Got a problem? Blame it on the avocado

Call it a First World problem, a disease of affluence or just people being careless with kitchen knives.

It's avocado hand, and there is an epidemic of it in British hospital emergency departments.

It happens when someone trying to get the stone out of the smashable fruit jabs at it with the point of a knife, and ends up jabbing themselves. Laceration, exsanguination and even nerve and tendon damage result. Some people never fully recover the use of their hand; some never eat an avocado again.

The British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons wants to put a warning on the fruit. Simon Eccles, the honorary secretary, says he treats four people a week. Middle-class urbanites are particularly susceptible.

Avocados must be a new thing in British kitchens. Any Australian worth their sourdough toast knows the proper way to go about it: embed the blade, not the tip, in the stone, twist it out of the fruit, then lever it off the knife on the edge of the compost tub.

Has any fruit in history been blamed for so much social ill? Maybe only the apple.

"Avocado smash" has become a global synonym for hipsterfication, and eating it gives off the same small-l liberal reek that sipping chardonnay once did.

The hunger for avocados in the US has been blamed for deforestation in Central America, and the trade is so lucrative that a drug cartel in the Mexican state of Michoacan tried to muscle in on the action.

In Britain, people now buy more avocados than oranges. A London restaurant recently announced a no avocado policy: "Our mission is to reinvigorate the morning dining scene in London, which has done avocado to death, and we're frankly bored of seeing it on every breakfast and brunch menu," said George Notley, executive chef of Aegean eatery Firedog.

Here, 20-somethings eating $20 avocado smash rather than saving for a deposit was (jokingly) blamed for the housing affordability crisis. But it became a meme, then a thing, and is now shorthand for the fecklessness of millennials.

Avocado-bashing has become an international sport.

I met an avocado farmer once, near Pemberton in Western Australia in the early 1980s. He'd recently planted what he was sure would be the next big thing in fruit and veg.

"Fool," I thought. "Who is going to eat all this green mush?" Fool me, actually, gazing at a hillside covered in the main ingredient of Australia's future national dish.

And if our cousins in the old country don't know how to prepare it safely, all I can say is: "Hands off!"

Matt Holden is a Fairfax Media columnist.