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.”