The Conde Nast magazine announced it will no longer feature recipes with beef in an effort to encourage sustainable cooking. 

“Beef won’t appear in new Epicurious recipes, articles or newsletters,” David Tamarkin and Maggie Hoffman write in a blog. “It will not show up on our homepage. It will be absent from our Instagram feed.

Why is Epicurious making this move (and possibly turning off part of its audience that may enjoy beef)?

The authors claim “this decision was not made because we hate hamburgers (we don’t!). Instead, our shift is solely about sustainability, not giving airtime to one of the world’s worst climate offenders.

“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.” 

The blog noted nearly 15% of greenhouse gas emissions globally come from livestock, while 61% of those emissions can be traced back to beef.

Why announce the decision now, when increasing numbers of people are cooking at home due to the pandemic?  

“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,” they answer. “The conversation about sustainable cooking clearly needs to be louder; this policy is our contribution to that conversation.” 

The Epicurious homepage now features a vegan fried artichoke sandwich on a burger bun — not quite the same thing.  

Epicurious now provides content via an iOS app, a YouTube channel, newsletters and a Facebook group. And it has published a book "COOK90: The 30-Day Plan for Faster, Healthier, Happier Meals.”