Epicurious, the food and recipe website, is cutting beef out of its diet.
The site announced in an article posted April 26, “The Planet on the Plate: Why Epicurious Left Beef Behind,” that it will no longer publish new recipes that feature beef, on environmental grounds.
“We’ve cut out beef,” says the article, bylined by senior editor Maggie Hoffman and former digital editor David Tamarkin. “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.”
The reason for the ban is beef’s allegedly bad effects on the planet, through greenhouse gas emissions. The Epicurious article cites research that almost 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock.
Epicurious actually made the decision to stop accepting new beef recipes more than a year ago, and to step up its coverage of meat alternatives.
“Why announce our decision now?” the article says. “While beef consumption in the U.S. is significantly down from where it was 30 years ago, it has been slowly creeping up in the past few years. The conversation about sustainable cooking clearly needs to be louder; this policy is our contribution to that conversation.”