avocado? WHY DON’T YOU COME TO YOUR SENSES?

Millennials aren’t choosing avocado toast over home ownership, but they are embracing food culture as a substitute for the comforts they’ll never possess

‘Ilike being an Uber driver because it means I can drive anywhere I want to get lunch,” my Uber driver explains after recounting a dish of Taiwanese popcorn chicken slathered in sweet and spicy sauce and served in a paper bag in a Los Angeles parking lot.

I write down the name of the food truck serving the popcorn chicken before telling him about a recent life- altering plate of blue corn tortillas. He mentions the best spot in Los Angeles for Korean Barbecue. I recall a tasting menu full of celery ribbons and avocado confit by French chef Ludo Lefebvre.

And just like that, food is a tennis ball we’re bouncing between each other, and I refuse to be the one to drop it first. When he deposits me at my location, the air in the car freezes as we watch the tennis ball roll on the floor. Instead of exchanging numbers, we swap Instagram handles. Now we can follow each other’s respective food adventures until the end of time.

Of course we are not the first people to bond over a shared love of putting flavours to taste buds. Before the explosion of the modern foodie, gourmands made pilgrimages to La Pyramide in France in the 1960s, and to Chez Panisse in California in the 1980s. Yet the degree to which people my age, otherwise known as Millennials, obsess over gastronomy has reached a critical peak.

Not only have we birthed food trucks and food porn, we have created more depraved food trends in our few years on this earth than most other generations care to know in a lifetime. If you were born between the 1980s and early 1990s, chances are that food makes up a good chunk of what you talk about, think about, share online and spend what can only be described as “too much” money on.

We love eating so much that the personality trait is being used as an insult against us. The reason we can’t afford houses is no longer because we are too lazy or entitled to find proper jobs. ( Nor is it because housing prices have risen much higher and faster than wages.) Millennials can’t afford property because we like avocado toast and coffee too much. Specifically, as Australian property mogul Tim Gurner told 60 Minutes, $19 slices of avocado toast and four coffees at $4 each.

Attributing an entire generation’s financial problems to a penchant for avocado toast reads, at first, like an incendiary argument with the specific purpose of garnering hate clicks. It’s so reductive that it seems barely worth the time it might take to acknowledge it. Yet the eye rolls and outrage produced by Gurner were not born out of indifference. The avocado- induced Millennial housing bubble was all anyone was talking about last week because Gurner’s assessment hit a nerve.

It’s well documented that Millennials have abandoned many items marketed as life’s essential luxuries. An Atlantic investigation found that we are not buying property or cars. The Economist infamously diagnosed Millennials as the reason that the diamond industry is in trouble. Yes, good food is also a luxury, but it is the cheapest luxury available that has the capacity to directly impact our quality of life.

This is bonus for a generation that makes less than its parents or grandparents did. An analysis of federal reserve data by advocacy group Young Invincibles found that Millennials earn 20 per cent less than Boomers did at the same stage in life and have a lower level of wealth than previous generations. A separate study by a team of economists and sociologists from Harvard, Stanford and the University of California found that half of Millennials make less than their parents did at the same age.

Many pricier luxuries are out of reach for Millennials, but a plate of $ 18 avocado toast is not. As Millennials realized this, our eating habits and bank accounts have broken into two misfit pieces that often feel like dueling sumo wrestlers more than anything resembling sound financial planning.

Brunch isn’t a question of why but when. We splurge on $ 12 green juice and $ 6 kombucha because drinking it makes us feel good. Trying the $ 18 bowl of poke at the latest raw fish locale is a conversation starter. Organic meat is better for us so we spend the extra cash when we can. A jar of $ 14 almond butter instead of $ 3 peanut butter pumped with hydrogenated canola oil sounds great to us.

Rent is due and credit card and student loan payments are always looming, but that is exactly the point: when you’re not making much money the money is going to disappear anyway. You might as well spend it on something guaranteed to make you feel good.

The overwhelming mentality of “eat and enjoy now, worry later” stands in stark contrast to the mainstream food mentality of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. It was here that many of us witnessed our parents pay little attention to the calories on our dinner tables. Gastronomy was secondary to convenience, and supermarkets — not farmer’s markets — were king.

Our bodies were nourished by a diet of prepackaged microwave meals heated in melting plastic, Lunchables, anemic iceberg lettuce, Five Alive juice boxes and Healthy Choice pudding cups. Raw ramen noodles sprinkled with MSG were an after-school snack or a forbidden treat, depending on how strict your parents were. The gospel of nutrition at the time was low fat. Allegedly healthy foods were sanctified by a promising red and white Health Check logo — a symbol that lives on in a quiet corner of our minds as an anthropological culinary fossil of the early aughts.

As we grew up, we noticed conventional North American diets were not only boring, but they didn’t work. New research suggested promising alternative nutritional wisdom: there was good fat and bad fat, ancient grains were full of protein and fiber, and yogurt and kimchi had health-enhancing substances called probiotics. The local food movement pushed farmer’s markets and Whole Foods into the mainstream as we searched for fresh, non-anemic produce and hormone-free meat. Soon it wasn’t a question of whether or not we should spend money on food, but how much money we should spend.

Meanwhile, the internet was permanently changing how we interacted with our surroundings. It coddled preteens concerned with feeding their Neopets into teenagers who sent illicit emojis to their crushes on MSN Messenger on the family computer. Without realizing it, we sacrificed the development of critical social skills for the reward of communicating without the awkward blushing and burping of real life. The internet broke our still developing brains and taught us new online social cues at the cost of real life social skills. We learned that entire relationships can be built off handmade heart emoticons and a mutual interest in Blink-182.

Even if we weren’t aware of it, choosing what to have for lunch gave us agency by offering an opportunity for concrete awareness and control. Food became a tangible form to return to after an increasing amount of our lives was being experienced through a screen.

Today it remains one of the only mediums that cannot be replaced by a digital replica. It doesn’t matter how great virtual reality technology gets, it has yet to come close to satisfying the feeling of sinking your teeth into a juicy hamburger with crunchy pickles and extra cheese.

Food tethers us to reality while simultaneously allowing us to escape from it.

In the Netflix series Master of None, Dev, played by Aziz Ansari, is well aware of the power food has over his reality. He discovers his ability to act independently and make his own free choices in bowls of steaming spaghetti Bolognese as viewers hear the loud physicality of noodles being slurped in a quiet home full of creature comforts like wifi and air conditioning. Pork is a source of rebellion when the faces of his Muslim relatives appear blanched as he orders crispy pork with Chinese broccoli for dinner. Learning how to make pasta is the answer to reconciling a failed relationship. Two bottles of Martinelli’s apple juice provide a moment of levity during a midnight trip to the drugstore for Plan B with a one-night stand. “You gotta get the apple juice,” he insists, his eyes suddenly aglow. Dev’s excitement around eating could be used as a time capsule to explain to future generations what people born in the ’80s and early ’90s were like. For us, food is often at the root of comfort and conflict. It is, in many ways, everything.

As we continue to experience our lives through screens, food provides a sense of community, both in the act of coming to the table with others and in sharing whatever is about to end up in our stomachs with followers online. Not everyone watches Game of Thrones or has the energy to discuss the Trump administration’s latest blunder, but everyone has to eat. It may seem obvious, but the ability to insert calories in your mouth serves as increasingly rare common ground. Food has become one of the only topics that is safe without being boring, and engaging without being polarizing.

If generations before us had photo albums documenting themselves settling into their first homes in their 20s, my generation will find similar solace reminiscing about the time we snagged a table at Rene Redzepi’s Noma pop-up in Mexico. We will scroll to the bottom of our Instagram feeds in our rental apartments for proof, recalling a crystallized picture of a dish made with expensive and rare criollo avocados grown locally in Tulum.

So, yes, in this sense, it’s true. My generation is buying avocado toast with no plans to purchase property. But we’re not sacrificing stability for experience — because we can’t sacrifice what we don’t have.

We’re recognizing that buying a house is not a realistic option for us. So instead of attempting the impossible, we’re seeking several of the same comforts that previous generations found in home ownership: a sense of control over our own lives, a greater understanding of the reality around us and a feeling of connectedness.