Podcasts

Avocado Anxiety: how to choose what to eat They’re “not so bad”. Compared to what?

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Three photographs of avocados on toast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:42 — 22.8MB)

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Portrait of Louise Gray, a young woman with shoulder length brown hair and dark eyes wearing a white blouse.
Louise Gray
Winner of the Guild of Food Writers award for investigative work in 2024, Avocado Anxiety is about more than avocados. It offers a deep look at the implications of the choices we are faced with when deciding what to buy. Local may not always be best for the planet, but perhaps it avoids the worst abuses of labour. And air-freighted is usually terrible for greenhouse gas emissions, but may be good for communities far away.

Some universal truths did emerge from our conversation. Fruit and veg is almost always better for the planet than meat, and homegrown is generally preferable to imported. Exceptions, however, are not uncommon, and in the end questions outnumber simple answers.

Notes

  1. Avocado Anxiety: and Other Stories About Where Your Food Comes From is available from Bookshop.org and elsewhere.
  2. We didn’t discuss the meaning of the word avocado, thank heavens, because the greatest service I can offer is to point out that nobody believes that words like nut or ball actually mean testicle. Let the Nawatl Scholar explain: the word guacamole does not come from the Nahuatl word for “ground testicles or avocados”..
  3. The book Louise Gray mentioned at the end is The Avocado Debate by Honor May Eldridge.
  4. Here is the transcript.
  5. Photo of Louise Gray by Nancy MacDonald. Others scraped by me from Instagram.

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Podcasts

Olives Reborn in the Salento The Xylella disaster points the way for a new optimism

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Ripe green olives of th variety FS17 hanging on a branch

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:32 — 22.6MB)

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A man standing in front of a glass-fronted cupboard in which are cans of single variety olive oils.
Silvestro Silvestori stands in front of some of the metal cans of his varietal olive oils.

Xylella fastidiosa is a bacterium that attacks all manner of plants. It prevents water getting to the leaves, so the plant essentially dies of drought. It probably arrived in Italy in 2008 but wasn’t really noticed until 2013, attacking a few trees around the town of Gallipoli in the Salento, the heel of the boot of Italy. Thanks to badly botched responses it spread, carried by spittlebug insects that live in the plants under the olives. By 2019, efforts to control the spread of Xylella were more or less abandoned, and the disease had killed 10 million olive trees in the Salento.

People – including me – thought it might be the death of olive oil production in the Salento and the rest of Puglia. In the past couple of years, however, literal green shoots of resistant olive varieties have taken hold, and with them the opportunity for a new industry focused on high-quality, profitable olive oil. To learn more, I went to visit Silvestro Silvestori, who runs The Awaiting Table cookery school in Lecce.

Notes

  1. The Awaiting Table Cookery School runs lots of different courses, including an opportunity to plant new olive trees.
  2. Here is the transcript.
  3. Cover photo of a fiscolo, the jute mat used in older mills to contain the crushed olives in the press. Banner photo of FS17® La Favolosa from iocolivivai

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