Few food debates get recycled as often as the claim: “Vegans are destroying the planet with their avocados!” It’s a neat rhetorical trick—call out a trendy plant-based food with documented environmental issues, and suddenly all of veganism looks hypocritical.

But here’s the thing: it’s a red herring. This argument doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and worse, it distracts from the real work of fixing our broken food system.