Has a foodstuff ever been in need of some good PR more than the poor, beleaguered avocado? The brunch favourite never seems to be out of the papers. But, much like a #MeToo-adjacent male celebrity accused of making questionable comments to female colleagues, it’s never for positive reasons.
The latest shots fired came from an unlikely source when TV gardener Alan Titchmarsh took aim in a letter to The Times. Writing in response to a recent warning from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents about the dangers of so-called “avocado hand” – injuries sustained while using a sharp knife to dig out the stone or separate the flesh from the skin – the presenter stated that “There is a simple solution to avoiding injury when removing the stone from an avocado: don’t eat them.”
But Titchmarsh’s beef with avocados has more to do with climate change than protecting the accident-prone. He cited the environmental impact of growing and transporting them, writing: “Most of those sold in the UK are grown where the rainforest has been felled at an alarming rate to accommodate them. They are then shipped, often more than 5,000 miles across the ocean, as breakfast for supposedly environmentally friendly consumers.”
What should we be eating instead? Good old-fashioned British cereals, apparently. “There’s a lot to be said for Cornflakes, Weetabix and Shreddies,” he added.
As a millennial, I can honestly only sigh and roll my eyes at this point. My generation is all too familiar with the humble fruit being demonised beyond all sense or reason.
After becoming a kind of shorthand for irritating hipster culture in the 2010s, avocados were infamously blamed for young people’s inability to get a foot on the property ladder. In 2017, Australian millionaire and property mogul Tim Gurner posited the preposterous theory that if we all stopped splurging on bougie brunches, we’d be homeowners.
“When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,” Gurner said at the time, sparking outrage and near-radicalising the next gen as he blamed the Kardashians for inspiring young people’s extravagant lifestyles.
His comments were provably nonsense. At the time, the proportion of young people who owned a property had plummeted from 63 per cent in 1990 to less than 33 per cent, while the average deposit for a home in the UK had hit £32,000 – double what it had been 10 years prior – and house prices consistently outpaced wage rises.
The issue remains just as pertinent eight years later. According to data from Mojo Mortgages released last year, the difference between buying a house in the 1970s and now is stark. Prices have risen by 2,534 per cent in the last 50 years, while average individual salaries have gone up by only 1,791 per cent. It means there is a shortfall; if today’s wages had kept pace with house prices, we’d each be earning £13,676 more per year. Meanwhile, the average house deposit as a percentage of two people’s income was 15 per cent in 1974, compared to nearly 87 per cent in 2024; it takes contemporary couples approximately 11 years to save for a deposit, compared to just six months 50 years ago.
But absurd though Gurner’s assertion was after even the most cursory glance at the data, it seemed to go largely unchallenged in many quarters. There was a consensus within some areas of the media that, in fact, Gurner probably had a point – economic realities be damned.
The avocado became more symbol than product, a physical representation of millennials’ perceived aspirational extravagance, our obsession with style-over-substance “Instagrammable” experiences and profligacy when it came to money. This knee-jerk negativity was best epitomised during Meghan Markle’s trial by fire with the British press. Overnight, the tide of coverage had noticeably turned from gushing praise to savage scrutiny of the Duchess of Sussex’s every action, reaching fever pitch with this hysterical 2019 headline courtesy of the Daily Mail: “How Meghan’s favourite avocado snack – beloved of all millennials – is fuelling human rights abuses, drought and murder”.
While we may chastise Meghan for having made a pointless and saccharine lifestyle show (Netflix’s widely panned With Love) about a decade too late, it seems a bit of a stretch to blame her for murder. There was much puritanical handwringing in the piece, the underlying suggestion being that Meghan’s penchant for the occasional avo-on-toast was tantamount to her condoning Mexican drug cartels reportedly extorting farmers with threats of violence.
Clearly, avocados are far from perfect. Aside from the cartel connections – leading to them being dubbed the “blood diamonds of Mexico” – the environmental cost is real. An avocado has a carbon footprint five times higher than a banana, while each avocado requires 320 litres of water to grow, more than twice that needed to grow an apple.
But it’s all relative, surely? And, as is so often the case when looking at sustainability issues, is part of a much wider and more complex picture. Professor Mike Berners-Lee, author of How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything, put together UK “carbon equivalent” (CO2e) data for everyday foods in the UK by combining the total greenhouse gas cost, including methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. Avocados were well down the list when it came to their carbon footprint, clocking in at 1.6kg of CO2e per kg of produce when shipped from South Africa, Peru or Chile.
For comparison, most other brunch foods fared much worse, even when locally sourced: British cow’s milk totalled 1.9kg; local jam, honey or marmalade 2.3kg; British yoghurt 2.4kg; Scottish salmon 4.1kg; UK-produced bacon 10kg; and British eggs 19.1kg. UK-produced beef came in at a whopping 25kg of CO2e per kg of produce. As Viva!, the UK’s leading vegan campaigning charity, put it in an article comparing avocado and animal products: “Every other week, someone blames vegans, millennials or ‘trendy food bloggers’ for destroying the environment by eating avocados. Predictably, the truth is far from these inflated accusations.”
Avocados may not be perfect, but neither is anything else when you get right down to it. At this point, it feels borderline bullying. In the name of fairness, can’t we lay off the avo for a bit and find another ingredient to blame all our problems on instead? I hear asparagus might just be the reason Gen Z don’t have any savings or job security…
