Originally published at: Did you survive "avocado hand" summer? - Boing Boing
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Via Jennifer Sandlin…
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If you’re making guacamole, just cut it in half on a cutting board, pop out the pit by pressing on the opposite side, and squish the green stuff out between the skin into a bowl. Don’t go whacking at your hand with a knife!
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Kitchen tip: if you need a bandsaw to cut up an avocado it’s probably not at optimal ripeness yet.
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Yeah but if you wait five minutes longer it’ll be too late
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At least hold the avocado in a kitchen towel and then whack it with the knife. You get a better grip, and if it misses, you just hit the towel.
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Isn’t this just a variation on the more year-round “bagle hand” injury, but with fruit instead of a bread roll?
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My method is to cut the avocado in half, take the half with the stone and cut it in half again, always rotating the blade against the stone. Pull out the stone by hand (by cutting away three quarters of the fruit you’ll be able to grip the stone. Sometimes it goes flying but whatever). Take the three pieces of avocado and use a spoon to scoop/scrape each one out. If you’re careful you’ll get good pieces of avocado to slice thinly, if that’s what is needed.
I use the same method with peaches, plums, and nectarines and it has never failed me.
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Peach, don’t fail me now!
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You monster
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that women between the ages of 23 to 29 made up more than a third of all cases.
Text actually says 23 to 39. Not 29.
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I cut ripe avocados with a serrated butter knife and this has never happened to me This problem seems manufactured by big avocado and/or big knife.
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Hack is the operative word here
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This is generally a good idea. 
FWIW -
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Seriously… do you really think all those famous chefs with all ten fingers haven’t figured it out by now? YouTube has it.
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When reading about avocado-cutting related injuries, I wondered what kind of hard-ass avocados people are buying, and how green they’re eating them. I don’t even know what you’d use a sharp knife for with an avocado.
It is, but while a proper bagel should be chewy (and thus tricky to cut), a ripe avocado absolutely shouldn’t be…
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Eh. I eat avocados every day and slice against the pit with my bare-ass hand, whack the pit and twist. I always tell my kids and employees “The fact that something bad hasn’t happened before is no excuse for doing stupid things.” However, of all the times I have cut myself cooking, I’ve never even come close with this method. If it’s actually ripe, it slices like butter and assuming there aren’t mobility issues involved, if you can’t hit that pit square in the middle you probably shouldn’t be using a knife at all. Also, you don’t need an 8” kitchen knife to cut a 4” fruit. You’re not chopping down a tree, fer chrissakes. 
Of course this doesn’t apply to French avocados. After spending the summer there I can conclusively say they don’t have a single decent avocado. Even the ones that eventually “ripened” still stayed hard on one side and were utterly flavorless. I never want to see another avocado from Brazil again.
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