Epicurious Will Stop Publishing Beef Recipes In A Move It Calls 'Pro-Planet'

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Digital food magazine Epicurious has announced it will stop publishing new recipes featuring beef in an effort to promote more sustainable cooking. Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images hide caption

Digital food magazine Epicurious has announced it will stop publishing new recipes featuring beef in an effort to promote more sustainable cooking.

Digital food magazine Epicurious will no longer publish recipes featuring beef in what it says is an effort to help home cooks become more environmentally friendly.

The Condé Nast-owned publication announced the change in an article published Monday but revealed that it "actually pulled the plug on beef well over a year ago." Senior editor Maggie Hoffman and former digital director David Tamarkin explained that because of cattle's carbon footprint, cutting out — or even cutting down on — beef makes space for more climate-conscious recipes.

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"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!)," they wrote. "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."

Today we announced that Epicurious is cutting out beef. It won’t appear in new Epi recipes, articles, newsletters, or on social. This isn’t a vendetta against cows or people who eat them. It’s a shift about sustainability; not anti-beef but pro-planet. https://t.co/yQ8PrtChtE

Going forward, the magazine will not feature beef in new recipes, articles, newsletters or social media content, though its previously published beef content will remain online and in archive-based recipe galleries.

It actually enacted this policy in the fall of 2019 and has published beef recipes only a "small handful of times" since then, as explained in an FAQ. Focusing on vegetarian alternatives for summer cookouts, for example, it has offered creative takes on meatless meat and grilled vegetables instead. Hoffman and Tamarkin said that readers had "rallied around the recipes we published in beef's place."

"The traffic and engagement numbers on these stories don't lie," they wrote. "When given an alternative to beef, American cooks get hungry."

So why beef, and why now? The editors outlined a number of their considerations, which all point to fighting climate change.

The single step of cutting out beef constitutes a big leap toward becoming more environmentally friendly, they explained. Citing an expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, they said cattle contribute to climate change in multiple ways.

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Those include the considerable quantity of corn and soybeans that is grown using pesticides and fertilizer to feed cattle; the amount of climate-polluting methane that cows release into the atmosphere; high rates of deforestation to make space for cows and the amount of water that is alternately needed to raise cattle and polluted as a result of runoff from their manure.