Epicurious Will No Longer Publish Beef Recipes

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/dining/epicurious-beef.html

by fortran77 • 5 years ago

21 64 5 years ago

nytimes.com

coldtea• 5 years ago

The cant really has no end...

DoingIsLearning5• 5 years ago

There needs to be an informed decision pollution breakdown, industry by industry of the climate change impact.

Cows are the latest media exposed industry but I have no intuition on how they compare with other industries? Coal power plants? ICEs in auto industry? Petro-Chemical industry?

If the meat industry collapsed would we eliminate 20% of the world's pollution or 0.2%? I have no idea and haven't found any clear cut data on this?

junon• 5 years ago

This is the biggest problem with climate change in my opinion. Public education is abysmal and as someone that fully believes in it I still have the exact same issue - I have no clear understanding of the problem in order to make a clear decision as to where I could focus my efforts.

itcrowd• 5 years ago

There's a good chart with a short text summary at Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

Jetgocl• 5 years ago

Grants from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

DoingIsLearning5• 5 years ago

This is really really cool.

So looking at the world data the global warming effect of the whole world livestock production is 5.8% which is aproximately the same as the methane emissions of accidental leaks in the Energy sector industries.

It seems logistically much easier to solve the problem of coal mining leaks and Oil and Gas methane leaks created by a few multinational conglomerates, than to try and curb a fractured meat industry spread through multiple (often developing) countries.

senectus1• 5 years ago

be interesting to see what the predicyions would be if another World War broke out and we pretended that nukes wouldn't get used.

I'm guessing that the 73% of GHG from industry and energy production would jump to 90% during war 0.o

edit: Holy snapping duck crap. a quick google search bought up some really horrifying links:

https://www.wri.org/data/greenhouse-gas-emissions-over-165-y...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_war

I'm no human hating greeny but this makes me feel sick about us in general

toyg• 5 years ago

And what about forest-killing soy and avocado plantations? What about water-guzzling fields?

The “environmental” story of vegetarianism is such hypocritical bullshit.

elite_hackers4• 5 years ago

What about them?

vineyardmike2• 5 years ago

It seems the data doesn’t back up this assertion (based on studies linked elsewhere in this post).

PS. What-about-ism is not a sound argument.

bafumio6• 5 years ago

Your examples are still much better then beef.

Beef creates the pressure for forest killing soy btw.

jayd16• 5 years ago

Industry by industry doesn't reward good actors or innovation within an industry. Ideally we would just directly tax polluters and let the price reflect the pollution.

tommek40772• 5 years ago

They probably looked in their traffic logs and saw that google isnt sending users for those keywords anyway. PR-Stunt.

rognjen• 5 years ago

Exactly! And in a year or two when they'll just quietly bring them back should they realize it hasn't had the impact they wanted.

elite_hackers4• 5 years ago

And what exactly is the purpose of this “pr stunt”?

tommek40772• 5 years ago

An article and some backlinks?

colinb• 5 years ago

My spidey-senses are tingling. You're clearly a plant (!) sent by big tofu to double bluff us.

tasssko3• 5 years ago

I do think the problem is there is no differentiation between organic animal husbandry which has proven benefits (the pastures capture carbon dioxide etc) and the intensive factory farms. I have been reasonably selective of my meat sources over the past decade buying from a local butcher who sources from local organic farms and i am a happy customer and not ashamed.

bafumio6• 5 years ago

How does that make the co2 and methan go away?

Every cow produces it.

And do you have a conflict that you are able to pay higher prices for meat than a lot of other people?

throwaway69123• 5 years ago

He offsets the carbon by mixing in some veal

CaptArmchair3• 5 years ago

Every cow produces it.

Every individual cow does produce CO2 and Methane. But that's not causing rapid climate change. The root cause is perceiving cows - or meat in general - as a commodity.

Factory farming, raising and keeping tens of thousands of animals, has little to do with the historically intricate relationship between individual humans and cattle. It's about producing as much of a resource as possible in order to compete on an open market. In such a model, CO2 and Methane are costs to the farm that need to be externalized as cheaply as possible.

Not to mention externalized costs further down the chain to the customer such as the waste of unsold produce, single use plastic packaging, transport and so on.

And do you have a conflict that you are able to pay higher prices for meat than a lot of other people?

Not OP. I buy meat from a local butcher or farm.

No. I don't have that conflict for several reasons.

First, I rather buy quality meat once a week which I consume sparingly, then cheap, processed meat daily or even multiple times a day. So, that evens the costs out for me.

Second, I choose to pay a higher price. Why? Because that's closer to the true cost of keeping and raising healthy cattle on a small, sustainable scale. What I get is a quality product.

Third, I make self-cooked meals on a daily basis. I'm a stickler for good, tasty food. Choosing to approach meat more carefully prompted me to adapt my diet and replace the dishes I used to make. This is a positive experience since there's an absolute wealth of dishes out there that don't require meat. The meat I do buy and prepare only get minimally wasted (e.g. freezing portions, making stock,...)

Fourth, I don't support a model where the abundant availability of meat globally is taken for granted, even though the environmental and social costs are clearly there. My effort is entirely insignificant on a global scale, but at least it makes me sleep just ever so slightly better at night. That's more then enough for me.

elp2• 5 years ago

Is there something specific about cows that produces more methane than other animals?

Assuming we stopped cow farming completely and the fields were turned into wild live reserves of bison or something would emissions magically go down? Or do they no longer count as anthropogenic so we can magically ignore them?

tasssko3• 5 years ago

The issue here is there is no balance in the discussion. we push people to be vegan and they become radical environmentalists but the vegan lifestyle for the average person is filled with processed foods with no discussion of the environmental impact of food processing. Busy people have no time for some of the food preparation required to be vegan. There is no balance of conversation at all.

Regarding the comment about me paying higher prices, I can't agree. I spend an aggregate of about £1.50 / head on meat per day which is much less than if I decided to buy any processed soy or processed plant protein.

bryanlarsen• 5 years ago

Cattle on ranchland can easily be CO2 negative. Soil is a great carbon sink. So as long as the quality of the soil is increasing, we're removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Cattle and Buffalo are great for the soil, unlike other grass consumers like sheep.

Methane is a more difficult problem. It's mostly soluble with specific supplements and other mechanisms, but it's an expensive process that ranchers won't pay for unless there are proper incentives.

akvadrako2• 5 years ago

Indeed. I have seen a study that suggested free range cows in Australian grasslands were even less CO2 intensive per calorie than grains and also made use of land which wasn't farmable.

However such a thing can't really scale because of the large area required.

voisin• 5 years ago

Link to study?

dzhiurgis• 5 years ago

Grasslands cover around 3.5 billion heactares globally, representing 26-40 percent of Earth's total terrestrial area.

I assume wiki meant these are natural grasslands in which case sounds pretty scalable.

airhead9692• 5 years ago

You can't provide billions of organic, free-range, hipster beef burgers to the entire world and expect there to not be associated massive anthropogenic costs to GHGEs and air/water/soil pollution. The point is meat ag for the whole world is inherently not scalable, not sustainable, and a losing luxury like ivory that needs to go away ASAP.

fortran77• 5 years ago

The majority of the Western world eats too much food!

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/global-shift-obes...

We need to start taxing the Obese and Overweight to encourage them to put their forks down, and to pay for their externalities. With 67% of Americans obese or overweight, this would help more than switching to a "better" beef.

https://www.webmd.com/diet/obesity/news/20191220/growing-obe...

oliwarner• 5 years ago

I make similar choices for animal welfare reasons for all our meat, but better husbandry and land management doesn't stop the cow pumping out methane.

The problem is we still refuse to make sacrifices to show an impending climate disaster. We know where we need to be, we know that gestures like organic beef don't get us there. I hope our grandkids forgive us.

AI_Overlord_• 5 years ago

I was much more concerned about my beef consumption before watching this WIL video. It put things in perspective for me. The efficiency of beef production in each country, how water and land use calculations are done, equivalent nutritional value compared to other crops was very interesting.

It doesn't negate the moral problems with factory farming, but that wasn't the intent of the video.

https://youtu.be/sGG-A80Tl5g

equanimitivity• 5 years ago

Thanks for posting this link! Marginal land use, green water use, and inedible feed being standard really puts into perspective what stopping beer consumption would actually do. I found it a surprising perspective.

kangnkodos4• 5 years ago

But they still publish recipes with eggs, the innocent unborn embryos of chickens. Disgraceful!

bioinformatics• 5 years ago

Not to mention recipes using plants that are either eaten alive or die a slow death on a stove or in an oven.

kangnkodos4• 5 years ago

Yes. A thousand times, yes. Electromyography has proven that plants scream in agony at that point. Isn't there a more humane way?

New theories of consciousness posit that everything in the universe has consciousness to a greater or lesser extent. Even rocks are conscious to a small degree. And salt is a type of rock. Therefore, we must all rally together to shut down any company that encourages the ingestion of salt, a conscious being. We nosaltarians must impose our moral views on everyone else.

totesraunch• 5 years ago

We eat unfertilized eggs which will never turn into a chicken, so really it's just an single cell.

Unless you eat Balut but that's not common in the west and definitely not a recipe on Epicurious.

kangnkodos4• 5 years ago

Some people publicly admit that they think it's OK to eat eggs?! Outrageous! Reading those words are causing me actual harm. Why isn't there a trigger warning? Egg eaters are on the wrong side of history.

I mean it's one thing if you sneak out to Waffle House at 3 in the morning when no one is looking for two over easy.

But anyone who publicly condones this barbaric behavior should be cancelled.

And any company that encourages this barbaric, utterly un-eggs-eptable behavior should be cancelled.

shalmanese• 5 years ago

Ah yes, doing one thing to improve must be discouraged because it is not doing all the things.

kangnkodos4• 5 years ago

You grossly misunderstand the point I was trying to make. My point is more about who gets to say what's acceptable on the internet.

On the one hand, you have thoughtful, rational nosaltarians such as myself and millions of my minions, err... followers.

On the other hand, you have the craven beasts at Epicurious who want to encourage the consumption of eggs, living suffering plants, and even conscious salt.

Yes. Everything in this universe has at least a little consciousness. Even salt.

I say that the internet should be ruled by those with the most people pointing out problems. In this case the problem is that encouraging the consumption of conscious beings, such as salt, has logical consequences.

You may call my idea mob rule. But I call it the voices of a thousand rational beings simply trying to save one of our own.

Do you see what I'm saying now?

"Mob rule" as it might be called has one victory down, but we won't stop until we reach the logical end.

My moral standards are different and superior to the lax proprietors of Epicurious. Therefore, it would be wrong for me to hold back and let others violate my moral standards. I won't stop until everyone follows my unquestionably superior moral standards.

Epicurious Will No Longer Publish Beef Recipes

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