Avocado Wedding Proposals Are the Trend We Didn't Ask For

Avocados are a marvelously versatile fruit. This is not news. They can serve as the base of a nice, verdant guac; be blended into a smoothie; and are great mashed and slathered on toast that’s so obscenely expensive that you won’t be able to afford a house, you idiot millennials.

The permutations are endless, or so it seems. But they must stop somewhere.

Colette Dike, founder and editor-in-chief of Food Deco, recently posted a photograph of a pristinely pitless avocado. And there it is: a wedding ring lodged in a cavity where it doesn’t belong.

"Tag someone who should propose like this," she captions the photo, goading her followers to forgo traditional velvet boxes and instead stick expensive, precious jewelry inside a slowly decaying fruit.

And yet, the photo has 10,000 likes and climbing.

Dike told Health last week that the photo was the result of a partnership with the World Avocado Organization, who did not respond to immediate request for comment. "I took this picture and it’s my own Tiffany’s engagement ring," Dike wrote to MUNCHIES over email on Tuesday. "My boyfriend did not propose to me like this, but maybe he should ask me again ;-)."

Dike explained that she's a huge avocado fan, so much that people have begun calling her "Avo Queen." She's even written a book, in Dutch, called Avocado.

"I’ve not seen a lot of negative reactions so far but there are always haters and lovers and probably all avocado lovers will enjoy this idea," she explained to MUNCHIES of her photo. She pointed to her early appraisal of the avocado burger bun in 2016 as another example of an avocado use that angered so many people online, even though she now notes that it's served in "a lot of restaurants worldwide."

I don’t mean to traumatize you further, but this pre-marital gesture stretches far back beyond Dike’s post. It's the stuff of a few stray Instagram posts over the past two years and even a video.

Hmm… this is all very upsetting! In the words of Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding, who would do that to a friend? If my betrothed-to-be did this to me, I would reject him on the spot and sever all ties.

A few photos here or there over the past few years are not enough to mark a full-blown trend. The avocado proposal is merely a "thing," in other words. Whatever it is, I cannot endorse it in good faith.

I will say this: It’s more defensible than putting a latte in your avocado, I guess, though I resent that I live in a world where I have to make that judgment call at all.