Confessions of an avocado eater

Books: Avocado Anxiety | Tally-Ho: Tactical Leadership in the Battle of Britain

- Kate Green

Avocado Anxiety Louise Gray (Bloomsbury, £17.99)

FOR her first, highly readable book, The Ethical Carnivore, Louise Gray spent a year eating only meat that she had killed or seen killed. She still eats meat, although rather less of it, and now, as the descendant of an Edinburgh grocer, has turned her journalistic focus to the ethics of fruit and veg consumption and the guilt we should-or shouldn't -feel about their production.

She has assembled a blizzard of information, some of which is comforting justification, whereas some will cause indigestion; essentially, we should eat more homegrown broad beans (they contain 20% protein, don't need nitrogen fertiliser and don't necessarily cause flatulence) and pay more for bananas (grown in monocultures, continually sprayed, at risk of a TR4 pandemic and affected by climate change, hence the increase in green bananas on sale), the pickers and packers of which may be treated poorly. The titular avocado, Ms Gray suggests, is the 'perfect food to represent our age of anxiety': it's vitamin rich, but is associated with excessive water usage and criminal extortion.