Well, the renowned foodie website hasn’t really banned beef; it’s just decided not to feature the stuff in its pages any more. The online magazine’s leadership has decided to fully support the cause of food sustainability by shunning one of the worst climate change offenders of all…
Illustration accompanying recent Epicurious article explaining shift away from
beef content: It’s going to be a Veggie world by 2050 (or so)…
The trouble, as I saw it – until I read more about Epicurious’ decision – is that Beef has been one of the all-time most-favourite main-dish protein ingredients in the western world since cattle were domesticated around 10,000 years ago, in the neolithic era. They were much easier to catch than most other wild animals and were found to produce milk as well as taste good. Who’s going to remain loyal to a magazine and its advertisers if the publication stops covering the single most popular food on the planet?
No serious push-back
The magazine also wondered if its planned shift in content emphasis would be sustainable. Epicurious Senior Editor Maggie Hoffman and former Digital Director David Tamarkin explained in an article in the latest edition. that they’ve been moving slowly and carefully away from seen since 1919 and have seen no significant negative effects on their readership.
“Our readers have rallied around the recipes we published in beef’s place,” Hoffman and Tamarkin said. “The traffic and engagement numbers on these stories don’t lie: When given an alternative to beef, American cooks get hungry.”
The Epicurious brass apparently also see themselves as change-makers – kind of like influencers, but in a more professional and official sense:
“Abstaining from beef means we can use our resources to focus our recipes on more climate-friendly foods,” the editors wrote in Monday’s FAQ post. “Our hope is that the more sustainable we make our coverage, the more sustainable American cooking will become.”
What can we expect?
Among the experiments conducted over the past couple of years by Epicurious content managers has been the publication of some recipes suggesting alternatives to beef in some signature meals celebrating major holidays. For example, for St.Patrick’s Day, a reader suggested substituting a potato-stuffed cabbage pie for the traditional corned beef brisket. And for Passover, the magazine featured a collection of 45 main dishes featuring chicken, fish and vegetarian options.
By contrast, new beef recipes have been published in Epicurious ‘only a small handful of times’ over the same stretch of time, with no major complaints, apparently.
Cattle may look cute, but they belch ‘ugly’
According to a CNN story on research into cutting cattle ’emissions’, “Methane [a byproduct of digestion] is produced from both ends of the animals, although over 90 ercent enters the atmosphere via their burps. And that’s a problem, because methane is a potent greenhouse gas, which traps 28 times more heat than carbon dioxide over 100 years. As the world’s appetite for beef has grown over the last two decades, annual methane emissions have risen 9 percent a year. According to the FAO, cattle are responsible for nearly 10 percent of greenhouse gases generated worldwide by human activity.”
The CNN story focused mainly on efforts of a company called Future Feed that is experimenting with feeding cattle seaweed rather than traditional grain and grass to minimize methane emissions. But the up-front statistics were the real attention-grabbers.
My take
Apparently, many Epicurious readers can take beef or leave it. I’ll take it, please. Even if it becomes steadily more expensive and harder to get. There are some circumstances in which beef has no peer. I will admit, though, that I have been voluntarily reducing my beef consumption and that of my family, largely in response to price increases that have already taken place. And we haven’t really missed it that much. Not that we’ve gone massively vegetarian; we’ve just come to rely more on proteins like chicken and fish, which are held by many to be healthier for us than beef, anyway. Has this been the result of conscious, logically-considered decisions? Not at all. Like most social and cultural changes, it just seemed to happen: Evolution vs. revolution. And that’s the way the ‘fall’ of beef as ‘king of the proteins’ is going to progress. Now I have an inking as to why the ‘experts’ are so concerned that the world won’t make it to their prescribed sustainability targets before the deadlines they’ve set for climate disaster arrive.
Note: Epicurious does admit that it won’t totally erase beef references from its pages and archives. Just refrain from publishing any future feature stories on the protein. Sounds like they also subscribe to the ‘evolutionary’ theory, too…
~ Maggie J.