Epicurious drops beef recipes
BEEF was the red-hot topic du jour last week when food website Epicurious made some meaty news on Monday: It would no longer publish recipes using beef, citing the environmental harm caused by cattle farming.
“Our shift is solely about sustainability, about not giving airtime to one of the world’s worst climate offenders,” senior editor Maggie Hoffman and former digital director David Tamarkin said.
Some reactions praised the decision, noting that tastes had changed and readers were looking for more plant-based dishes. Others slammed Epicurious for “cancelling” beef.
About a year ago, the platform, which is owned by Condé Nast, had stopped publishing new recipes containing beef, the editors wrote. They decided to make the announcement now, they said, with beef consumption starting to “creep up” after a decline.
“The conversation about sustainable cooking clearly needs to be louder; this policy is our contribution to that conversation,” Hoffman and Tamakin wrote.
While many people commenting on the move by Epicurious seemed to be motivated by the partisan pro-beef sentiment circulating on social media, the announcement also disappointed many people in the food and animal-welfare world.
“I love Epicurious, but this seems a little short-sighted,” said Danielle Nierenberg, a food activist and the founder of Food Tank, an NPO focused on sustainability and equity.
She said there were options for more sustainable beef, including regenerative farming methods and pasture-raised cattle.
“It might be good to reduce our meat consumption, but it could mislead consumers into thinking that all beef is bad. There are small-scale producers who need consumers’ support.”
Others said beef wasn’t the only food whose farming has environmental costs.
“Factory farming of anything from corn to cattle is environmentally destructive,” a user wrote.
Epicurious acknowledged that beef wasn’t the only potentially problematic ingredient to be found in recipes.
“All ruminant animals (like sheep) have significant environmental costs, and there are problems with chicken, seafood, soy, and almost every other ingredient. In a food system so broken, almost no choice is perfect.”
Although Epicurious explained its reasoning as an environmental one, animal advocates were disappointed that the publication didn’t take other factory farming into account.
Lewis Bollard, the farm animal welfare programme officer at Open Philanthropy Project, said he welcomed the increasing attention to the environmental impacts of meat, but he hoped people adopt a more inclusive definition of “sustainability”.
“(It) is not just about the carbon emissions, it’s ‘Is this a socially acceptable system? Is it sustainable for the community, and for animals?’” he said. He fears that urging people to drop beef – instead of reducing their overall consumption of all kinds of meat – would drive more people to simply substitute more chicken, which has environmental and animal welfare costs of its own.