16 THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019
DOORTODOOR
AVO C A D OALDENTE
M
iguel Gonzalez wakes up just after
4 a.m. on most weekdays with
one thing on his mind: avocados. In the
past few years, Gonzalez, who lives in
Long Island City, has become the pri-
vate avocado dealer to dozens of New
York City restaurants, from Miche-
lin-starred spots (Daniel and Eleven
Madison Park) to low-key brunch places
(Sunday in Brooklyn). His avocados can
end up in sixteen-dollar avocado-let-
tuce cups with toasted cumin at abcV,
but his daily operations are decidedly
no-frills; they start with him sitting on
his sofa in the dark, his sons’ Nintendo
games strewn about, planning the morn-
ing’s delivery routes in Brooklyn, Man-
hattan, and Queens.
Since March, he has also been deliv-
ering avocados ($7.50 for three, $12.50 for
five) to individuals, who typically hear
about him on Instagram. Ordering from
Davocadoguy—Gonzalez’s nom d’avo-
cat—is only slightly more complicated
than using Postmates for take-out gua-
camole: requests are made by direct mes-
sage a day in advance, with payment via
Venmo or Apple Pay or in cash.
The other morning, after collating
the day’s orders on a spreadsheet, Gon-
zalez, who is thirty-seven, drove his
white van down still-dark streets to his
warehouse, in Queens, not far from a
couple of cemeteries. The space holds
several thousand avocados at various
stages of ripeness. Chefs prize his abil-
ity to deliver a perfectly ripe product;
his aging method is the opposite of leav-
ing a rock-hard avocado on the kitchen
counter and crossing your fingers. He
treats the details of his process like the
recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken.
“That’s part of my trade secret,” he said,
adding that developing the method had
involved plenty of trial and error.
Given the way that Gonzalez be-
haved in his warehouse, the formula
appears to include obsessively watch-
ing the goods, which are stored in car-
tons in two temperature-controlled
rooms that are a bit warmer than a home
refrigerator, and periodically prodding
them through holes in the cartons. He
provides avocados at several levels of
ripeness, from firm (a foil for crabmeat
in a California roll) to creamy (for mash-
ing). “It’s not my job to assume that
you will eat them all right now,” he
said. “My goal is to give you something
that’s different than the supermarket.”
Gonzalez never planned to deal avo-
cados, although he did grow up in Los
Reyes de Salgado, a city west of Mexico
City that is known for its avocado farms.
(Mexico now produces more than half
of the world’s avocados; drug cartels are
reportedly fighting for control of the
billion-dollar avocado trade.) Gonzalez
moved to Long Island with his mother
when he was a teen-ager and began sell-
ing mortgages at JPMorgan Chase. The
work was gruelling and left him with no
time for fun, so he quit and joined his
brother importing berries from Mexico.
Finding that business too seasonal, he
shifted to avocados. “I didn’t do any stud-
ies or research,” he said. “I just needed
something to sell on the slow times.”
At 7:30 A.M., he made his first drop-
off, at a nearby deli, then headed into
Manhattan. He stopped at a white brick
building in midtown and handed a brown
bag, labelled in Sharpie, to a doorman.
He headed to the Upper West Side for
another doorman handoff, then took the
West Side Highway down to the res-
taurant Perry St. Inside the gleaming
kitchen—in lunch-prep mode, the smell
of roasting garlic in the air—Gonzalez
put down a heavy case and chatted with
Cédric Vongerichten, the chef, who told
withdraw only along the sixty-mile bor-
der where the Turks invaded. The Kurds,
he said, “are not leaving the lands and
graves of their grandfathers.” Brett Mc-
Gurk, who resigned last year as the U.S.
special envoy for the coalition fighting
isis, said that the safe-zone plan is “to-
tally non-implementable.” He added,
“This is Erdoğan’s fantasy scenario, and
it includes, of course, nearly all the Kurd-
ish, Assyrian-Christian, and other mi-
nority areas of Syria.”
The impact of Trump’s decisions—
on the campaign against isis, on the bal-
ance of power in the Middle East, and
on America’s image globally—can’t be
undone by the deal that Pence negoti-
ated. “I don’t understand how, in any way,
the U.S. is better off on the ground,”
Richard Haass, the president of the
Council on Foreign Relations, said. “It’s
a question of when, not if, American
forces will have to return to the region
to deal with a reconstituted isis.” And,
just as Trump was abandoning the most
effective campaign ever conducted against
jihadi extremists, he committed some
three thousand troops to Saudi Ara -
bia, the birthplace of the ideology that
spawned Sunni jihadism, including Al
Qaeda—a movement that was inflamed
when the U.S. stationed troops in the
Kingdom during the first Gulf War.
The Kurds, left stranded, turned to
the Syrian government for military help.
President Bashar al-Assad regained con-
trol of more territory in a day than he
had in years of fighting Syria’s civil war.
Russian troops, who are propping up
Assad’s regime, also moved in. A Rus-
sian journalist posted a video from a
strategic U.S. base in Manbij—once the
hub where foreign isis fighters plotted
attacks on five continents—showing
food left uneaten on plates in the mess
hall and cans of Coke in a refrigerator.
The American withdrawal coincided
with Vladimir Putin’s arrival in Riyadh.
“Saudi Arabia appreciates the active role
of the Russian Federation in the region
and the world,” King Salman said last
Monday, welcoming him. During the
Turkish offensive, Putin invited Er-
doğan to Moscow. Turkey’s agreement
to a pause expires on October 22nd, the
day that Erdoğan will meet with the
Russian President.
Trump’s actions are already raising
questions about America’s trustworthi-
ness. “Partnership is a principal way we
establish and maintain influence, par-
ticularly as we strive to maintain a com-
petitive advantage against our great-
power rivals,” General Joseph Votel, who
retired in March as the head of the U.S.
Central Command, said. “It is hard to
see how this policy decision will con-
tribute to that end.” Trump claimed that
he withdrew to avoid being sucked into
another “endless” Middle East war. He
may instead have facilitated one.
—Robin Wright
