Thechatter The deadly truth behind killer recipes

Most influential, most essential, best vegan and bestselling – many ambitious home cooks regularly rely on cookbook rankings to flesh out their collections. But a criterion that’s much more rare than publication year, style of cooking or cultural influence is animal welfare.

This is something that researchers from the University of California San Diego are seeking to change with their “animal kill index” of popular cookbooks. Authors Andy Lamey and Ike Sharpless examined 30 cookbooks by 26 celebrity chefs for the study – Making the Animals on the Plate Visible: Anglophone Celebrity Chef Cookbooks Ranked by Sentient Animal Deaths – which was recently published in Food Ethics.

Lamey and Sharpless selected chefs with an English-language national television presence since 2000, and books that were published between 1993 and 2015. They determined that when it came to animal welfare, food choices weren’t necessarily aligned with public personas.

However, Yotam Ottolenghi – renowned for his plant-forward style – and back-to-basics champion Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall fared well in the ranking, while the likes of Mario Batali, Gordon Ramsay, and Susur Lee did not.

“Regardless of how their audiences respond, the chefs’ choices themselves send a message regarding what practices are acceptable when it comes to food and animals,”Lamey and Sharpless write.

The researchers averaged the number of animals dispatched per recipe, and categorized the cookbooks into four levels: level one required zero animals; level two up to 0.5; level three up to one; and level four, upwards of one animal per dish.

Batali’s Molto Gusto: Easy Italian Cooking was the worst offender, with 5.25 average deaths per recipe and 620 total animal deaths. Lee’s Susur: A Culinary Life took the dubious honour of second place with an average of 2.85 kills and a total of 268. Gordon Ramsay’s Fast Food: Recipes from the F Word rounded out the category with an average of 1.23 deaths per recipe (127 total).

On the other end of the spectrum, Giada De Laurentiis’s Food made level two with an average of 0.19 animal deaths per recipe (20 animals total). While FearnleyWhittingstall and Ottolenghi made level one with zero animals required for River Cottage Veg, and Plenty respectively.

Given the impact of celebrity chefs on society at large, the authors point out that paying more attention to the ethical treatment of animals has the potential to affect change in everyday kitchens.

“The rise of the chef as celebrity has coincided with increased consciousness of ethical issues pertaining to food, particularly as they concern animals,” Lamey and Sharpless write. “Whether they intend it or not, celebrity chefs’ food choices and public meal recommendations are ethically significant.”

The menu at your standard Italian American restaurant is a crash course in excess. Plates of spaghetti Bolognese are finished with greedy fistfuls of Parmesan and served alongside creamy bowls of fettuccine alfredo, the very essence of which depends on the emulsification of butter and cheese. Most restaurants also offer lasagna—a casserole-like concoction involving yet another heavy handed application of shredded dairy and ground meat. There are also bulbous meatballs and piping hot pizzas.

Despite the endless ramble of cheese, meat and tomato sauce, Italian American food is best described lacking. Sure, quality tomato sauce can bring a whisper of acidity; and you are also occasionally graced with a splash of balsamic vinegar or a pinch of red pepper flakes. However, the meagre garnishes pale in comparison to more flavourful dishes found scattered across the rest of the world.

There is no Italian American equivalent to Korean banchan, the small plates of mouthwatering fermented vegetables served at nearly every meal. Nor is there a counterpoint to Thai green papaya salad, where a blank canvas of tart fruit is enlivened by the sweetness of palm sugar and the astringency of fresh lime. Even in Poland, with the comparable blandness of meals based entirely off sausage meat and boiled potatoes, they have figured out that sauerkraut keeps things interesting by contributing a burst of much needed acidity.

Of course, there is more to Italian food than pizza and pasta: it’s hard to deny the potent anchovy and garlic drenched Bagna Cauda of Piedmont or the copious fresh seafood of Campania. However, the wheat and meat-heavy offerings at Italian American restaurants are undeniably bland by any food. But our affinity for pizza and pasta makes sense. Based almost entirely off of cheese, meat and wheat, Italian ingredients share a striking familiarity to those already on many North American kitchen tables. Once you take off some of the makeup, a cheeseburger is just a flattened down meatball composed of the same three ingredients as tagliatelle Bolognese.

The idea that we prefer familiar foods is hardly news. Not only does it explain why your grocery cart looks the same every week, but our preference for the recognizable has also been backed up by science. A 2015 study in the journal Neuron found that subjects chose familiar foods over those that they did not know as well, even if they had already decided that other foods were more delicious.

Maybe this explains why we rarely bat an eye at paying high prices for Italian food. Few would question a $20 cheese pizza or complain about a $16 plate of spaghetti, but the idea of paying more than $10 for a plate of chicken chow mein, a dish that involves far more ingredients that include plenty of fresh vegetables and chicken, makes us cringe.

As if that weren’t enough, proponents of Italian food hardly listen when anyone tries to bring these problems to their attention. “You just have to go to Italy,” they say, where the tomatoes are described as being as juicy as Jolly Ranchers; the mozzarella so smooth you’ll want to use it as moisturizer on your skin. I have taken these stalwarts by their word, travelling to Italy to eat pizza in Florence and Carbonara in Rome, waiting, with each bite, to have my guaranteed religious experience.

It’s true that the cheese and tomato sauce were better than most renditions available at your average grocery store. But as the farmto-table