Epicurious: After Beef

April 28, 2021 at 2:55 pm

Starting back in the fall of 2019, the recipe and cook­ing resource site Epicurious qui­et­ly start­ed cut­ting beef from its culi­nary cov­er­age. They pub­lished a select few beef pieces since then, but start­ing this week, no more.

Today Epicurious announces that we’ve done just that: We’ve cut out beef. Beef won’t appear in new Epicurious recipes, arti­cles, or newslet­ters. It will not show up on our home­page. It will be absent from our Instagram feed.

We know that some peo­ple might assume that this deci­sion sig­nals some sort of vendet­ta against cows—or the peo­ple who eat them. But this deci­sion was not made because we hate ham­burg­ers (we don’t!). Instead, our shift is sole­ly about sus­tain­abil­i­ty, about not giv­ing air­time to one of the world’s worst cli­mate offend­ers. We think of this deci­sion as not anti-beef but rather pro-planet.

The Planet on the Plate: Why Epicurious Left Beef Behind

If you haven’t taken inven­to­ry of your food deci­sions, please read this piece about their deci­sion mak­ing and the ques­tions they had to con­front. If you have already made changes to your diet, use these links to help spread infor­ma­tion to those around you. The writ­ing and facts are straight­for­ward. It’s also self-aware enough to admit that this is just one lit­tle act that needs big­ger and big­ger support.

Meat — be it beef, chick­en, or seafood — makes up about 5% of my fam­i­ly’s year­ly diet. We start­ed cut­ting it out over two years ago when it had been an every day fea­ture. On about fif­teen spe­cial days a year, we indulge and have a meat meal. Even then, we still choose more sus­tain­able options. Most often that’s local seafood since we’re on the Gulf Coast. We’re also not com­plete­ly vegan; we eat dairy and eggs and cheese. A sus­tain­able diet is a spec­trum and there are some easy wins to help the plan­et by cut­ting out the worst polluters.

Sure, there’s lots of bean and rice meals. But that’s okay. That’s what we should be eat­ing. That’s what a lot of peo­ple all over the world eat. Pitch in, do your part, and join the side of human­i­ty that wants Earth to stay functional.

(Photo Credit: Lou Liebau)

The Nation’s Corn Belt Has Lost a Third of Its Topsoil

April 20, 2021 at 1:05 pm

Sorry-not-sorry for anoth­er depress­ing envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter head­line. At least I did­n’t write that one. You can thank Becca Dzombak over at Smithsonian Magazine for it and for fol­low­ing up on the sci­en­tif­ic study that pro­duced the find­ings. This arti­cle and study are aggra­vat­ing to read because they prop­er­ly iden­ti­fy the root caus­es and that peo­ple just don’t change. We’ve known for fifty-plus years that sus­tain­able prac­tices would be bet­ter for the long term, but due to short term cap­i­tal­ist pres­sure farm­ers pump year­ly yields until collapse.

Aggressive plow­ing and mono­cul­ture plant­i­ng led to unprece­dent­ed top­soil loss dur­ing the Dust Bowl. In 1935, in the wake of stag­ger­ing soil and eco­nom­ic loss, Congress cre­at­ed the Soil Conservation Service (now known as the National Resource Conservation Service) to encour­age more sus­tain­able farm­ing. The orga­ni­za­tion encour­aged no-till plant­i­ng, which con­serves top­soil by not churn­ing it up as intense­ly as con­ven­tion­al till­ing, and cover crops, which help hold soil in place and replen­ish its nutri­ents, in the mid- to late-1900s. Today, such sus­tain­able prac­tices are begin­ning to spread as aware­ness of soil spreads too, but fewer than a quar­ter of fields nation­al­ly are farmed with no-till practices.

A rare plot of original prairie grasses and wildflowers showing the baseline for topsoil in Iowa, land and photo credit to Jon Judson, a sustainable farmer and conservation advocate
A more sus­tain­able alter­na­tive — cover crops and native grass­es on rota­tion. Photo Credit: Jon Judson

Hashtag ScrapCooking

April 13, 2021 at 9:00 am

Here is anoth­er sign of the times that sus­tain­abil­i­ty, resource­ful­ness, and stretch­ing con­sump­tion are top of mind. IKEA has a new cook­book — and Instagram Live per­for­mances — fea­tur­ing fifty recipes for find­ing fur­ther use of your table scraps. Banana peels, broc­coli stems, and wilt­ed greens get a sec­ond chance instead of going to the land­fill. You’re still expect­ed to have a pret­ty stocked pantry of sea­son­ings and spices to breathe new life into these scraps so it’s not all the way to strug­gle meals yet. That’s prob­a­bly best cov­ered by the Dollar General Food Desert Field Guide. Don’t get me wrong — this is a step in the right direc­tion, but we’re about a mil­lion steps behind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr1WLOSxqYs

Non-Fungible Token

March 15, 2021 at 2:50 pm

Since I men­tioned NFTs ear­li­er, I want to link two other arti­cles worth read­ing on the sub­ject. Seth Godin weighed in on the traps involved. He also linked to a more in-depth break­down of cryp­to’s envi­ron­men­tal prob­lems by Everest Pipkin. Here I was wor­ry­ing about web host­ing being prob­lem­at­ic while other peo­ple were cre­at­ing car­bon bombs to light up the atmosphere.

Abstraction. Speculation. Competition. So much of our world in 2021 is geared towards indi­vid­ual prof­it over col­lec­tive good. It’s been that way for a long time — real­ly for­ev­er. The innate bio­log­i­cal imper­a­tive of sur­vival con­tin­ues to hold grasp even after lay­ers of con­science. Sure, some cul­tures that value the group have emerged, but we need some species level evo­lu­tion. We need to find ways to make it eas­i­er for us to think about every­one instead of our self.

Screw NFTs. Screw infi­nite growth. Screw unpriced, neg­a­tive exter­nal costs.

The Great Green Wall

March 15, 2021 at 12:15 pm

The Great Green Wall is an African-led move­ment with an epic ambi­tion to grow an 8,000km nat­ur­al won­der of the world across the entire width of Africa.

Now this is the bold, humanity-as-a-collective action I need­ed to see this morn­ing. The world needs more peo­ple spend­ing time on projects like this and less on NFTs (or blog­ging for that mat­ter). Unfortunately, given the scale and bureau­cra­cy it’s impos­si­ble to direct­ly donate to the United Nations con­ven­tion cam­paign­ing the Great Green Wall ini­tia­tive. If you want to show some mon­e­tary sup­port, you’ll want to head over to a part­ner such as TreeAid to donate.

(via swiss-miss)

The Unsustainable Internet

December 1, 2020 at 2:00 pm

I’ve been try­ing to rec­on­cile the envi­ron­men­tal impact of work­ing on the com­put­er and Internet. Hosting this site means I should be accept­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty of the elec­tric­i­ty required to store, trans­mit, and work on it. Correct?

I’m not the only one com­ing to grips with this real­iza­tion. Mozilla recent­ly released a green­house gas base­line. They esti­mate that peo­ple using their brows­er in 2019 amounts to 785,474 met­ric tons of car­bon diox­ide equiv­a­lent (mtCO2e). That’s equal to the year­ly ener­gy use for 90,639 homes in the United States.

Pie chart of Mozilla's Emissions Distribution, 2% Business Operations versus 98% of Product Use
Mozilla’s Direct Business Operations vs. Product Impact

Apple has also made a bold promise to be total­ly car­bon neu­tral by 2030. That includes “the ener­gy used to power our cus­tomers’ devices.” They would not be count­ing the ener­gy my iMac is using right now since it is nine years old. The fine print states, “Apple assumes a three- or four-year peri­od for power use by first own­ers based on the prod­uct type. Product use sce­nar­ios are based on his­tor­i­cal cus­tomer use data for sim­i­lar products.”

Apple 2020 Environmental Progress Report, Historical and projected future emission bar chart

Closer to my orig­i­nal thought, Eric Bailey came along and asked, “So you wanna cre­ate an eco-friendly web­site.” His take includ­ed some good per­for­mance improve­ments for min­i­miz­ing impact but still came to the same con­clu­sion I’m run­ning into. Outside of delet­ing your web­site and not par­tic­i­pat­ing in ener­gy use, you’re going to need car­bon cred­its and offsets.

Luckily, there are some resources to help with this process.

  • The Website Carbon Calculator can show you a sober­ing esti­mate of your impact.
  • The Green Web Foundation can help find eco-friendly hosting.
  • There are tons of car­bon off­set com­pa­nies pop­ping up now. I haven’t done enough research to link any. That seems like the next step I need to take to jus­ti­fy this site stay­ing online.
Website Carbon Calculator, 1000 monthly pageviews equals one tree per year