Thursday, February 4, 2010

Dipping into avocado lore

As Super Bowl time approaches, America's thoughts turn to...food. Mounds and mounds of it. Wings, pizza, chili, burgers, brats, and of course, guacamole. Depending on which advisory council you believe, Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest alligator pear-consumption day of the year. With that in mind, TSG presents this little trivia quiz on the subject of that lovely greed obloid once known as midshipman's butter.

Which of the following are true?
  • Avocados have been used to advertise Led Zeppelin concerts
  • The name avocado comes from the Aztec word for testicle
  • Hass avocados are named for a mailman from southern California
  • All Hass avocados can be traced to a single tree that died of root rot in 2002
  • Avocados leaves are toxic to horses
  • Avocado milkshakes are popular in both Brazil and Vietnam

3 comments:

Parm said...

OK, between Wikipedia, Snopes, and Google I'm guessing that I could provide a useful answer to every one of these WITHOUT guessing.

That would hardly be fun. Research? Bah!

So - all are true except for the bit about horses (avocado skins, however, are known to upset the stomachs of certain canine breeds - of this I am most certain) and the bit about the milkshakes (everyone knows that avocado shakes tend to be best excepted by long-time smokers who have little enough of their taste buds remaining to them, making this more of a medical symptom of sorts than a cultural one).

Mister Ed said...

Almost a perfect score! But, according to the ASPCA website:

Horses: Poisonings can occur when avocado groves are used as pastures, or pruned branches become accessible. The leaves, seeds fruit and bark are likely all toxic. Clinical effects occur mainly in mares, and includes noninfectious mastitis, as well as occasional gastritis and colic.

Parm said...

When we had a parrot, we always had to be careful when guac was around, as it is quite poisonous to parrots.

And yet, come this particular day, we humans go on a guac binge. Perhaps, deep in our prehistoric past, herds of mammoth sabertooth horses would prey upon proto-humankind and we learned that eating guac in sufficient quantities protected us from such marauding.