Avocado Anxiety: and Other Stories About Where Your Food Comes From

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As pressure grows via social media to post pictures of food that ticks all the boxes in terms of health and the environment, these food stories from the author of the award-winning The Ethical Carnivore are also a personal story of motherhood and the realisation that nothing is ever perfect. As pressure grows to share our healthy, environmentally friendly lives on social media, Avocado Anxiety is also a personal story of motherhood and the realisation that nothing is ever perfect.

Potato farmers are learning how to look after the soil better, largely from watching the organic movement. Generally, fruit and vegetables have a lower carbon footprint because it takes a lot less energy to grow a plant than to raise an animal. So much of the modern world would be incomprehensible to medieval peasants, but not the rows of glossy vegetables in our supermarket aisles.

She covered UN climate change talks, GM foods and the badger cull during five years as the Environment Correspondent for The Daily Telegraph. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. If our ancestors could time-travel to one location in the present, where would modernity astound them most? Gray, a journalist who specializes in food and environmental issues, is not afraid to get her hands dirty.

Avocados may not have a heavy carbon footprint but they use up a lot of water, around 85 litres to grow an avocado from Peru. Avocado Anxiety encourages understanding the science behind one’s food and demonstrates the global impact of every meal.

Through visits to farms, interviews with scientists and trying to grow her own, she digs up the dirt behind organic potatoes, greenhouse tomatoes and a glut of courgettes. In one meme it was claimed eating avocado on toast rather than saving money for a house, was preventing young people getting on the property ladder. A portrait of a food system that has become miraculously proficient at giving us cheap produce whenever we want it but at the expense of so much else.

However, if the vegetables have been flown in by air freight, such as asparagus from Peru (18kg CO2e per kg), it can be up there with steak.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Louise is passionate about environmental issues, increasingly focusing on how individuals can make a difference through the choices they make, such as the food we eat. In recent years, she has written for The Sunday Times, Scottish Field, the Guardian and The Spectator, among others. As a nation we do not eat enough fruit and veg (only a third of adults eat the recommended five-a-day), we need to start filling our plates with vegetables from farmers and growers we trust.