Last December, escaping from the dank, dark English winter, I spent a week in Tenerife during which time I made a fairly sophisticated attempt to eat my body weight in guacamole made from fresh local avocados. This week I will explore the history of this delicious foodstuff, forever, it seems, the byword for spendthrift millennials.

Let me start by dispelling a myth around the name. You may find online that the word guacamole means ‘ground testicles’. The rationale for this is that the word ‘avocado’ comes from the Nahuatl word meaning ‘testicle’ and in combination with the Spanish word moler ‘to grind’ you get guacamole, or ground testicles. Sounds convincing, right? It is, however, wrong on both points. The Nahuatl word for the avocado (which is variously spelled ahuacatl, aguacatl and auacatl) comes from a proto-Nahuan word *pawata, that means, unsurprisingly, ‘avocado’. But was this originally the word for ‘testicles’ and avocados were so-named because of their similarity in appearance? No, it was the other way around. Ahuacatl became a slang word for testicles because they looked like avocados (in a similar manner to the use of the word ‘balls’). As for the mole part, that doesn’t come from the Spanish moler, rather from another Nahuatl word, mo:lli, meaning ‘sauce’. So the word guacamole means ‘avocado sauce’ which, I think we can all agree, is preferable to the alternative!

Archaeological evidence from the Tehuacan Valley (located in modern-day Mexico) proves that avocados have been eaten by humans for as long as 10,000 years. Initially harvested from wild trees, they have been purposefully cultivated for perhaps 7,000 years. Starting in central America the farming of avocados soon spread widely, with the Caral civilization in the Supe Valley in modern-day Peru growing them for more than 3,000 years. The significance of avocados to these cultures can be seen in the Mayan Haab calendar which was developed between 800 and 300 BCE. Each month had a name based upon what was going on seasonally, and the 14th month was represented by the glyph Uniw (or Uniiw) meaning ‘avocado’.