Free Republic

Food website Epicurious will no longer publish beef recipes, citing the impact of raising and consuming cattle on climate change. Cutting out beef from one's diet is "a worthwhile first step" in cooking more sustainably, wrote Maggie Hoffman, senior editor at Epicurious and David Tamarkin, former digital director of Epicurious in a blog post Monday. Livestock accounts for nearly 15% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions — 41% of those emissions comes from beef, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Fossil fuels produce the pesticides and fertilizers used to grow the corn and soybeans consumed by...

For any person — or publication — wanting to envision a more sustainable way to cook, cutting out beef is a worthwhile first step. Almost 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally come from livestock (and everything involved in raising it); 61 percent of those emissions can be traced back to beef. Cows are 20 times less efficient to raise than beans and roughly three times less efficient than poultry and pork. It might not feel like much, but cutting out just a single ingredient — beef — can have an outsize impact on making a person's cooking more environmentally...