Essay: Why Avocado Toast is the Millenial Anthem

You walk into a cafe, and on a table you see a polished white plate. On it is a single slice of toasted crusty bread, smeared with avocado. You notice it because it’s attractive-looking. Vibrant green topped with a jumble of bright purple onion slices, and a curly mess of micro-greens. The plate is sprinkled with salt and pepper. You see the item listed on the menu above the barista’s beanie-d head, and your eyebrows raise at the price. Millennials, you think to yourself, moving forward to claim your double shot espresso. 

What happened here? Why are there endless looping arrows pointing from avocados on toast to millennials and back again like a snake eating it’s tail? I’ve heard the comment “millennials and their avocado toast” more times than I care to count since I became an adult In 2008. The more I thought about what this relationship might signify, the more I realized that underneath this small, grumbling comment floats a massive iceberg of context. Let’s break down why it’s such a signifier, and look at what it means for 30 year olds to eat healthy green smush on crispy bread. 

I discovered a few interesting things while looking into this. Technically speaking, a millennial is a person born between 1986 and 2002. This most important note about this timespan is that it means everyone was slowly realizing that by the time we became our parents’ age, the government benefits afforded to our parents would no longer exist. The churn of one economic stressor after another has kept millennials in a state of dwindling security, and fewer opportunities available. We’ve seen prices inflate exponentially, leaving the minimum working wage far behind (exhibit A: the price of avocados on toast). We now live crammed together in single family houses and work back to back part time jobs so that rent stays within an affordable range. And simple, humble avocado toast has taken the place of lunch, sometimes dinner too, in our daily grind. 

The item itself can be divided into layers of context. Each ingredient is itself a signifier of socio-economic contexts that have shaped the millennial generation. Let’s start at the bottom, with the bread. Bread baking received a re-enlivening in America in the 90’s, after almost being eradicated by Wonderbread campaigns in the 50s. I read that Chad Roberts, the owner of Tartine Bakery in San Francisco, and inventor of the perfect loaf of sourdough bread, had to go to France to train for three years under a baker to learn everything that we should have known already. This points to two things in the case of millennials: the rise of health issues starting to be medically connected to what we eat, and learning that that we could save our dollars by making things ourselves. As bread baking knowledge became more widely available (thank you, internet trends), we realized how utterly delicious a result we could get for the spending of a couple bucks on flour. Self-sufficiency and knowledge, then, are the base layer of avocado toast. Let’s move on to our vegetarian-signifying next layer: the avocado. 

The avocado is a dense, protein-packed fruit from a tropical tree, imported to us mostly from Mexico. When the fruit is ripe, it offers up a bright green, succulently mashable plant butter. It’s important to note that avocados came into popularity (and thus, availability increased) in 1990. At this time we were at the tender growth point of becoming conscious of humanity’s impact on the environment. Vegetarianism (or veganism, depending on your philosophy) was on the rise as we grappled with the heft of personal responsibility for crisis happening around us (It would be a form of detoxing from some of this messaging later to realize the misplacement of some of this responsibility is actually due to corporate greed, but that’s another essay, or three). Fat! Protein! Imagine realizing you don’t want to eat meat anymore, and that you need another option to keep you sated, and fast. Avocado was a lifesaver for many hungry, conflicted young folks in the 2000s. It’s easy to see how it would eventually end up spread across toast. First sighting: a cafe in Australia, 1996.

The other ingredients are an interchanging melody accompanying the bread and the green fruit, and for this reason have perhaps less specific significance. We could talk about micro greens and hydroponics (ie, millennial engineer types trying to figure out how to feed the world and bring personal independence from grocery stores). Not to mention the cancer-fighting health benefits of young plants just from seed. I could go on for paragraphs about the methods of pickling onions that transferred to us in a wave of inspiring food knowledge from other countries, and unpack our generation’s need to be connected to some form of heritage other than puritanical capitalism, but I’ll keep us on topic. Needless to say, in thinking out this essay I found myself in a research rabbit hole with no definitive end. 

A blind spot was brought to my attention: I have been brought up over time to look at my generation through the lens of those we seek the approval of: our parents. I hadn’t realized how many critical narratives I have absorbed about my age and place that must’ve been hosed up from subtle voices I’ve been trained to be sensitive to, simply because they are older. A young friend prompted me to ask myself about the lens of the younger generations instead. She suggested that avocado toast may now have a different significance in the opposite direction on the timeline. And it’s got me wondering. How are millennials perceived by our Gen Z peers? 

This bears more exploration, but I was given a hint that we and our mighty toast could have had a positive impact for those who come next. If so, this might be the most heartening news I have heard in fifteen years. If it means that our current youngsters feel like we are setting them up to receive a world better than we found it, I will eat avocado toast for lunch for the next ten years as well.