What you see: Small black or brown spots on the outside of your avocado, almost like it got a rug burn on the tips of its bumps.
What it is: Lenticel damage! Basically the avocado got knocked around, damaging air exchange pores on the peel.
Eat or toss: This is usually just a surface issue. Odds are good that the avocado is fine.
What are the tiny black or brown dots on the skin of some avocados?
Built into the bumpy, rugged exterior of avocados are little air exchange openings called lenticels. They take in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide so that ripening and other such avocado business can proceed according to plan (check out lenticels in potatoes, mangos and apples too!). Normally, you can’t really see lenticels, but if an avocado has rough encounters with other avocados, gets scrubbed too abrasively or otherwise is bumped around, those lenticels can snag and suffer. The tips of the little bumps on an avocados skin then blacken and collapse into little pock marks. This condition is also called nodule damage, peel spotting or peel damage.
If you buy your avocados ripe–when the entire fruit has turned blackish purple, you may not see lenticel damage–it will simply blend in with the rest of the skin. But it’s easy to spot when avocados are still green.
In any event, lenticel damage is only skin deep–it doesn’t mean anything is wrong with the rest of the avocado. It does, however, suggest that the fruit was handled roughly, so there’s a chance you’ll find a bruise on the inside and the avocado might be more susceptible to rot. Still, the avocado will probably be fine and if you can handle the slight risk then, in the spirit of preventing food waste, I suggest buying avocados with this affliction. Other people may pick over them and you can make sure they don’t go to waste.
Clearly, gentle handling of fruit will reduce instances of lenticel damage. The fruit is particularly at risk for lenticel damage during harvest and packing. The Avocado Fruit Problem Solver, a guide for growers, suggests keeping roads between orchards and packing houses smooth and making sure the avocado-packed trucks traveling those roads drive slowly and have well-functioning suspensions. Only harvesting while fruit is dry can also help. Fruit harvested after rain or irrigation or dew are particularly turgid, making them more susceptible to abrasions.
SOURCES:
- The International Avocado Quality Manual. Edited by Anne White and Alan Woolf (Plant & Food Research, New Zealand); Peter Hofman (Primary Industries and Fisheries, Department of Employment, Economic Development and Innovation, Queensland, Australia); Mary Lu Arpaia (University of California, Riverside). 2009.
- Avocado Fruit Quality Problem Solver. Hort Innovation (grower-owned not-for-profit research and development corporation for Australia horticulture). Accessed August 2024.
- Avocado Quality Manual: A Guide to Best Practices. Hass Avocado Board. Section 7: Common Fruit Defects. 2009.