Epicurious won't be publishing new beef recipes going forward. But what does that really mean?
“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. ...
“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.“
