The Independent is Wrong, Avocado Consumption Isn’t Causing Climate Change
Heartland Institute
By
Heartland Institute
March 12, 2025
By Linnea Lueken and H. Sterling Burnett
The Independent published a story reporting on how British television presenter and gardening journalist Alan Titchmarsh urged UK citizens to stop eating avocados because of their alleged climate impact. This is nonsense. As islands, the United Kingdom imports a lot of their food, and, as a result, attempts to limit a carbon footprint are a waste of time and perhaps detrimental to nutrition. Certainly, the carbon footprint of avocado imports is miniscule relative to the UK’s and the globe’s total output. To pile more alarmism on, The Independent also suggests that avocado production is likely to decline due to climate change. This is refuted by available data.
The Independent’s post, “Why Alan Titchmarsh is urging Britons to eat Weetabix,” contextualizes Alan Titchmarsh’s claims that avocado consumption is bad for the environment. Titchmarsh, a regionally famous television personality, goes further advising that people should eat “traditional breakfast staples like Cornflakes, Weetabix, and Shreddies,” instead. According to The Independent Titchmarsh links deforestation to avocado production, and points to the carbon footprint associated with shipping and handling for avocados to reach the UK as contributing to dangerous climate change.
Part of the reasoning behind the grain-based cereal suggestion is that these are more often locally produced, or are at least produced a shorter distance away, as opposed to tropical avocados. But the “food miles” theory has lately been debunked, as discussed in the Climate Realism post “Thanks, WBUR, For Explaining “Eating Local” Has No Impact on Climate Change,” where recent data showed that locally farmed foods almost always had higher carbon footprints than food grown efficiently elsewhere. This might not hold true for a comparison between local mass-produced wheat versus distantly mass-produced avocados, but the formula is not as simple as “distance equals higher footprint.”
https://climaterealism.com/2025/03/the-independent-is-wrong-avocado-consumption-isnt-causing-climate-change/
