Avocado gray or light brown inside?

What you see: Patchy gray or other discoloration. It’s likely more toward the center of the avocado and may be focused around the seed.
What it is: Diffuse flesh discoloration! Probably due to being stored too cold.
Eat or toss: Eat! This isn’t a food safety issue. The avocado could still taste great, but you may want to sample it before proceeding with the rest of your dinner.

Why is this avocado gray inside?

Some gray around an avocado pit may be a little off-putting, but as long as that’s all you see, the avocado is still fine to eat. This discoloration comes about because of how internal mechanisms within the rich green fruit respond to cold temperatures–not because any creepy microbes are at work. In my experience, avocados can have diffuse flesh discoloration and still taste fine, but more advanced cases can taste bad. So sample the avocado before you dive into your guac recipe.

Cold storage conditions can cause patchy gray or brown areas inside avocados

Avocados, denizens of humid, subtropical climates, don’t do well when they get too cold. Discoloration like this is a possible outcome of what scientists refer to as “chilling injury.” In cold temperatures, their cells weaken and lose their grip on compounds that are normally kept separately. When those compounds mix, they create gray, brown and even black colors. When cells turn that color they’re basically dead.

In cold temperatures, enzymes that trigger changes like softening and flavor development are stalled; an avocado with damage like this might have struggled to ripen. But if the initial chilling injury was mild and if the avocado was taken out of the too-cold place and allowed to ripen at a more agreeable temperature, it could be good enough, even if it will never achieve avocado perfection.

Diffuse discoloration tends to strike in the middle layer of fruit, near the bottom and the seed

This type of chilling injury doesn’t have solid margins (unlike, say, finger press injuries or a bruise from a fall). It usually starts in the wide end of the fruit, near the seed, according to the Avocado Fruit Quality Problem Solver, from the Australian nonprofit, Hort Innovation. Then, the graying spreads, patchily, upward and outward. 

Diffuse discoloration sometimes occurs alongside vascular browning, in which the transit channels in the avocado, normally invisible, darken and appear as dots or lines, depending on how you slice the fruit.

Only put ripe avocados in the fridge

The more ripe an avocado is when it’s exposed to cold temperatures, the better it’s able to withstand them. That’s why you never want to put an underripe avocado in the fridge. But once an avocado is perfectly ripe, you can stash it in the fridge for a couple days and it will stay freshly ripe for longer. A fridge will slow the aging process of a ripe avocado.  

What else can cause gray areas around the avocado pit?

If you encounter an avocado with chilling injury, it’s quite possible the cold temperatures occurred long before you purchased it, while it was in transit or storage. You could also have inflicted chilling injury yourself by placing a hard aka unripe avocado in the fridge.

Other circumstances during an avocado’s growth and journey to your plate can also make chilling injury more likely. For example, if produce managers store or ship avocados for too long, the odds of this disorder go up, especially for late season fruit. Ill-timed exposure to ethylene, a gas many fruits give off to promote ripening and that produce managers use strategically, can make discoloration more likely. Avocados that are immature or overmature at harvest are more susceptible to diffuse discoloration, as are avocados from trees with high nitrogen, but low calcium levels.

You can drive, but do you avocado?