Beef! It’s What’s Not for Dinner

The current culture war is over Democrats’ desire to put you in prison for eating beef or something, whatever Tucker is talking about. This is of course idiotic, but when did that stop the Republican talking points machine. After all, no one likes their policies so they have to pretend that eating a burger will lead to a nice waterboarding, which is of course not torture when it happens to brown people bu we all know that only whites will suffer here because Tucker says so.

Anyway, what’s interesting is that the food site Epicurious stopped publishing recipes that included beef an entire year ago and…..no one noticed! So they finally announced that as a policy a few days ago and now people are freaking out about it.

And yet we know that home cooks want to do better. We know because we actually pulled the plug on beef well over a year ago, and our readers have rallied around the recipes we published in beef’s place. For every burger recipe we didn’t publish, we put a vegetarian recipe into the world instead; rather than articles about ground beef, we talked about alt-meats from brands like Lightlife, a sponsor of this collection of recipes. And last summer, when America’s annual grilling holiday rolled around, we set our fires on cauliflower and mushrooms, not steaks and hot dogs.

The traffic and engagement numbers on these stories don’t lie: When given an alternative to beef, American cooks get hungry.

Why announce our decision now? While beef consumption in the U.S. is significantly down from where it was 30 years ago, it has been slowly creeping up in the past few years. The conversation about sustainable cooking clearly needs to be louder; this policy is our contribution to that conversation.

Addressing climate change requires legislation, international cooperation, and buy-in from the corporate sector. Individual actions like choosing alt-meat—or mushrooms, or chickpeas—instead of the real thing can feel so small they’re essentially pointless. But every time you abstain from beef at the grocery store or a restaurant, you send a signal—to the grocery store, yes, but also, and perhaps more influentially, to whomever you talk to about your decision. Our announcement today is simply us loudly (and proudly!) letting you, the home cook, know about a step we’re taking. (Admittedly, we’re also hoping the rest of American food media joins us too.)

Some of you will have questions (we’ve tried to anticipate those questions and answer them here). Some of you will wonder if Epicurious has become a site with an agenda. Rest assured, the beef recipes that were published in 2019 and before are still on the site; they are not going anywhere. Likewise, Epi’s agenda is the same as it has always been: to inspire home cooks to be better, smarter, and happier in the kitchen. The only change is that we now believe that part of getting better means cooking with the planet in mind. If we don’t, we’ll end up with no planet at all.

I know how much people love to make fun of vegetarians. Beef is a strong cultural identifier in this nation, especially among white men. But here’s the thing–beef really is the worst possible thing you can put in your body for the planet. Moreover, the Impossible burger is in fact very good. If we can have tastiness without the cows, isn’t that a good thing?