“Avocado toast is a 100 percent Australian invention,” Rodell wrote last year on Eater, “insofar as any one ingredient on a piece of bread can be.” There’s little doubt that modern avo toast—the Instagram kind—can trace its existence to that continent. In fact, Sweatshop’s owners are two dudes from Melbourne. The menu, with its Jaffle (a pressed cheese sandwich with optional Vegemite), is as Aussie as chef Curtis Stone’s rooster cut.

In 1993 Sydney chef and restaurateur Bill Granger put a sexed-up version of avocado toast—with lime, salt, and chile flakes (the modern foundational recipe)—on the menu at Bills in Darlinghurst, near Sydney. In the new millennium, it jumped to New York City via Chloe Osborne, another Aussie, who became the consulting chef of Cafe Gitane in Greenwich Village. Her version was similarly Australian: a pebble-grained slice from a square loaf, toasted and covered in mashed avocado, diamond-cut and confetti-covered with crushed chile. The fashion models and post–Carrie Bradshaw brunchers made Gitane’s avo toast a thing: healthyish, exotic, simple, yet piously extravagant. It migrated into magazines and other restaurants, and with the launch of Instagram in 2010, to the screen of every food follower in America. By 2013 we were approaching peak toast.

That was the year Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle cookbook, It’s All Good, was published. In that, avocado toast was one accessory of a radiant life devoted to psychospiritual nutrition, part of a conscious uncoupling from sausage and lattes. Gluten-free toast spread with vegan mayo—Vegenaise—under a simple arrangement of avocado slices and salt: Paltrow called it a “holy trinity” not unlike “a favorite pair of jeans.” Avocado toast had become the thing you wanted to jimmy yourself into every morning, something that could make your ass look triple-heart-eye-emoji-face amazing.

After getting Goop’ed, there was nowhere to go but down. And avocado toast—having flown too close to the sun of post-yoga breakfast terraces of lifestyle gurus’ Santa Barbara ranches—began to plummet toward the sea of cynicism. In America, Rodell says, it came to signify status, which is how avocado toast became “basic.” It’s why I feel chagrin, tweaked through a filter of guilt, for posting my Sweatshop pic. It’s like, Look at me! I’m living my bomb life and have the photographic evidence to prove it! It’s everything I hate about Instagram, and aspirationalism, and using food as a lifestyle marker. It’s also, I admit, everything I love about those things.

“Restaurants figured out they could make it and we would Instagram the s**t out of it,” says Marian Bull, a GQ food writer. And by “we,” Bull says, she means “millennials who live in cities.” Ordering avocado toast once branded you as in the know, cultured even. Then, amid internet stories with titles like “Why Avocado Toast Isn’t Cool Anymore,” it marked you as a striver, scrambling to keep up. “It’s overplayed,” adds chef Gerardo Gonzalez of Lalito in NYC, who grew up with avocado trees in his grandmother’s San Diego backyard. “It’s lazy to open a business in 2017 where your thing is avocado toast.”

Food trends come and go. In this era of kale salad and artisanal yogurt in cute glass jars, that’s almost too obvious to say. But there’s something different, something more rapid and more internet-y, about the rise and fall of avocado toast. Louis Diat created vichyssoise at Manhattan’s Ritz-Carlton in 1917, and it was almost immediately the most stylish dish in New York City. Vichyssoise enjoyed a 40-year ride up the trend-line curve before it peaked—to the fashionable, it began to seem outdated and tepid. The puréed potato-leek cold soup spent another 20 years ratcheting down the status ladder. Nowadays, with Instagram and Pinterest and an online food media ravenous for fresh finds and blistering hot takes, that trajectory is considerably shorter, even as enthusiasm screams louder than ever. So can a perfect three-ingredient thing have a life beyond the trend cycle? Can avocado toast outlast its own hype?