Epicurious is righting cultural wrongs one recipe at a time

NEW YORK — With a new Black editor in chief and promises to do better, a little corner of the Conde Nast universe is taking racial and cultural injustice one recipe at a time.

Since July, the small staff at Epicurious, a resource site for home cooks, has been scouring 55 years’ worth of recipes from a variety of Conde Nast magazines in search of objectionable titles, ingredient lists and stories told through a white American lens.

“It came after Black Lives Matter, after a lot of consciousness-raising among the editors and staff,” said David Tamarkin, the white digital director for Epicurious. “It came out of conversations that we had about how we can do better, where are we failing and where have our predecessors failed?”

Called the Archive Repair Project, the work is also an outgrowth of complaints and controversies at Conde Nast. But it’s just one effort on a full plate of initiatives, said Sonia Chopra, who’s been executive editor of Bon Appetit and Epicurious for about four months, working under the new editor in chief, Dawn Davis.

In all, the 25-year-old site (with a staff of 10) is a repository of a massive 35,000 recipes from Bon Appetit, Gourmet, Self, House & Garden and Epicurious itself.

They stretch back to 1965.

“The language that we use to talk about food has evolved so much from, sure, the 1960s but also the 1990s, and I think it is our duty as journalists, as people who work in food media, to make sure that we are reflecting that appropriately,” Chopra said.

Epicurious and Bon Appetit have been at the center of accusations that also plague others in the food world: undervaluing staffers of color, perpetuating structural racism, racial and gender discrimination, and more. Some of those issues led several Bon Appetit employees to leave earlier this year after Editor-in-Chief Adam Rapoport resigned over a 2004 Halloween “brownface” photo and amid allegations of racial discrimination.

While Conde Nast studies pay equity, and has issued apologies and pledges to do such things as expand unconscious-bias education and create inclusion and diversity plans, the Archive Repair Project rolls on.

The bulk of Epicurious site traffic goes to the archive, mostly recipes but also articles and other editorial work, Tamarkin and Chopra said.

“Being such an old site, we’re full of a lot of ideas about American cooking that really go through a white lens,” Tamarkin said. “We know that American cooking is Mexican American cooking and Indian American cooking and Nigerian American cooking, that that’s the kind of cooking that’s really happening in this country every day.”

One of the first issues “repaired,” he said, was use of the word “exotic.”

“I can’t think of any situation where that word would be appropriate, and yet it’s all over the site,” Tamarkin said. “That’s painful for me and I’m sure others.”

Other terms, such as “authentic” and “ethnic,” are also among repairs.

The work, Chopra said, is “certainly something that I think not just Conde Nast brands but all over food media and media in general are really thinking about.”

Since July, when Tamarkin outlined the project on

Epicurious, he and his staff have fixed about 200 recipes and other work. Some repairs are more complicated than removing a single word, such as an entire story about the “ethnic” aisle at the grocery store.

“We have published recipes with headnotes that fail to properly credit the inspirations for the dish, or degrade the cuisine the dish belongs to. We have purported to make a recipe `better’ by making it faster, or swapping in ingredients that were assumed to be more familiar to American palates, or easier to find. We have inferred (and in some cases outright labeled) ingredients and techniques to be ‘surprising’ or `weird.’” Tamarkin wrote.