If Alan Titchmarsh says it, it must be true: avocados are pure evil in fruit form. Actually, I paraphrase. What he said in a letter to The Times today is: don’t eat them! He observes, “Most of those sold in the UK are grown where the rainforest has been felled at an alarming rate to accommodate them. They need huge and often scarce supplies of water. They are then shipped often more than 5,000 miles across the ocean, as breakfast for supposedly environmentally friendly consumers”.
In fact, the Sustainable Food Trust says that the distance an avocado must travel from Mexico, the really big avocado exporter, to the UK is a memorable 5,555 miles. The great man has put his finger on the nub of the issue, viz, that it is precisely the people who sit outside trendy cafes eating their avocado on Seeded Sourdough with salsa verde (north of £7) with an air of smugness who are colluding in ecocide with every bite. Avocado is celebrity food — Meghan Markle/Sussex and Gwyneth Paltrow are avocado on toast enthusiasts — which is one more reason to regard them with reserve.
