You see avocado in salads all the time. Cobb salads, etc. It’s in most salads on Seamless.com. (If you’d like to go check and come back you should feel free, however to save time I’d suggest you just believe me as I have never lied to you in the past and I don’t intend to in the future.) It’s consistently an option when you go to a make-your-own-salad bar, if you do that, maybe you go on your lunch break with a friend from work. Sitting there, (the avocado), chunky and wet. An unappealing, hazy green. No.

No.

This is not a good ingredient for a salad.

No.

Avocado is bad in salads.

Is avocado bad in everyplace? Thank you for the question, now I know you’re paying attention even though I also know you’re not too smart, which I know from how the question was bad. The answer is no. Avocado is good lots of places. “On toast,” to say a joke about millennials. In guacamole. On a taco. Maybe placed on top of some sort of a spicy soup. Just plain, and you eat it with a spoon and some salt on top. I like avocado, unlike my friend Allie Jones who is a Senior Writer at The Cut, and who said, of avocado: “I guess I just think, why not have cheese.” Fair enough, Allie. I like it, though.

But not: on salads.

Avocado is smushy and wet. Too smushy and wet for a salad. That’s essentially it. Also, while we’re here, you know what else is bad in a salad? Oranges, for the same reason. I don’t want a leaf with a smush. Better than a leaf with a smush is a leaf with a crunch. Or, I guess that’s best. Better would be a leaf with just a neutral, though I can’t think of what a “neutral” would be in terms of salad accoutrements. One exception to the smush rule is goat cheese, but that’s because it’s sort of a dry mush and because the taste really hits you. Avocado is a wet mush with not a whole lot of taste. (Orange, though also bad in a salad, is a step above avocado because of its punchy taste.) Get it? Capisce? I do realize I was saying smush and then I said mush but they both work.

Chewing is a problem, with avocado in salads. You don’t need to chew avocado, really. It’s essentially pre-chewed. So you have to chew all the other stuff and, what? Just wet mush there, too? With your salad? Two blands, one mush?

I guess then the question is, what makes salad so different from a food with which avocado pairs well. Hm. I think the answer is the food has to be either crunchy or interesting, in a taste way. Toast, some sort of taco. Tortilla chip, some sort of spicy thing. Salt on top, hamburger. Etc., etc. Salad is boring and doesn’t stand up to the wet smush of the avocado. Get it out of there. Do something better with it.

I guess the sneakiest part about it is that it sounds like it’s going to be good. “Avocado? Sure, I’ll have some. I love avocado.” No.

Not in a salad, you don’t.

(Unless you do.)

In conclusion: avocado is bad in salads. Get it out of there.