CALIFORNIA AVOCADO ASSOCIATION 



71 



All avocados are good, but how much better some are than others I 

 I have, like that popular pickle man, fifty-seven varieties. The hotelman 

 seeks the fruit that is free from fibre, and whose flavor appeals to him 

 as tasting rich and nutty. These words described the perfect avocado. 

 Some cynics think they are applicable to the present day avocado eater — 

 rich and nutty. 



As yet, with hotels, it remains, practically a salad fruit. It has 

 been doctored by many prescriptions, but there remains only one best 

 way to eat it: with a little salt, and, perhaps, lemon juice; the fewer 

 frills the better — like that Irishman's celebrated recipe for whiskey 

 punch: "You pour in the whiskey, and then the less water you pour 

 in the better." 



And now, fellow growers, benefactors of humanity, who are pre- 

 paring this superb food for the health and pleasure of others-— and 

 profit to ourselves — don't be down-hearted when someone dolefully pic- 

 tures prices "shooting the chutes." There will, doubtless, be an adjust- 

 ment of prices, but take it rather as evidence that the production and 

 consumption are keeping pace. 



Be happy, conscious that you are bringing the avocado to stay, and 

 it will soon find its welcome way to a hundred million mouths in the 

 everywhere of "My Own United States!" 



THE AVOCADO IN MEXICO 

 R. O. Price, Upland, Cal. 



In complying with a request from Dr. Webber for a paper on the 

 avocado in Mexico, I will state at the outset that I am limited to a gen- 

 eral knowledge only of the subject coming to me as a coffee planter 

 of some fifteen years experience in the Tierra Caliente, or hot country 

 of southern Mexico. 



Of course on the plantation we had all of the native fruits such as 

 the mango, avocado, banana, pine-apple, orange, lime, guava, naranja- 

 lima, cocoanut, sapote, papaya and many other less known fruits. 



Our plantation was located in the foot-hill section of the Sierra 

 Madres, some seventy miles back from the gulf coast, in latitude seventeen 

 and a half, at an elevation around eight hundred feet. 



We were pioneering in a virgin forest as old or older perhaps than 

 the ruins of the prehistoric city of Palenque in the same forest which 

 stretched off to the east of us toward the Guatamalan line. 



In making our clearings for the "fincas" or plantings, we left the 

 largest trees of the forest to protect the coffee plants from the direct 

 rays of the sun. The ground selected was always a hillside or mountain 

 slope necessary to get proper drainage, as our rain fall often reached 

 one hundred and forty inches. Invariably we found in this tropical 

 under growth the wild avocado, called by the Indians "CHININI". 



Apropos of the discussion of the proper name for this fruit, I might 

 say, in passing, we have here in the Aztec tongue perhaps our oldest 

 precedent. 



