In Queensland, Australia, a next-gen Noah’s Ark is taking shape — and it’s piled high with frozen avocados.
After a year of failed experiments and a lot of “brown mush,” a researcher named Chris O’Brien just figured out how to cryogenically freeze avocados.
It’s all for a valiant cause: Ensuring that people in the distant future can continue to splurge on avo toast.
Their popularity has shot up 7x since 2000. But droughts and wildfires have made the crop harder for farmers to grow.
Some avo-kingpins are warning that the fruit might be absent from shelves in just 25 years.
Which is where O’Brien comes in: He’s already frozen — then revived — 80 avocado plants at the University of Queensland. The next step would be to create a giant crypto-preservation archive, so even if all other avocados go extinct, O’Brien’s won’t.
As the western US faces historic wildfires, tons of avocado plants will be burned through.
But no matter what happens, we can take some comfort in the fact that, if cryogenic freezing works, Walt Disney might get to add some avocado to his quesadillas in the year 2350.