The Almond Paradox

Cracking Open the Politics of What Plants Need

A 2025 Food Tank Winter Book List selection

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Almonds have become a poster crop for agriculture's environmental controversies. Notorious for consuming vast volumes of water and trucking honeybees across the continent, California's almond orchards appear extraordinarily needy. In Spain, however, almond trees have long epitomized the exact opposite: rain-fed resilience. Often planted at the margins of agricultural viability, almonds are championed for their ecological thrift rather than their thirst. How is it that a crop can be known in such radically different ways? The Almond Paradox explores a captivating contrast between divergent ways of knowing not only how much water or pollination almond trees need, but also which trees should be grown and where. Charting the buildup to a global almond boom, the book exposes how situated histories of capitalism, land, science, and the state profoundly shape the most fundamental ways of understanding agriculture. A recognition of knowledge as place based further reveals how seemingly placeless efficiency deepens ecological precarity.

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