Every Question You Have About Cattle, Climate, and Why Epicurious Is Done With Beef

Epicurious’s decision to cut beef from our coverage came after a lot of questioning. Those questions were both practical (are we ditching beef going forward, or scrubbing it from the site?) to more philosophical (could this really make an impact?). We know our readers may have some of the same questions we did; below, we offer some answers.

What exactly is Epicurious doing?

We’re refraining from publishing new recipes that contain beef. We aren’t running feature articles about beef either. And because we won’t have new content about beef to share, beef will not be featured in our newsletters and social media feeds moving forward.

Is this effective immediately?

We actually started to make this change awhile ago—we began to put this policy in place in the fall of 2019. Since then we’ve published beef recipes only a small handful of times.

Is Epicurious removing all beef recipes from the site?

No. All our previously published beef content is still available and there are no plans to remove it. 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.

Why is Epicurious doing this?

We believe that what we cook, and how we cook it, is a powerful action that anybody can take to fight climate change. Our mission at Epicurious is to provide cooking inspiration; the dinner ideas we suggest often make their way from our kitchens to yours. Abstaining from beef means we can use our resources to focus our recipes on more climate-friendly foods. Our hope is that the more sustainable we make our coverage, the more sustainable American cooking will become.

What’s so bad about beef anyway?

“Cattle contribute to climate change in multiple ways,” says Sujatha Bergen of the Natural Resources Defense Council. The first way involves the massive quantity of corn and soybeans grown to feed cattle. “It's grown using pesticides and fertilizer, which are actually produced using fossil fuels...we apply them all over the corn and the soy that we use to feed cattle.”

The second issue occurs when the cows digest that feed: Via belching and flatulence (yes, in that order), cows release methane into the atmosphere. And methane is a particularly powerful climate polluter, Bergen notes. “It’s actually about 80 times more powerful as a climate polluter than carbon dioxide,” she says. “So that’s another place where [cows are] producing lots and lots of climate pollution.”

When that feed passes through the cow and eventually becomes manure, it remains problematic. And this is the third contribution cows make to climate change: Spread on fields or stored in lagoons, the manure releases both nitrous oxide and methane into the atmosphere. In fact, manure is responsible for about 12 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions from America’s agriculture sector.

There’s also the issue of deforestation. Forests pull carbon out of the air, which is a good thing. But when forests are cleared to make way for cows—which happens at alarming rates—“you're, in effect, leaving extra carbon in the air,” Bergen says.

The story doesn’t end here. In addition to emitting greenhouse gases, beef is also “a very water-intensive product,” Bergen says. “Much, much more so than plants, and even other types of meat.” And the water that isn’t used to raise the cattle? A lot of it is polluted by all that aforementioned manure, which runs off into rivers, streams, and other water sources, where it impacts water quality and creates dead zones—that is, low-oxygen areas of the ocean that cannot support living things.

So you’re saying I shouldn’t eat beef?

Maybe! If you’re looking for ways to lower your personal carbon footprint, abstaining from beef is a straightforward and effective way to do it. But it doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

“I don’t think anyone has to be perfect,” says climate journalist and cohost of the Hot Take podcast Mary Annaïse Heglar (who happens to be vegan). “Giving up beef might not be a realistic starting point for a lot of people; it might just be cutting back.”

Why are you picking on beef but not pork, chicken, or seafood?

Because beef is the biggest climate offender in the American diet. “Over a 10-year period we found that just beef alone is responsible for about 35 percent of the greenhouse gases in our diet,” Bergen reports. “That's over a third and more than any other single item.”

Pork, chicken, seafood, and almost every other food—including conventionally grown vegetables—have carbon footprints and are variously culpable in polluting land, air, and water. But these foods are far less destructive to the atmosphere than beef for one simple reason: They don’t release methane.

Goats and sheep—which, like cows, are ruminants—emit methane in the same way cattle do, and according to the WRI, lamb is even more destructive to the climate than beef is. However, people in the U.S. don’t currently eat nearly as much lamb and goat as they do beef.

What about dairy?

It pains us to say this, but cheese, butter, ice cream, and milk made from cow’s milk is almost as destructive to the environment as beef is—and for all the same reasons. The only reason it’s marginally better is because, as Richard Waite of the World Resources Institute explained to us in 2020, “over its life, a dairy cow will provide much more food in terms of calories, protein, and other nutrients, than a beef cow.” When you divide a dairy cow’s climate impact over those calories, it begins to look a little less destructive than a cow that is slaughtered for beef.

Still, Bergen says, “the next best thing to do after you reduce beef in your diet is to reduce dairy.”

What about grass-fed beef?

It’s complicated, but in short, it’s still beef. We have a lot more on this subject here.

Does it really matter what we cook? To fight climate change we need policy.

Taking individual actions to fight climate change—or any social ill—often feels frustrating. The actions seem so small as to feel pointless. But just because an action is small “doesn’t mean that your actions have no consequence,” says climate journalist (and the other cohost of Hot Take) Amy Westervelt. Every individual action you take models behavior for somebody else; every purchase you make (or don’t make) sends a signal, however small, to the beef industry (and the grocery industry and the restaurant industry).

“Individual action is really just the first step toward collective action,” Westervelt continues. Those collective actions often start off small. “Maybe you push your entire family to eat less meat, or it could be getting involved on the policy side and looking at how your kid’s school system purchases food…”

It’s true that truly tackling the precarious state of our environment will require policy. But policy isn’t just at the state and national level. Rather, it’s everywhere: at your local college, at your place of worship, at your place of work. Epicurious’s ban on beef is policy too.

“The problem with beef is actually more systemic than it is individual,” Heglar notes. “However, it is one of the places where your individual action can have extreme influence on the system itself. It’s one of the most impactful choices you can make.”

“The worst thing you can do,” she says, “is nothing.”

Originally Appeared on Epicurious