Is Ripe Or Not Is Ripe? How To Tell Whether An Avocado Is Mature.

I have eaten all kinds of avocadoes from many corners of Kenya, including big ones like a volleyball, small ones like a baby's fist, sweet ones, bland ones, sweet ones which are watery, bland ones which are watery, avocadoes oilier than the upside-down of Iraq, overcooked avocadoes, undercooked ones, hard ones, medium fruits and soft fruits, avocadoes that agree with rice and those that rob everything they touch of its taste - even life itself -, fruits with small seeds and big meats, fruits with big seeds and small meats, purple ones, green ones, red ones, and finally, wannabe reggae musician avocadoes with more roots inside than Bob Marley's dreadlocks. The only problem I have experienced common to all those fruits across space and time is this one: telling whether a fruit is mature - and ripe, and soft.

Ideally, the fruit you intend to eat with your ugali or kachumbari (white people call this combination guacamole. Clever comrades call it guacs.) is mature, ripe, well done (i.e. not rotting) and soft. It is very hard to tell from the look and feel because there are many varieties, colours and textures of the fruit and a ripe-looking, soft-to-the-touch fruit could be harder and sourer than some people's lives. However, people have developed heuristics that they use to determine whether a fruit is mature (not necessarily ready to eat; it can be ripened later) including:

1. Colour. Most immature avocadoes are a shade of green in colour and either turn darker green or purple or red when mature.This point is important to this piece.
2. Texture. Some varieties of avocado become rougher or wrinklier when ripe. At this stage, you should have noticed that I use mature and ripe interchangeably at points, therefore do not bring for me.
3. Provenance. It is important to know where an avocado is coming from because it is subject to vagaries of environment and handling; avocadoes from Western Kenya and Gusiiland are the best in this regard because they are usually harvested when mature, which is dependent on the tree. They also have the highest numbers of fruits with high oil content and great taste. Avocados from Central Kenya are more likely to be boiled so they 'ripen' faster and are thus likelier to be sour. Avocados from Meruland are 50-50 bland and have less oil on average. Those from Rift Valley are usually grown for export and are mostly of the Hass variety which has disappointed me and not a few other Kenyans with their mute taste, but it is this variety to which this article is most relevant.

So what do you do if you want to tell whether your fruit is mature for eating?

According to a professional avocado farmer I met, it is fairly easy outside the lab; immature fruits are the colour of Safaricom, mature fruits are the colour of MPESA.

Now you know. I'm going back to my roots yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!

Notes

The following are approximately the colours I think he was referring to. They will not render well on your screen due to my site settings, so use their css values.

Safaricom

MPESA