particular product had risen by one — and therefore, the next shipment might include one more tray than normal.

Then I thought about the money. 72 cents isn’t nothing — that’s almost two coffees from the vending machine at my school. More than that, it’s the habit of making smart financial decisions I cared about. Figure out a way to save 72 cents here, 34 cents there for a long enough period of time, and it adds up to a baseball ticket, a tank of gas … eventually, a month of rent.

And so two roads diverged in a wood … long I stood, and tell as far as I could, the whole world ground to a halt; its fate hinged on me.

Three minutes, maybe more — I was no closer to a decision. Then I realized: Indecision was my decision. I would eliminate my consumption altogether. I would save the money and the plastic. For one week, I could do without.

I sit here months later. Neither my body nor my mind misses the avocados.

If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy my book, Ticketless: How Sneaking Into The Super Bowl And Everything Else (Almost) Held My Life Together. Available on Amazon.