Are avocados and quinoa worse for the planet than meat?

The objection

“Your quinoa is flown halfway round the world and your avocados are draining Mexico dry. Trendy vegan food is an environmental disaster.”

The answer

Some of this is true. Avocado orchards have cleared forest in Mexico and been linked to falling water tables there, farming has overdrawn the aquifers of Chilean valleys where avocados grow, and the quinoa boom spread the crop over grazing land in Bolivia. None of it makes either food worse for the climate than meat.

Do avocados and quinoa have a bigger carbon footprint than meat?

No: the life-cycle studies cited here put a kilogram of avocados or quinoa at roughly 0.6 to 1kg of CO2-equivalent [3][4][5], and Our World in Data’s figure for the average avocado is about 2.5kg (2020) [13], while poultry, the lowest-carbon meat in Poore and Nemecek’s data from about 38,700 farms in 119 countries (2018), has a mean of 9.9kg [1][2]. In the same data beef from a beef herd has a mean of 99.5kg, lamb 39.7kg and pork 12.3kg [2]. These are the global means across all studies that Our World in Data now charts; its 2020 article on eating local gave a lower average for beef, about 60kg [13]. The meat means also count land-use change and food lost along the supply chain, and without those poultry still comes to about 4.9kg [2].

Poore and Nemecek’s dataset has no avocados or quinoa, so those figures come from single studies. Avocados grown in Limpopo, South Africa, and sold in Europe came to about 0.9kg at a grower that had made significant investments in cutting emissions, or 0.38kg after subtracting carbon stored in the farm’s preserved land and compost (2024), and the authors found their figure before that subtraction within the range of earlier avocado studies with similar boundaries [3]. Creole avocados in northern Colombia came to 0.59kg for the growing alone (2023) [4]. None of the studies cited here measured avocados grown in Mexico, which grows 40% of the world’s crop [8], or in Chile and Peru, Europe’s main overseas suppliers [7].

Quinoa grown in Spain came to 1.03kg, similar to Andean quinoa, in a study that stopped where the grain leaves the producer and that also found a high water-scarcity footprint, 60 cubic metres a kilogram, because Spain is short of water (2024) [5]. Organic quinoa from Peru, assessed up to delivery to its main export markets, had emissions in the upper range for organic crops but considerably lower environmental impacts than other high-protein foods, especially animal ones (2018) [6].

Almost no food is flown: air freight carries 0.16% of food miles, mostly highly perishable produce, and avocados travel by boat (2020) [13]. Shipping avocados from Chile to European capitals, either straight to a nearby port or through Algeciras in Spain and on by road, added about 0.2 to 0.4kg a kilogram (2022) [7]. That is a real share of an avocado’s footprint, but small beside poultry’s 9.9kg, and for most foods transport is under 10% of the total, which is why the miles travelled matter far less than what the food is [13].

All of these comparisons are per kilogram. Avocados hold about 15g of fat but only 2g of protein in 100g [14], so per gram of protein they fare worse: by our arithmetic the South African figure comes to about 4.5kg of CO2-equivalent per 100g of protein, close to poultry’s 5.7kg [16], and Our World in Data’s 2.5kg average would put them above poultry and pork. Quinoa, with 14g of protein in 100g [15], comes to under 1kg per 100g of protein, far below every meat [16]. In data covering five environmental measures, Poore and Nemecek found that even the lowest-impact animal products typically do more harm than the plant foods that could replace them, which they took as evidence for the importance of dietary change [1].

Is avocado farming draining water in Mexico and Chile?

Avocados share the blame in parts of both countries: a 2022 review ties Mexico’s avocado industry to lost forest and falling water tables in Michoacán, and a 2020 study blamed farming for overdrawing the aquifers of two Chilean valleys, in one of which the area under avocados grew significantly. In Michoacán, the state that grows 80% of Mexico’s avocados, the review found deforestation heavily concentrated in avocado-growing areas and said the industry harms water supply twice over, by removing forest that holds water in the soil and by planting trees that use two to seven times as much water per square metre of leaf as the native pines; it also cites a report from Mexico’s national forestry, agriculture and livestock research institute of residents in parts of the state digging deeper wells as water tables fell [8].

In Chile’s Ligua and Petorca valleys, in the Valparaíso region, groundwater dropped significantly in 75% of the wells studied during the longest drought in 36 years. The area under avocados grew by 2,623 hectares in Ligua and shrank by 128 hectares in Petorca, and the study put the depletion down mostly to overexploitation by agriculture and a lack of water management, with water rights still being granted through the drought [9]. These harms depend on where an avocado was grown, which a carbon figure doesn’t show.

Did the quinoa boom hurt people in the Andes?

A study of 11 years of Peruvian household surveys found that rising quinoa prices had not harmed household welfare in Peru, and in Bolivia the claim that the boom hurt local diets and land is disputed [10][12]. Bellemare and colleagues (2018) called fears that the price rise had hurt Peruvian consumers unwarranted. Quinoa made up less than 1% of the budget of the roughly 30% of Peruvian households that ate it; in districts and provinces where more quinoa was eaten or grown, household welfare rose slightly as prices climbed, and at the level of the larger departments it fell slightly, by less than 1% of household consumption [10].

In Bolivia’s southern Altiplano, Jacobsen (2011) warned that flat ground around the salt desert, once natural vegetation grazed by llamas, was being sown with quinoa and turned to desert as intensive cultivation exhausted the soil [11], and argued that the export boom was hurting home consumption of quinoa [12]. Winkel and colleagues (2012) replied that his review misrepresented the situation: his data showed no fall in yields to back the claim of soil degradation, and his case on home consumption was ill-founded on both nutritional and cultural grounds [12].