The ‘Ecovado’ highlights the pitfalls of a plant-based diet. Just don’t ask me to eat one

The absurdity of fake food has reached new heights with the arrival of the avocado-free avocado: the Ecovado.

An imaginative graduate of Central Saint Martins, Arina Shokouhi, has designed a pale green, creamy concoction made from a combination of ingredients, including broad beans, hazelnut, apple and rapeseed oil, packaged in a fake avocado skin fashioned from wax and food colouring.

This artful construction would amuse me at an end-of-term student show, but to eat it looks un-tempting (though the stone has been replaced with an unshelled walnut, so if you had some nutcrackers handy, you could always fall back on that for real food).

But why, you might ask, would anyone want an avocado-less avocado? To my mind Shokouhi’s real contribution here is not that she offers us a plausible food source but that she highlights the environmental damage caused by intensive crop production.

As she points out, avocados from plantation-style monoculture farms are driving deforestation and a suite of other problems.

Yet avocados apart, most plant foods get a free pass from finger-wagging vegans and environmental lobbyists, purely because they don’t come from animals. 

There is no mention of what would happen without soil-enriching animal manures to build up microbial activity. Those producing crops on a commercial scale would face a soil fertility problem that could only be solved by repeat spraying with synthetic chemical fertilisers, derived from fossil fuels.

Nor any realisation of how the natural fine balance of wildlife, of which animals are an integral part, would be disturbed by the absence of livestock. So pest and disease control would become tricky and the farmer would have to rely on a routine programme of fossil fuel-based pesticide applications.

Neither do those who avoid meat, dairy and eggs want to know about the legions of small animals killed by the combine harvester and crop cultivation techniques.

What’s worse? The slaughter of a one cow after a content life chewing the cud, or the demise of hundreds of voles, birds, rabbits and field mice?

If the Ecovado makes people think about these issues, great. Just don’t expect me to eat it.