Edinburgh-based writer Louise Gray has been challenged by food in the past. Researching her first book, The Ethical Carnivore, she spent a year only eating meat from animals she had killed herself. A former environment correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, she has jumped from the frying pan into the steamer with her latest book Avocado Anxiety: And Other Stories About Where Your Food Comes From. Using 12 familiar fruits and vegetables, she considers what turns out to be a formidable array of accompanying ethical, environmental, economic, social and dietary concerns.

After that 2016 debut, surely taking on vegetables would be less, well, meaty? A side order, particularly from a Scottish perspective. After all, aren’t Scots and vegetables locked in a joyless marriage? ‘That’s the myth,’ says Gray, ‘but there’s a danger in playing to the stereotypes. In writing this book, I’ve found many examples of positive relationships between Scots and their fruit and veg. The country has a great heritage of farming and growing.’

Gray notes the quality of our world-class seed potatoes and reminds us that Lanark Valley tomatoes were once exported. ‘We’re famous for strawberries and raspberries, and once upon a time apples too,’ she explains. ‘There are waiting lists for allotments and Scottish institutions like The Rowett Institute are doing really important research into how locally grown fava beans can be important sources of plant protein, or uncovering the photochemical properties of foraged leaves and plants.’

Gray’s instinctive positivity around fruit and vegetables also stems from her grandmother’s tales of growing up in the family business, Rankins, which ran greengrocer shops across Edinburgh from the 1920s to 1980s. ‘She surprised me. She said that fruit and vegetables in today’s sterile supermarket aisles aren’t so colourful now, and there’s less variety. I thought that in the past it was all tatties and turnips. Her experience with the greengrocers shops was that they were all competing with each other so they were making it beautiful. It was a more sensory, exciting experience; there were smells, dirt and personality with all the different varieties and the places where they’d come from.’

The loss of joy plays to the book’s central theme that we now approach food (vegetables no less than the more obviously contentious battleground of meat) with a particularly paralysing combination of anxiety and powerlessness. Fruit and veg appear year-round in our supermarkets, but it’s a miracle tempered by the many knotty issues that attend the globalised food system. Avocados may have moved on from ‘alligator pears’ to become a signifier of millennial hipsters. But at the same time, they stir up angst about water use, fair trade, pesticides, food miles, packaging and food waste, not to mention dietary fibre and whatever the ‘right’ kind of fats might be. 

Is Gray just offering a new suite of reasons for Scots to be gloomy about their greens? ‘We can’t be perfect in our food choices, and even there I find wonky veg or blemished fruit can actually be a reminder of what it is to be human. Eating more vegetables won’t solve all the problems of the world, but it can help. Environmentally it would help. It can benefit diversity on farms. It connects us to our landscape, which is important to the human psyche. It’s a step to tackling our health crisis. Fruit and vegetables can help society function better.’  

Avocado Anxiety is out now published by Bloomsbury; follow @loubgray on Twitter and Instagram for Edinburgh launch event information.