When Australian millionaire Tim Gurner used “avocado toast” as an example of frivolous spending that was preventing millennials from achieving home ownership in 2017, it was the brunch entrée that launched a thousand memes. On Twitter and across the internet, millennials found a certain dark humor in mocking what they saw as out-of-touch advice that failed to acknowledge financial realities faced by those who came of age around the 2008 financial crisis.
Instagram screenshot from Know Your Meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/avocado-toast, accessed September 29, 2025.
As an elder millennial myself, I found it quite amusing when I encountered a 1967 recipe for “Avocado Toast” in The Drinking Man’s Diet Cookbook. Avocado toast belonged to baby boomers all along!
The Drinking Man’s Diet Cookbook by photographer Robert Cameron, offered a high-protein fad diet, essentially premised on the idea that eating dense calories offered satiation, while allowing space for carbohydrates in wine or cocktails. Despite the title, Cameron is careful to say in his introduction that his goal is “not to stress drinking as a way of life.” Although long-forgotten in popular culture, The Drinking Man’s Diet Cookbook was very popular in its own day, selling more than 2 million copies and being translated into several other languages. “Avocado toast” appears in chapter 10 “Bread Notes for Weight Watchers:”
Avocado Breakfast Toast for 4
Scoop out and mash the pulp of half a medium-sized avocado; season with salt and pepper or paprika, and 2 tablespoons lemon juice. Heap on half slices of whole-wheat toast and serve with crisp bacon or fried ham.
Approx. 7 grams carbohydrate per serving.
Seems normal enough on a first reading, but when it came to preparing this in the kitchen, I discovered that generational tastes have definitely changed. The combination of two tablespoons of lemon juice to just half an avocado results in a flavor profile described by one of my taste-testers as “like lime Jell-o.” And this was after I added additional avocado mash to the initial watery mixture, thinking, “I guess he meant half of a really big avocado!” I also have to say that I’m going to stick with complementing my avocados with cilantro, rather than paprika, although perhaps those for whom cilantro tastes soapy could find paprika a good alternative.
Avocado Toast from The Drinking Man's Diet Cookbook (1967)
On a little further investigation into HathiTrust, I found that paprika & avocado on toast have a history going back at least to the 1930s: similar recipes may be found in Adventures in Cooking (1939) by the Women's guild of the Episcopal church in Ironwood, MI and in Unusual Cookery (1935) by the Sisterhood of Temple Beth El in Detroit, MI. The basic avocado & lemon juice on toast combination (sans paprika) is promoted as “Avocadoed Toast” in a 1947 bulletin from the Florida Department of Agriculture: Florida Fruits and Vegetables in the Family Menu by Mary A. Stennis, originally published in 1931. These earlier recipes, however, leave the amount of lemon juice entirely to the cook’s discretion. Did earlier generations uniformly prefer the “lime Jell-o” flavor & texture in their avocado mash? Or was this just Robert Cameron’s eccentricity? Or (always a possibility) is The Drinking Man’s Diet Cookbook a case of a fad diet with more emphasis on calculating calories than kitchen-testing its recipes? In any case, as you enjoy your avocado toast - mashed, sliced, paprika’d, or cilantro’d, and with or without bacon - know that you are participating in an American brunch tradition going back many decades.