AmazingRibs.com is supported by our Pitmaster Club. Also, when you buy with links on our site we may earn a finder’s fee. Click to see how we test and review products.

Hypocrisy By Epicurious

Share on:
ribeye steak with butter and asparagus

You have probably heard by now that Epicurious.com, a large cooking website owned by the huge publisher Condé Nast, has announced it will not publish any new recipes using beef out of concern for sustainability, whatever that means (someone give me a solid definition, please). According to the website editors, “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.”

This is bullpoop.

According to the EPA, all forms of agriculture produce only 10% of all greenhouse gases. Transportation accounts for 29%, electricity generation 25%, industry 23%, commercial and residential buildings 13%. If Epicurious really wants to be sustainable, the editors should talk to the site’s parent company Condé Nast (owned by Advance Publications), which regularly delivers print publications to more than 72 million consumers. They’d make a bigger dent in greenhouse gas emissions if they stopped chopping trees and grinding them into paper, running massive printing presses, and then shipping glossy magazines across the nation to postal carriers who drive gas guzzlers to deliver their ad laden publications.

By the way, if we reduce the numbers of cattle, we will also reduce the available manure needed for organic vegetables. And why oh why did they use the awful illustration below to make their point?

Illustration by Aless Mc.

If Epicurious is so opposed to beef, why go half-assed? Why not remove all the beef recipes on the site? Because they have a massive library of beef recipes and really don’t need any more, so it is easy to cut off new recipes.

James Hohmann in the Washington Post says the move “plays into the hands of the bad-faith actors who falsely claim that President Biden wants to limit their hamburger consumption.” In other words, it’s not helping the situation.

Look, the solution to climate change is not to stop eating beef. The solutions are to employ emerging technologies for more efficient transportation, electricity, and heating. Together, those sources account for 90% of greenhouse gases while agriculture accounts for only 10%, and beef production a fraction of that. If we want to reduce the carbon footprint of beef specifically, the solutions are new animal feeds that produce fewer gases (yes, this is a thing), stopping corn subsidies so beef prices will rise to their true level thus reducing demand, and for Epicurious and other food influencers (including my website, AmazingRibs.com) to convince our readers to stop eating crap beef like those billions of cheap tasteless quarter pound fast food hockey pucks, and instead focus our beef love on steaks and the good stuff.

Related articles

Published On: 5/5/2021 Last Modified: 5/8/2021

Share on:
  • Meathead, BBQ Hall of Famer - Founder and publisher of AmazingRibs.com, Meathead is known as the site's Hedonism Evangelist and BBQ Whisperer. He is also the author of the New York Times Best Seller "Meathead, The Science of Great Barbecue and Grilling", named one of the "100 Best Cookbooks of All Time" by Southern Living.

 

High quality websites are expensive to run. If you help us, we’ll pay you back bigtime with an ad-free experience and a lot of freebies!

Millions come to AmazingRibs.com every month for high quality tested recipes, tips on technique, science, mythbusting, product reviews, and inspiration. But it is expensive to run a website with more than 2,000 pages and we don’t have a big corporate partner to subsidize us.

Our most important source of sustenance is people who join our Pitmaster Club. But please don’t think of it as a donation. Members get MANY great benefits. We block all third-party ads, we give members free ebooks, magazines, interviews, webinars, more recipes, a monthly sweepstakes with prizes worth up to $2,000, discounts on products, and best of all a community of like-minded cooks free of flame wars. Click below to see all the benefits, take a free 30 day trial, and help keep this site alive.


Post comments and questions below

grouchy?

1) Please try the search box at the top of every page before you ask for help.

2) Try to post your question to the appropriate page.

3) Tell us everything we need to know to help such as the type of cooker and thermometer. Dial thermometers are often off by as much as 50°F so if you are not using a good digital thermometer we probably can’t help you with time and temp questions. Please read this article about thermometers.

4) If you are a member of the Pitmaster Club, your comments login is probably different.

5) Posts with links in them may not appear immediately.

Moderators

  Max

Click to comment or ask a question...

Spotlight

These are not paid ads, they are a curated selection of products we love.

All of the products below have been tested and are highly recommended. Click here to read more about our review process.

Use Our Links To Help Keep Us Alive

Many merchants pay us a small referral fee when you click our “buy now” links. This has zero impact on the price you pay but helps support the site.