Earlier this summer, rocked by changes at the top of our masthead, Epicuriousmade some promises to our readers. They were promises of change: change to the recipes we publish, the stories we tell, and the people we hire.
We’re applying these changes to current and forthcoming content; the slate of recipes and stories that will appear on the site in the foreseeable future is inclusive in a way that is long overdue. But new content is just a small fraction of what Epicurious readers encounter. Unlike many other editorial sites, the bulk of our traffic goes to our archive: recipes (and to a lesser extent articles) that have been published as recently as three days ago and as far as twenty-five years back.
So as we begin the work of repairing Epicurious holistically, we’re paying particular attention to our history.
This work is in the very early stages, but it has begun. Epicurious editors have already identified a long list of recipes and articles in our archive that are in need of repair, and started to make changes to correct the content.
What qualifies a recipe or story as needing repair? It could be one of many things. Over the years, Epicurious has published recipes that have been put through a white American lens. We have published recipes with headnotes that fail to properly credit the inspirations for the dish, or degrade the cuisine the dish belongs to. We have purported to make a recipe “better” by making it faster, or swapping in ingredients that were assumed to be more familiar to American palates, or easier to find. We have inferred (and in some cases outright labeled) ingredients and techniques to be “surprising” or “weird.” And we have published terminology that was widely accepted in food writing at the time, and that we now recognize has always been racist.
To actually repair content that contains the racist language described above, we’re making edits. For example, when we come across a recipe with a reductive, racist title (i.e. Asian Noodle Salad), we’re looking closely at the recipe and its headnote and adding more specific and accurate language. That title may simply reflect the recipe’s ingredients (Cold Rice Noodle Salad), or, if we see that the recipe is actually a well-established dish, we will assign it its proper name. (Whenever possible, we are in communication with the recipe developer about their inspirations and the context for the recipe.)
Sometimes it’s obvious how we can repair a recipe or story. Other times it requires debate. Certainly there will be times when our edits do not go far enough; some of our repairs will need repairs.
Transparency is key to this process, so we will be adding notes to recipes and articles that have been edited. Most of the time you’ll find these notes in italics at the bottom of the page, but for particularly egregious articles you’ll find a note at the very top.
It’s depressing, disheartening, and discouraging—for the Epi staff, but especially for our readers—that problematic recipes and stories are so easy to find on our site. And it is frustrating—again, especially for our readers—that these repairs will take months, and maybe years, to complete. The ultimate goal is that we get to a place where we can say that the site has been repaired for good. Until that day, we’ll post regular updates such as this one.
Update: March 5th, 2021
We are now eight months into our Archive Repair Project, and the work is steady but slow. Since July 2020, the Epicurious staff has repaired an average of 16 pieces of content every month. As of this writing, we have repaired 128 pieces of content in total. By the one-year anniversary of the project, we hope to have repaired 200 pieces of content or more.
Not much has changed in terms of our process. Content is repaired by Epicurious editors and staff writers; we discuss the repairs at monthly meetings. In December 2020, theAssociated Press ran an articleabout the Archive Repair Project, and in response to that article we received some feedback about the Editor’s Notes we leave on repaired content. From the beginning we have left notes stating that the content has been amended, but now, in response to feedback to the AP article, we leave more detailed notes. These more detailed notes explain (albeit briefly)whatwe repaired andwhy.—David Tamarkin, Digital Director
