Epicurious is righting cultural wrongs one recipe at a time

NEW YORK (AP) — With a new Black editor in chief and promises to do better, a little corner of the Conde Nast universe is taking racial and cultural injustice one recipe at a time.

Since July, the small staff at Epicurious, a resource site for home cooks, has been scouring 55 years' worth of recipes from a variety of Conde Nast magazines in search of objectionable titles, ingredient lists and stories told through a white American lens.

“It came after Black Lives Matter, after a lot of consciousness-raising among the editors and staff," said David Tamarkin, the white digital director for Epicurious. "It came out of conversations that we had about how we can do better, where are we failing and where have our predecessors failed?”

Called the Archive Repair Project, the work is also an outgrowth of complaints and controversies at Conde Nast. But it's just one effort on a full plate of initiatives, said Sonia Chopra, who's been executive editor of Bon Appetit and Epicurious for about four months, working under the new editor in chief, Dawn Davis.

In all, the 25-year-old site (with a staff of 10) is a repository of a massive 35,000 recipes from Bon Appetit, Gourmet, Self, House & Garden and Epicurious itself. They stretch back to 1965.

“The language that we use to talk about food has evolved so much from, sure, the 1960s but also the 1990s, and I think it is our duty as journalists, as people who work in food media, to make sure that we are reflecting that appropriately," Chopra said.

Epicurious and Bon Appetit have been at the center of accusations that also plague others in the food world: undervaluing staffers of color, perpetuating structural racism, racial and gender discrimination, and more. Some of those issues led several Bon Appetit employees to leave earlier this year after Editor-in-Chief Adam...