As preteen girls getting muddy in the avocado orchards of Carpinteria during the 1970s, Sarah Allaback and Monique Parsons never guessed how integral those groves would become to all of us. Once a regional and seasonal specialty, avocados are now nearly ubiquitous across much of the world all year long, but they’re playing an even more personal role in the lives of these childhood chums.
Decades after both graduated from Princeton and settled elsewhere — Allaback to Amherst, where she’s an author/historian of architecture and landscape preservation; Parsons to Chicago, where she’s a journalist of religion and other topics — they reunited four years ago to tell the avocado’s tale. After much diving through the archives, interviewing surviving pioneers, and developing their research into a compelling saga, the result is Green Gold: The Avocado's Remarkable Journey from Humble Superfood to the Toast of the Nation.
“Growing up in Carpinteria, we took them for granted,” said Parsons. “Then we went off to the East Coast and couldn’t find a good avocado. Now they’re on every menu, at every restaurant, in every grocery store. We wanted to tell the story of how that happened.”