Photo: Mack Male via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0, cropped. This adapted image is also licensed CC BY-SA 2.0.
Epicurious, one of the most popular recipe websites in the world, has announced it will no longer publish any new recipes that use beef, and it's doing it for the planet.
The site was launched by Condé Nast in 1995 and claims 8.4 million unique digital users and 8.5 million social media followers. In an article titled "The Planet on the Plate: Why Epicurious Left Beef Behind", senior editor Maggie Hoffman and former digital director David Tamarkin explained the decision:
We've cut out beef. Beef won't appear in new Epicurious recipes, articles, or newsletters.
It will not show up on our homepage. It will be absent from our Instagram feed.
Here's the twist. Epicurious actually stopped publishing beef recipes in the autumn of 2019 and only told readers now. If you've been cooking from the site for the last 18 months, you've been eating a little greener without even noticing.
Older beef recipes will stay in the archive, but nothing new is coming. The editors were keen to stress that this is not about anyone's dinner choices. As NPR reports, they wrote that "this decision was not made because we hate hamburgers (we don't!)" and that "We think of this decision as not anti-beef but rather pro-planet."
The numbers back them up. According to the editors, as quoted by Green Queen, "Cows are 20 times less efficient to raise than beans and roughly three times less efficient than poultry and pork." The editors cite UN Food and Agriculture Organization figures putting livestock's share of global greenhouse gas emissions at almost 15%, with 61% of that traced back to beef, and a major Oxford University study found that a global move to plant-based eating could cut food emissions by around two thirds.
They also had a message for everyone at home: "every time you abstain from beef at the grocery store or a restaurant, you send a signal." We couldn't agree more.
This is exactly what the scientists have been asking for. In 2019 the EAT-Lancet commission said the world must halve red meat, following 24 MEPs demanding a shift to plant-based diets and Germany's environment ministry banning meat at official functions. Only last week the world's largest meat company bought a plant-based brand.
The future is looking brighter.