The popular food website Epicurious.com announced on Monday that it won’t be publishing any new recipes for beef out of concern for climate change.
Editors said the website wants to encourage more sustainable ways of eating rather than dishes with beef. Besides no new beef recipes, there will be no articles or social media posts about beef going forward.
The website will still publish new recipes for chicken, pork and seafood and justified that by saying those meats don’t have the same level of environmental impact as cattle.
The change was actually made without fanfare a year ago, and editors said the data suggests readers respond very positively to vegetarian and alt-meat recipes.
But don’t worry, meatheads.
“All our previously published beef content is still available and there are no plans to remove it,” the website explained in an FAQ post about the change. “You may also see beef pop up in our recipe galleries, most of which are archival pieces of content that get lightly updated every year.”
In the post announcing the change, editors admitted that some people might assume the new editorial direction “signals some sort of vendetta against cows ― or the people who eat them” but insisted “this decision was not made because we hate hamburgers (we don’t!).”
Instead, editors said the shift ― which they believe is “not anti-beef but rather pro-planet” is about “not giving airtime to one of the world’s worst climate offenders.”
The Epicurious edict does not extend to other forms of meat such as pork, chicken and seafood. Editors said this is because studies suggest that “beef alone is responsible for about 35 percent of the greenhouse gases in our diet.”
Considering that Fox News ginned up a lot of fake controversy this past weekend by falsely asserting President Joe Biden’s climate change plan would ban burgers, it’s not surprising many people had a beef with Epicurious.
For instance, Mediaite noted that if Epicurious was really serious about limiting beef consumption, editors would simply delete all the beef recipes from the website.
One Twitter user noted that Epicurious helped sustainability in at least one aspect: It gave Fox News shows a narrative that should sustain them for many episodes.
One Fox News contributor got a head start into the grievance.
Still, a few Twitter users tried to point out that any issues people might have with the dishes may just be conservative virtue signaling since the change was made back in 2020 and nobody griped until Monday’s announcement, such as:
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