Avocado Anxiety

And Other Stories About Where Your Food Comes From

Louise Gray, Bloomsbury (APR 18) Hardcover $24 (289pp) 978-1-4729-6963-7

The essays of Louise Gray’s Avocado Anxiety investigate the nature of food consumption in a global economy.

Sparked by a deep need to understand where her family’s food was coming from and how it was processed, Gray began to question the sources of the food eaten in the United Kingdom every day. Part history and part investigative reporting, her chapters follow individual crops (including bananas, zucchini, and avocados) from their ancient origins into the modern incarnations and delivery, sometimes in airfreighted shipments. With its focus on climate implications and longevity, her work includes reminders such as that varieties of apples help to prevent apple pandemics and that understanding water usage is just as important as considering one’s carbon footprint.

By combining stories from her garden allotment in Edinburgh with broader stories, as of green bean farmers in Kenya, Gray makes an overwhelming topic digestible. Her journalistic approach to topics like potatoes and strawberries proves that food has a global impact, from its production and travel to its consumption and waste management. Didactic explanations and a narrative focus on day-to-day relationships with food aid the conceit of the book: it is important to pay attention to food sources and even more important to understand what they mean. While food regulation jargon can be easy to dismiss, Gray makes a compelling case about the realities of the global food network and ably conveys the real impact of food production on the climate.

Avocado Anxiety encourages understanding the science behind one’s food and demonstrates the global impact of every meal.