Last week, prominent food and recipe website Epicurious.com announced in an article that they have decided to stop promoting or posting recipes that feature beef.
They reveal in the article that their choice to distance themselves from beef-focused recipes is based on a 2013 United Nations report on the negative impact that the livestock industry has on climate change. According to this report, 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock and 61 percent of those emissions are a direct result of beef production.
The food site declares that they “think of this decision as not anti-beef but rather pro-planet,” writing that “cutting out just a single ingredient—beef—can have an outsize impact on making a person’s cooking more environmentally friendly.”
Although Epicurious won’t be deleting any old recipes, they will no longer post or promote beef-centric recipes on their social media platforms. In fact, the company began to shift away from beef back in 2019, but wanted to make an official announcement because “the conversation about sustainable cooking clearly needs to be louder.”
Campaigns that step away from red meat often receive criticism from the beef and livestock industry. Though some big players in beef production claim that these campaigns don’t reveal the whole truth of the situation, they are supporting organizations that are offering more sustainable methods for beef production.
The Calgary-based Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef reports that the industry has launched a 10-year-goal plan just last week to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 33 percent within the decade and to reduce food waste by 50 percent. Perhaps they will be adopting seaweed diets for cattle as one method for achieving these reductions.
