The Avocado on the Mediterranean Menu

What an Unexpected Ingredient Taught Me About the Difference Between Assimilation and Building Something New

By Kenyatta  |  Founder, Cultural Appreciation

Looking for a Spot

I was new in town, doing the thing everyone does when they move somewhere; scrolling, driving past places, trying to figure out which restaurants would become my regulars. I wanted a Mediterranean spot. Hummus, fresh bread, tzatziki sauce, the works.

I found one. Walked in, sat down, opened the menu, and started reading.

Avocado toast. Avocado on the panini. Avocado in places I'd never seen it before in a Mediterranean restaurant.

I sat there for a minute. I've eaten at Mediterranean restaurants, and it is one of my favorite types of food, but I've never seen avocados on the menu. So, I did what anyone does in 2026, I pulled out my phone and started Googling.

Avocados aren't from the Mediterranean. They're not part of the traditional Mediterranean diet. They never have been.

The avocado is from Mesoamerica. Indigenous peoples in what's now Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras were eating and domesticating them thousands of years ago. They were woven into Mesoamerican life deeply enough that the fourteenth month of the Maya Haab calendar is represented by a glyph meaning "avocado." The Spanish didn't even encounter them until the 1500s. The first trees weren't introduced to Spain until 1601 — and even then, Spain's first commercial avocado plantation didn't exist until 1955. Four hundred years between curiosity and cuisine.

So, the avocado that I was now staring at on a Mediterranean menu in a city I'd just moved to had traveled an extraordinary distance; across oceans, across centuries, across cultures to end up next to my hummus.

And I sat there thinking: what exactly is happening here?

The Question I Couldn't Stop Turning Over

I want to be honest about what I started thinking, because this isn't a question I came in with an answer to. I'm still working it out.

My first thought was: this isn't really a Mediterranean restaurant anymore. This is something else. Some kind of fusion place that's borrowing the Mediterranean as a base and then doing its own thing on top of it. And my second thought, almost immediately, was: is that a bad thing?

Because there's a word that hangs over these conversations, and it's a heavy one. Assimilation. The idea that one culture gives up its identity to become more like another. That's a word with a lot of pain in it. It's the word for boarding schools that stripped Native American children of their languages. It's the word for immigrants being told to drop their accents to get hired. It's the word for "you can stay here if you stop being who you were."

Assimilation, in that sense, is not a neutral process. It's pressure. It's something done to people, not something they choose.

So, I sat with my tzatziki sauce and my unexpected avocado and I asked myself: is this restaurant assimilating? Is the Mediterranean tradition being erased here, or being absorbed, or being diluted?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized the answer was probably none of those things. Because nobody forced this restaurant to put avocado on the menu. Nobody pressured Mediterranean cuisine to give up its identity. What happened here was something different. Somebody made a choice.

And that's where I think the real conversation begins.

Two Things That Look the Same and Aren't

Here's the distinction I've been working toward, and I'd love to know if it lands for you the way it's landed for me.

Assimilation, in the painful sense, is when one culture must disappear for another to accept it. The pressure flows in one direction. You give up your language to learn ours. You change your name so we can pronounce it. You stop cooking your grandmother's food in your own house because your neighbors complain about the smell. That's not exchange. That's erasure. And it's a real thing that has happened, and is still happening, to real people.

But there's something else that often gets called assimilation, and I don't think it's the same thing at all.

It's what happens when somebody chooses, freely, to take something they love from one culture and weave it into their own life. When a Korean American family makes Thanksgiving turkey with kimchi on the side. When a Black church gospel choir sings a song originally written in Spanish. When a Mediterranean restaurant in North Carolina decides that avocado on a panini just tastes good and puts it on the menu.

That's not erasure. That's not pressure flowing one way. That's a choice being made by someone who has the freedom to make it, and the result is something new in the world that didn't exist before.

Assimilation is coerced. Infusion is curated. The first erases. The second creates.

And I think we lose something important when we use the same word for both. Because the conversation about coerced assimilation needs to keep happening. People are still being pressured to give up parts of themselves to fit in, and that's a real harm that deserves the weight of a serious word. But if we use that same word for every act of cultural mixing, we end up accidentally telling people that they're not allowed to build something new from the things they love. That every borrowing is a betrayal. That keeping every tradition pure is the only legitimate way to honor it.

I don't believe that. And I don't think most of you do either, if you're being honest.

The Part I Have to Say Out Loud

I want to be careful here, because there's an edge to this that I don't want to step over without naming.

Not everyone gets to mix cultures equally. The freedom to walk into a Mediterranean restaurant and not flinch at the avocado, or to make Thanksgiving with kimchi, or to wear a piece of clothing from a country you visited and not be looked at sideways, that freedom is not evenly distributed. There are people in this country, right now, who can't speak their first language in public without being treated as suspicious. There are kids whose lunch boxes get mocked at school. There are grandparents who still won't tell stories from the country they came from because they spent decades learning that those stories were a liability.

That's the real face of assimilation. And nothing I'm writing here is meant to wave that away.

What I'm trying to do is separate two things that look similar and aren't. Coerced erasure is a wound. Chosen infusion is a kind of art.

And here's something I find beautiful, when I sit with it long enough. The people most harmed by assimilation are very often the same people doing the most interesting cultural infusion work in this country. Black Americans are foundational to blues, jazz, rock, hip-hop, and to country, a fact the industry spent decades burying. Every one of them is an infusion of African, European, and American traditions, made under pressures most listeners never think about. Mexican Americans built Tex-Mex and Cal-Mex, fusions that the rest of the country lined up to eat. Vietnamese refugees who resettled along the Gulf Coast took the Cajun crawfish boil and rebuilt it, the Viet-Cajun style that came out of Houston in the early 2000s is now boomeranging back into Louisiana. The very communities that have been told their cultures are inferior have, repeatedly, been the ones building the new American culture the rest of us want to be part of.

That's not coincidence. That's what happens when people who know what they have are also given the freedom to share it on their own terms.

What I Think We're Actually Doing

Here's where I've landed, at least for now.

I think we're living in a moment where, for a lot of us, we have the chance to build a culture for ourselves that wasn't possible for our parents and grandparents. The world is more connected than it has ever been. We have access to food, music, languages, stories, philosophies, and traditions from every corner of the planet. We can taste injera one night and pho the next. We can listen to Afrobeats and bossa nova and bluegrass in the same hour. We can keep what we were given and add what we love and pass on something different than what was passed to us.

That's not a betrayal of culture. That's culture doing what it's always done.

Cultures have never been pure. They've always been mixing. The tomato isn't Italian — it came from the Americas, wild in the Andes and domesticated in Mexico, and Italian cuisine before the 1500s didn't have a single one. Tea isn't British, it's Chinese, and the British fought wars over it. Chili peppers aren't Thai or Indian or Korean, they're from the Americas, and they spread to Asia in the 1500s and remade Asian cooking. The coffee in your cup this morning came from Ethiopia, traveled through Yemen, was carried into mass cultivation by the Dutch, and now grows in Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, and a hundred other places.

Every cuisine you love is already a fusion of something. Every tradition you cherish has borrowed something from somewhere. The idea that culture stands still, in pure little buckets, waiting for us to either preserve it perfectly or pollute it irrevocably, that idea isn't how the world works. It never has.

What is true is that there's a difference between sharing and taking, between honoring and erasing, between adding to a tradition and replacing it. Those distinctions matter. They're worth being thoughtful about. But thoughtfulness doesn't mean refusing to mix. Thoughtfulness means knowing where things come from, naming the people who made them, paying attention to whether your borrowing is generous or extractive, and being willing to learn the story behind what you're enjoying.

So, What About That Avocado?

I've thought about that restaurant a lot since that day.

I don't think it's a Mediterranean restaurant in the traditional sense, and I don't think it's pretending to be. I think it's something newer than that. A Mediterranean-American restaurant, maybe. A Mediterranean-California restaurant. A place that took a tradition from the other side of the world, mixed in an ingredient from the other side of a different world, and put both on a plate for a guy who'd just moved to town and was looking for a regular spot.

And if I want a strictly traditional Mediterranean experience, that's available too. There are restaurants that will give you that. There are families that will cook that for you. There are entire neighborhoods, in cities all over this country, where that tradition is kept alive exactly the way it was practiced for generations. That work matters. Those keepers matter.

But I don't think it has to be the only option. I think there must be room for both. Room for the strictly traditional, and room for the freely infused. Room for the people who want their culture preserved exactly, and room for the people who want to take what they love and build something they didn't have before. Both of those choices are legitimate. Both of them are how culture stays alive.

The thing I want to push back on is the idea that mixing is automatically a problem. That if you're not preserving something in its purest form, you're betraying it. Because if that were true, none of us would be here. There wouldn't be a single cuisine, language, or music style on this planet that didn't get there through somebody, somewhere, choosing to take what they loved from one tradition and adding it to another.

Culture is not a museum. Culture is a kitchen. People walk into it, bring what they have, and figure out what they can make with what's on the counter.

That restaurant with the avocado on its Mediterranean menu? They were cooking. They were choosing. They were making something new.

And the more I sit with it, the more I think that's not assimilation. That's just what people do when they're free to.

Seek different. Find amazing.

There's culture everywhere. And the best of it is the kind we're still building.

— Kenyatta

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