The Halo Ten: Plant Foods That Are Neither Clean Nor Ethical

The plant-based movement sells a feeling. The feeling of having chosen correctly, of having kept your hands clean. This is a list of ten foods currently being sold to you as virtuous choices, and a brief account of what it actually cost to get them to your plate.

There is a particular kind of confidence that settles over a person the moment they decide their food choices are morally superior. You can see it at the farmers’ market: the slight uptilt of the chin, the bamboo tote bag carried with intent, the serene certainty of someone who has genuinely never looked into the supply chain behind their avocado toast.

The plant-based movement has built its entire moral architecture on a single assumption: that choosing plants over animals is a straightforward ethical act. Less suffering. Less destruction. Less blood on your hands. The logic has surface appeal, because animals are visible. Their suffering is documentable. An abattoir makes for better documentary footage than an almond orchard in a Californian drought.

But the documentaries don’t get made about the almond orchards. The cookbooks don’t include a chapter on the water table beneath the Ica Valley in Peru, or the condition of a cashew worker’s hands in Vietnam, or the pine forests that were standing in Michoacan, Mexico until last year. These things would complicate the narrative, and nothing kills a wellness brand faster than a complicated narrative.

So here is the list. Not an exhaustive audit of everything that grows in the ground, but a focused look at the ten most egregious offenders currently being sold to you as virtuous choices. Each one has a story the label doesn’t tell. And together, they make a fairly compelling case that the most ethical thing on your plate might just be the thing with a face.

1. Almonds

California produces roughly 80% of the world’s almonds. This is not a fun fact. It is an indictment, presented with a serving suggestion.

Each almond requires approximately one gallon of water to produce. A single gallon, per nut. To put that in context, the average shower uses about two gallons per minute, which means your handful of trail mix required roughly the same water as sitting under a waterfall for an afternoon while a sign above your head reads ‘ethical snacking’.

California is not a place with water to spare. It is a semi-arid state currently engaged in a long-running argument with its own aquifers about how much groundwater can be extracted before the land physically subsides. Satellite data from NASA has shown that parts of the Central Valley, where almond orchards stretch to the horizon in every direction, are sinking by as much as a foot per year. The San Joaquin Valley has sunk eleven metres in total over the past century. Not because of cattle. Because of almonds.

Then there are the bees. Almonds don’t self-pollinate. They require cross-pollination, which means they require bees, which means every February the entire American commercial beekeeping industry converges on California in what is effectively a forced march. Around 1.6 million hives, representing roughly two thirds of all commercial bee colonies in the United States, are transported across the country and concentrated in a monoculture landscape where they are exposed to pesticide cocktails and nutritional poverty. Between 15 and 25% of those colonies don’t come home. They die in the service of your afternoon snack.

The almond industry’s response to the collapsing bee population has largely been to require more bees. This is not a solution. This is an escalation with extra pollination.

Nutritional cliffnote: Almonds are high in oxalates and phytic acid, which bind minerals and reduce their absorption. The bioavailability of their protein and micronutrients is substantially lower than the label implies.

2. Soy

Let’s be clear about something from the start, because the defenders of soy will be forming a queue. The problem isn’t the milk. The problem isn’t even the tofu. The problem is soybean oil: the reason the Amazon is being flattened at a rate that makes even the most jaded environmentalist reach for a chair.

Brazil is the world’s largest producer of soybeans. It did not achieve this distinction by accident. It achieved it by clearing the Cerrado savanna and the Amazon rainforest on an industrial scale, converting irreplaceable biodiversity into flat ground for a commodity crop. Since 1970, roughly 18% of the Amazon has been deforested, an area larger than France. A significant portion of that land now grows soy.

Here is the part that requires sitting down: the primary driver of global soy production is not animal feed. It is soybean oil. The world’s most widely used industrial cooking oil, present in almost every processed food, every restaurant fryer, and every ‘plant-based’ ready meal on the shelf. The soy meal left over after oil extraction is then fed to livestock, which allows the plant-based movement to point at pigs and chickens and say ‘look, animal agriculture is destroying the Amazon’, while the oil that prompted the clearing quietly ends up in their salad dressing.

People consuming processed plant-based food products are, in many cases, directly funding the deforestation they are posting about. This is not a rhetorical device. It is a supply chain.

Nutritional cliffnote: Soy contains phytoestrogens which can disrupt hormone signalling, and goitrogens which interfere with thyroid function. It is also a nutritional mediocrity compared to the animal foods it is meant to replace.

3. Avocados

The avocado has achieved something remarkable: it has made a fruit associated with cartel violence feel aspirational. You have to admire the marketing, even as you recoil from the reality.

Michoacan state in Mexico produces the majority of the world’s avocados. It is also controlled, in significant part, by criminal organisations who identified avocado farming as a more stable revenue stream than some of their previous interests. The Knights Templar cartel was extorting avocado farmers in Michoacan as far back as 2013. Their successors have continued the tradition. Farmers who do not pay their quota have been known to find their orchards destroyed. Independent growers attempting to operate outside cartel influence have faced rather more immediate consequences.

The pine forests that once covered the highlands of Michoacan have been cleared at an accelerating rate to make room for avocado trees, since avocado orchards are dramatically more profitable than whatever was there before. Satellite analysis has shown tens of thousands of hectares of forest disappearing annually. The monarch butterflies that migrate through the region are running out of habitat. But the avocados ship on time, so that’s the main thing.

Then there is the water. Each avocado requires approximately 320 litres to produce. In a region already under significant water stress, this has led to the illegal diversion of rivers and streams, collapsing water supplies for local communities. The fruit then travels several thousand miles to arrive in a Waitrose near you, so that someone can put it on toast and describe it as clean eating.

Nutritional cliffnote: Avocados are nutritionally reasonable, but the fat profile, mostly monounsaturated oleic acid, is identical to what you’ll find in beef tallow. Without the deforestation.

4. Quinoa

The quinoa story is told less often now, because it made too many plant-based advocates uncomfortable and the internet has a short memory for inconvenient data. But it happened, and it deserves revisiting.

Quinoa is native to the Andes. It has been grown in Bolivia and Peru for several thousand years, forming the nutritional bedrock of indigenous communities in some of the highest and harshest terrain on earth. For most of its history, quinoa was an unglamorous subsistence food. Then Western nutritionists discovered it was a complete protein, Western dieters decided this made it a superfood, and Western demand exploded.

Between 2006 and 2013, quinoa prices tripled. As export demand surged, subsistence farming gave way to monoculture production. Traditional growing practices, which involved rotating quinoa with other crops to manage soil health, were abandoned in favour of maximum yield. The soil, which had managed this trick for millennia, began to degrade.

The Altiplano, the high plateau where Andean quinoa is grown, sits at 3,700 metres above sea level. It is arid. It does not have a deep reservoir of topsoil to burn through. The expansion of quinoa monocultures onto marginal land and steeper slopes caused measurable erosion in regions that can ill afford it. Meanwhile, local Andean communities found themselves priced out of their own staple crop. The food they had eaten for millennia was now more valuable as a Western export than as sustenance.

Nutritional cliffnote: Quinoa contains saponins, bitter defence compounds in the outer coating that require thorough washing to reduce. Its mineral content is substantially offset by phytates, which bind zinc and iron and prevent absorption.

5. Cashews

The cashew processing industry occupies a peculiar position in ethical food discourse: universally ignored. You will find exhaustive discussion of conditions in slaughterhouses. You will not find comparable coverage of what happens to a cashew worker’s hands.

Cashews are grown primarily in India, Vietnam, the Ivory Coast, and Brazil. The processing, the removal of the nut from its shell, is performed almost entirely by hand, because automation has not solved the problem of the caustic liquid that surrounds the cashew shell. That liquid contains urushiol: the same compound responsible for the reaction caused by poison ivy. It causes chemical burns. Processing workers, who often work without adequate protective equipment because gloves reduce precision and speed, regularly develop blistering, scarring, and permanent skin damage on their hands and forearms.

A study of cashew workers in southern India found that the majority had experienced chemical burns, with many reporting chronic skin conditions. The workers are predominantly women, paid piece rates, meaning there is a direct financial incentive to process quickly and skip the protective measures.

This does not feature prominently in the lifestyle brand copy that sells cashew butter at nine pounds a jar as a compassionate alternative to dairy. The ‘ethical’ certification systems which have proven so effective at putting a premium sticker on other foods have made no meaningful inroads into cashew processing. The supply chain is too fragmented, the workers too dispersed, and the margins too thin for certification to gain traction.

Nutritional cliffnote: Cashews have a poor omega-6 to omega-3 ratio, are high in oxalates, and their protein content is modest. They are mostly fat and carbohydrate with a marketing budget.

6. Peruvian Asparagus

Consider the Ica Valley. It sits in one of the driest deserts on earth, on the southwestern coast of Peru, between the Andes and the Pacific. For most of its history, it had the water supply appropriate to a desert: not much. Then international demand for year-round asparagus created an agricultural opportunity.

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By the early 2000s, the Ica Valley had become one of the world’s primary asparagus exporters, supplying British supermarkets with the vegetable in months when British soil has the texture of a car park and the asparagus season is a distant memory. The water required to irrigate asparagus in a desert comes from somewhere. In Ica’s case, it came from an aquifer: a fossil water reserve that accumulated over geological timescales and is not being replenished at anything close to the rate it is being extracted.

By the late 2000s, water levels in the Ica aquifer were falling by metres per year. Local communities, particularly smaller farms and domestic users, found their wells running dry. By 2010, various reports were documenting what amounted to a water crisis in a region that had agreed to grow asparagus for British dinner plates.

The asparagus then gets flown to the UK, adding around 6,000 air miles, before it ends up on a plate in January alongside the sincere assertion that eating vegetables is better for the environment than eating a steak from a farm twenty miles away.

7. Coconut Products

The coconut had a good decade. It rode the wave of ancestral diet enthusiasm, benefited from the rehabilitation of saturated fat, and positioned itself as both a cooking staple and a lifestyle accessory. Coconut water, coconut milk, coconut flour, coconut aminos, coconut everything. The market grew substantially, and with it the demand for coconut harvesting at scale.

In Thailand, the primary source of coconut products for Western markets, investigative reporting documented the use of pig-tailed macaques to harvest coconuts. The monkeys are trained, or more accurately compelled, to climb coconut palms and twist off the fruit. They work on chains, in conditions ranging from poor to genuinely distressing depending on the operation.

The industry’s response was that this was a traditional practice and the reporting was sensationalised. The response from major British supermarkets was to quietly audit their supply chains and remove several Thai coconut brands. Which suggests the supermarkets found the reporting credible enough to act on, even if the industry did not.

Beyond the monkey question, the expansion of coconut monoculture across Southeast Asia has involved the conversion of biodiverse coastal and lowland forest into single-crop plantations. The biodiversity loss is not dramatic enough to generate documentary series. It happens gradually, grove by grove, over decades. Which is precisely how these things tend to happen when nobody is incentivised to look.

8. Spanish Strawberries

There is something specifically dishonest about the out-of-season strawberry. It sits in its plastic clamshell in January with the quiet confidence of something that has not been examined closely, and most people do not examine it closely.

The Huelva province of southern Spain produces a large proportion of the strawberries consumed in the UK during winter months. The growing method involves covering enormous areas of land in plastic sheeting, through which the plants emerge, to accelerate production in conditions that would not otherwise support it. The land beneath and around these plastic deserts was, until relatively recently, adjacent to Donana National Park, one of Europe’s most important wetlands and a critical staging post for migratory birds. The expansion of strawberry cultivation has encroached on the park’s boundaries, and the irrigation required has drawn down the regional water table to levels that threaten the park’s ecology.

The workforce harvesting these strawberries consists largely of seasonal migrant workers, predominantly women from Morocco and sub-Saharan Africa, working under conditions that have attracted sustained criticism from labour rights organisations. Reports of inadequate housing, wage manipulation, and harassment have appeared consistently over the past decade.

The strawberry arrives in the UK looking cheerful and unremarkable. It is neither.

9. Dark Chocolate

Dark chocolate is perhaps the most sophisticated exercise in ethical misdirection on this list, because it has genuinely convinced large numbers of thoughtful people that it is a health food with a conscience.

Approximately 60% of the world’s cocoa comes from the Ivory Coast and Ghana. Both countries have lost over 90% of their original forest cover, much of it to cocoa farming expansion. The Ivory Coast, which once had one of West Africa’s most biodiverse forest ecosystems, is now predominantly agricultural land. The forest is not coming back.

Child labour is endemic in West African cocoa farming. The International Labour Organisation has estimated that hundreds of thousands of children work in cocoa production in the region, many in hazardous conditions. The major chocolate manufacturers have known about this for decades, have made repeated public commitments to address it, and have repeatedly failed to do so in any meaningful way.

The ethical certification systems available for chocolate have been extensively studied and found to produce modest and inconsistent benefits at best. A 2019 study in the journal Food Policy found that Fairtrade certification was not systematically associated with better outcomes for cocoa farmers. The premium price goes somewhere. It does not reliably reach the people growing the crop.

Nutritional cliffnote: The polyphenol content of dark chocolate varies enormously between products, degrades with processing, and the antioxidant narrative is largely promotional material dressed as nutrition science.

10. Rice

Rice has largely avoided the scrutiny applied to other crops, possibly because it is a staple food for billions of people and criticising it carries obvious complications. But rice is also among the largest single agricultural sources of greenhouse gas on the planet, and the silence around this fact is instructive.

Flooded rice paddies are methane-producing environments. The anaerobic decomposition of organic matter under standing water generates methane in substantial quantities. Global rice cultivation accounts for somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions, making it a more significant climate contributor than the entire aviation industry in some analyses.

This methane receives essentially no coverage in mainstream discussions of sustainable diets. You will not find infographics comparing rice emissions to beef emissions with the same urgency applied to livestock. You will not find celebrity chefs told that swapping beef for a rice dish represents a genuine climate compromise.

Because rice is the food of subsistence farmers across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and criticising it does not serve any particular Western lifestyle agenda. The animals get the documentary series. The rice paddies bubble quietly on.

A Brief Note On Nutrition

Every food on this list arrives with a nutritional compromise that, in a sane world, would feature prominently in the conversation about whether the sacrifice is worth it. Plant proteins are incomplete or poorly absorbed. Defensive compounds like oxalates, phytates, lectins, and saponins reduce the bioavailability of the minerals and vitamins the packaging claims to contain. The fats are often the wrong kind, in the wrong ratios, in forms the body handles badly.

The animal foods these products are meant to replace contain complete proteins with superior bioavailability, fats in their natural stable form, and micronutrients like haem iron, B12, vitamin A, and zinc that are either absent from plant foods or present in forms the body struggles to use. Nobody cleared a rainforest to produce a ribeye from a Devon farm. Nobody burned an aquifer to raise sheep on a Welsh hillside.

None of that gets factored into the cost-benefit analysis when someone buys a bag of cashews from the ethical food aisle. Because the ethical food aisle doesn’t run the numbers. It sells the feeling. The feeling of having chosen correctly. Of having opted out of something. Of having kept your hands clean.

The hands are not clean. They never were.

The Plant-Based Myth Series

This is part of an ongoing series on the false health halo of plants.

• The Plant-Based Blue Zone Hoax
• Why Carnivore Is Peak Vegan
• 10 Superfoods That Do More Harm Than Good
• Why Vegans Need To Be Criticised
• Why You Don’t Need Salt On Carnivore
• Sorry, Avocado Isn’t Carnivore

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