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Solving the Avocado Ripening Problem

Avocados are a wonderful low-carb, high-fat food. They are amply nutritious, they taste really good with just about everything, and it's fun to try to sprout the big seed with the toothpicks holding it up in a juice glass full of water. They have but a single drawback. If you can find one that's already ripe at the store, it's probably rotten. If you buy them green, you can't eat them for days, and a percentage of them won't ever ripen properly: they turn out both crunchy and rotten at the same time!

Yes, I have read the treatises on avocado ripening by the avocado experts. They advise special evaluations of what's left of the little stem, paper bags with a banana in them for the ethylene gas and many fabulous little tricks that turn the whole process into a daily ritual that is not only a drag, but amazingly ineffectual, as you still get a zillion rotten and unripe ones anyway.

Since half my brain is devoted to figuring out computer algorithms that efficiently solve some computer problem, I asked it to look into the avocado ripening problem and find a solution so dirt-simple that even a giant sloth could do it.

There are two schools of thought how avocados evolved. One is that the wild avocado was a big seed with almost no flesh that prescient meso-americans patiently bred to be the tasty things we love today. However, another avocado creation story is that it was the preferred food of extinct giant ground sloths that would swallow them but pass the giant seeds through unharmed and pre-fertilized so that avocado trees would be everywhere the sloths went.

With this in mind, I went into my usual trance state waiting for a good idea to appear. And what I got was the "Avocado Quotient". Nevermind that it is actually just a simple multiplication, but I like to think of it as the "Avocado Quotient".

The thinking goes like this: Just accept that a frightening percentage of avocados will need to be thrown out because they are rotten or too hard. How many avocados do you have to keep lined up in a row, adding green ones on the left and always selecting from the right, so that at least one will be good for your next meal?

I don't have the definitive answer to this, but I think the so-called avocado quotient is about 8. So, if I eat 1.5 avocados a day, I need to keep at least 1.5 x 8 = 12 avocados lined up in a row, so that I will always have a ripe avocado.

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