Epicurious Stopped Posting Beef Recipes And Science Deniers Are Big Mad
Epicurious hasn’t been posting beef recipes for the last year, but just announced why — and certain people on the internet are not having it
Folks, we have to talk about beef. Sure, it’s delicious — but the global beef industry as it currently exists is pretty terrible for the planet. Beef farming generates 60 kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of meat that’s produced, more than twice as much as any other food. That’s roughly eight times the emissions created by farming pork, chicken, or eggs. Nearly 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions on the entire planet can be traced back to beef. And so, in an effort to promote more sustainable foods, Epicurious has announced that they’re no longer publishing beef recipes (and actually haven’t been for the last year). And, predictably, the move has certain science-denying folks mad as hell.
“It might not feel like much, but cutting out just a single ingredient—beef—can have an outsize impact on making a person’s cooking more environmentally friendly,” Epicurious wrote in its announcement. “Today Epicurious announces that we’ve done just that: 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.”
The announcement continued, “We know that some people might assume that this decision signals some sort of vendetta against cows—or the people who eat them. But this decision was not made because we hate hamburgers (we don’t!). Instead, our shift is solely about sustainability, about not giving airtime to one of the world’s worst climate offenders. We think of this decision as not anti-beef but rather pro-planet.”
If this were a new policy beginning today, you might expect the kind of backlash that’s happening online. But in that same announcement, Epicurious actually revealed that they cut out beef recipes a year ago, and no one really noticed.
https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/1386838548813426688
But naturally, now that the announcement has been made, the torches and pitchforks have come out as people defend their apparently God-given right to guzzle burgers, the planet be damned.
A ton of people have announced that they’ll now be boycotting Epicurious, which seems suspect, since I kind of doubt they were previously getting their nightly beef recipes from a company that stopped publishing them a year ago. And then, there’s this guy, on a one-man crusade to cause as much environmental harm as possible for no reason other than spite. I’m sure his colon will thank him for this move.
The truth is, anyone can eat anything they want to eat. But if we want to eat more sustainably and protect the planet for future generations, one of the best things we can do is stop supporting the global meat industry. Try out Beyond or Impossible beef. Epicurious even has recipes for those. You can enjoy your burger and protect the planet, and if that’s an option, why not take it?
