Epicurious: US food website ditches beef in new recipes over environment

Foodie website Epicurious has said it will no longer publish new recipes containing beef.

For anyone considering adopting a more sustainable way of cooking, cutting out beef was "a worthwhile first step", it said in an article on its website.

Cutting out this one ingredient could have a significant impact on making one's cooking more environmentally friendly, it added.

The move was "not anti-beef, but rather pro-planet", two of its editors said.

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In the article, Senior Editor Maggie Hoffman and former Digital Director David Tamarkin go on to say that "all ruminant animals (like sheep and goats) have significant environmental costs, and there are problems with chicken, seafood, soy, and almost every other ingredient".

But they remind their readers that "almost 15% of greenhouse gas emissions globally come from livestock (and everything involved in raising it); 61% of those emissions can be traced back to beef. Cows are 20 times less efficient to raise than beans and roughly three times less efficient than poultry and pork".

On why they chose to announce the decision now, they say that while beef consumption in the US was significantly down from where it was 30 years ago, "it has been slowly creeping up in the past few years".

The publication has progressively been reducing the number of recipes containing beef over the last couple of years, publishing "only a small handful".

"Our hope is that the more sustainable we make our coverage, the more sustainable American cooking will become," the editors added.

The Epicurious website, which is owned by publishing giant Condé Nast, was started in 1995, and now also comes in the form of an app, a YouTube channel, a series of newsletters as well as a Facebook Group, with 8.4 million digital users and 8.5 million followers on social networks.

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