Epicurious is rewriting recipes from its archives that used racist terminology

Since July, a small team at Epicurious has been combing through 55 years’ worth of recipes from Conde Nast publications (Bon Appetit, Gourmet, Self, House & Garden and Epicurious) to discover and eliminate racist and insensitive language used in cooking directions and headnotes. The initiative is called the Archive Repair Project, and so far the team has fixed about 200 recipes and other work by addressing, for example, headnotes that failed to properly credit inspirations for dishes and removing words like “surprising,” weird,” and “exotic” to describe ingredients and techniques. “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,” Sonia Chopra, executive editor of Bon Appetit and Epicurious, told the Associated Press.