Gone Green

I grew up in the distant suburbs of Chicago, where pretty much the only "ethnic" food generally available was Chinese and (pseudo) Mexican. (Random suburban pizza places do not count as Italian food...) There was a much broader selection in the city proper, but it wasn't until I moved to Seattle that I started really branching out. But still having my rather pedestrian Midwestern tastes, I have yet to acquire an appreciation for avocado, mainly because I'm one of those people who dislikes the taste of cilantro, and so tend to avoid Tex-Mex and Mexican food. But not being a fan of avocado also means that I don't eat much in the way of roll sushi, since it tends to be a pretty common ingredient.

Being pretty sure that avocado is not native to Japan, I was curious why it was so common in sushi. The simple answer is that many sushi rolls are American creations; to the extent that they exist in Japan in the same forms they do here, they've effectively been re-imported. The slightly more complex answer to why so much sushi contains avocado is one of immigrant ingenuity; what's at question is whether they were working around supply chains or Americans.

The first explanation I found for the prevalence of avocado in sushi (on the website of a local sushi restaurant) was that a Japanese chef in Los Angeles couldn't source fatty tuna for their sushi, and avocado was a good substitute for texture and consistency. The second explanation is that Americans didn't like the taste of raw tuna, in much the same way that uramaki sushi rolls were developed because of American dislike of the texture of seaweed.

Now, I'm going to admit that I tend to have a rather limited palate; I'm not that experimental when it comes to food. Which is part of the reason why, when I vacationed in Japan, I would simply point to a random menu entry and eat that. The upside was I had some amazing food I wouldn't have thought to order. (The downside was I don't know what any of it was called.) So I understand the idea that foreign cuisines tend to be (sometimes heavily) modified for American tastes.

But the competing narratives over the inclusion of avocado, rather than tuna also speak to how people, domestic and overseas, see the United States. While both are stories of innovation, one is a story of needing to work around Americans' refusal to try different foods, and I suspect that it sticks around specifically because it plays into people's understanding of the United States.