10 things you didn't know about avocados

10 things you didn't know about avocados

So you know that avocados are delicious and healthy, but did you know that the most popular variety of the fruit - which is possibly the only one you see in supermarkets today - can trace its lineage to a fluke?

In the 1920s, a California man named Rudolph Hass bought some seeds from a nursery for the purpose of budding or grafting them to popular varieties at the time. On one of the seedlings, repeated grafts did not take and Mr Hass had planned to cut the tree down. But, according to the California Avocado Commission, his children preferred the unique fruit born from that tree to the then-predominant Fuerte variety, and Mr Hass changed his mind.

He had the tree patented in 1935, and the Hass variety today accounts for about 80 per cent of all the avocados eaten around the world.

Speaking of eating avocados, you were probably not aware that an astonishing 14 million pounds of avocados, or roughly 28 million of them, are consumed in the United States during Cinco de Mayo, or the commemoration of the Mexican army's victory over the much more powerful French forces on May 5, 1862.

Check out the gallery below for more little-known facts about the avocado.

huizhen@sph.com.sg

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