Poor old Bernard Salt wants to set the record straight:
One year ago, I used the now infamous words “smashed avocado” in this column. The piece went viral — at times feral — as the dish in question came to symbolise intergenerational tensions around the cost of housing in Australia and overseas.
I wrote the column in a Hobart hotel room and I recall being quite pleased with it at the time. It was intended not as a criticism of youth but as a parody of middle-aged moralisers, using the setting of a hipster cafe to showcase the conservatism of middle-aged thinking.
In this piece, Baby Boomers wandering into hipster cafes complain that they can’t read the menu because the writing is too small. They complain that they can’t conduct a conversation because the music is too loud. They can’t sit on a milk crate because of their dodgy lower backs. And they whisper to each other, because they can never say this out loud: “Look at all these young people eating smashed avocado with crumbled feta, shouldn’t they be saving for a house?”
Judging by comments on our website, the piece was received as intended during the weekend. But at 6.27am on the Monday, a news organisation tweeted that “Bernard Salt says he’s seen young people eating smashed avocado at $22 a pop, and shouldn’t they be saving for a house? Thoughts?” I saw that tweet go live and tracked — painfully, at times — what unfolded over the following week.
‘Cracks included “I stopped eating smashed avocado … and now I own a castle”’.
It’s true. The original piece did satirise the moralising Boomers. However, sometimes universal justice delivers the right outcome. Salt is a relentless property spruiker and the occasional article that he can point to to claim objectivity on the subject should not blind anyone to the fact:
I could list literally hundreds of these articles. Salt smashed by avo is the right outcome.
