In Too Afraid to Ask, we’re answering food-related questions that may or may not give you goosebumps. Today: What is avocado hand?
Alanna Clarke was making breakfast at a friend’s apartment when it happened. It was fall 2022, and the 32-year-old, Paris-based business advisor was cutting a plump avocado. Clarke was chatting with her friend while removing the pit with “a very sharp Swiss knife” when she distractedly “rammed” it through the buttery flesh and into her left palm, right between the index and middle fingers. “I fully collapsed onto the kitchen floor,” she tells me. Clarke had severed a nerve and got hand surgery the next day.
It’s no secret that avocados have risen to superfood stardom over the past decade. Retail sales of avocados in the US amounted to $2.7 billion in 2022, up from $1.1 billion in 2014. Unfortunately, though, it’s not all picturesque grain bowls and lush guacamole out there. Injuries like Clarke’s are now so commonplace that they’ve earned a special term: “avocado hand,” which describes the stab wounds and lacerations sustained while slicing or pitting avocados.
Over the past few years, researchers have penned various medical papers on the phenomenon. And avocado hand has transmuted from kitchen oopsie to legitimate source of concern for surgeons. In some cases the cuts “can be fairly severe,” says Mary Elizabeth Rashid, MD, a hand surgeon at Great Plains Orthopedics in Peoria, Illinois, who’s seen avocado-induced injuries “consistently” over the past several years. And in some cases, like Clarke’s, the consequences can be serious.
How common is avocado hand?
Avocado hand has to be one of the most mockable injuries. Can you imagine showing up to the ER bleeding and clutching your hand dramatically, then admitting to a medical professional that…an avocado dunnit? So many victims feel this shame. “It’s such an embarrassing injury,” says Delaney Vetter, a public relations specialist, who stabbed her hand in college. “I cook a lot so it was extra bad for my ego.” No Meat Required author Alicia Kennedy even has a permanent, taunting reminder of her avocado slip: “a smiley face scar on my left ring finger,” she says.
In 2020, researchers at Emory University branded avocado hand an “epidemic.” They’d estimated that 50,413 avocado-related knife injuries occurred between 1998 and 2017, with a 40% increase between 2013 and 2017. (And those figures don’t include the people too mortified to seek help.)
Unfortunately for me, avocado hand strikes millennial women the hardest. Of the cases the Emory University researchers studied, 80.1% of patients were women and nearly half of them were aged between 23 and 39. The increase in cases, they noted, almost perfectly correlates to the rise in avocado consumption in the US. A study from the Hass Avocado Board also found that the average millennial spent $24.99 on avocados in 2018 (5 percent more than non-millennials).
As avocados dramatically stormed the US culinary scene, it’s easy to see how accidents happened. The gnarled skin, slippery pit, and inherent awkwardness of wielding a knife around an uneven surface make avocados a uniquely risky fruit to hack into, especially for newbies. Most commonly, injuries happen while attempting to remove the pit with a knife while holding the avocado in your nondominant hand. The knife can slip off the pit, or the avocado itself, plunging into your palm. (See: Clarke and Kennedy.) Though, another pitfall occurs when trying to slice the halved avocado while cupping it; you can easily cut through the fruit’s skin and into, well, yours.
When should you seek help for avocado hand?
According to Rashid, the majority of avocado injuries are minor. “Most commonly, people have a fairly simple laceration in their hand or finger that doesn’t cause any significant damage,” she says. But in certain cases, the knife can sever or damage the nerves and tendons in your hand, which typically requires surgery and, in some cases, multiple weeks of physical therapy. So, how do you know when to go to the emergency room?
Lacerations that are deep (exposing the subcutaneous tissue in your hand), gaping, or won’t stop bleeding need medical attention. Usually, Rashid says, the emergency room will refer more serious cases to specialists. But you should also watch out for numbness in the finger that lasts more than three days, as well as any loss of motion in your hand. If you feel either sensation, “definitely see a hand surgeon,” says Rashid.
How to safely cut an avocado
If you love avocados but love your hand more, there are certain precautions you can take to avoid injury.
- Halve your avocado on a cutting board: Hold the avocado against the cutting board with the palm of your non-dominant hand. “Use a chef or paring knife and slice in until it hits the pit, then keep the knife hand fixed and use your non-dominant hand to twist the avocado until the cut is all the way around,” says senior test kitchen editor Shilpa Uskokovic. Then twist and pull the halves apart.
- Remove the pit without a knife: “If you are a risk-averse person like myself, place your thumbs on the peel of an avocado half right beneath the pit, then push upward,” says senior cooking editor Emma Laperruque. “The pit pops out like it never wanted to be there in the first place.”
- Spoon out the flesh: Instead of cupping the avocado and slicing it with a sharp knife, use a spoon to scoop out the good stuff. “If the avo is super ripe, you should also be able to just peel the skin off each half,” says test kitchen editor Kendra Vaculin.
If you’re determined to cut your avocado in-hand, at least be safe about it. Use a cut-resistant glove on your non-dominant hand for added protection, before you thwack a knife into the pit. Or invest in a plastic avocado knife, which might make you feel like a baby who hasn’t graduated to real utensils yet but will protect your palms. “I get all my friends avocado knives,” says Rashid. “I really do.”
