Editor's Note: This article was originally published on April 1, 2018. April Fool!

One of our goals at Serious Eats has always been to stay in touch with the wishes of our readers, even as we’ve steadily grown from a scrappy little blog into the faceless, multinational, union-busting, coastline-destroying, largely drone-operated and munitions-sales-funded cooking-knowledge conglomerate* we’re proud to call ourselves today.

* Fun fact: Serious Eats is the only entity in the world, for- or nonprofit, that has received seed money from both the Koch brothers and the Soros foundations. We once asked Ed to explain to us how this happened, but he just pulled a disheveled hamburger from his pocket and asked us to taste it.

Over the course of the last month, we’ve paid careful attention to the public response to some of our new content, and we’ve noticed a clear pattern: Some of our readers obviously have strong feelings about the recipes we’ve chosen to highlight.

Via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and comments on the site itself, they’ve shared their concerns in wording that none of us have ever heard before. Really, the novelty of expression we’ve seen has bordered on Joycean. We had to sit down for a good long while to take it all in.

But after we’d sat down, we got up again and started brainstorming about how we could better serve our audience. The result is that today, we’re unveiling an entirely new, entirely unprecedented direction for this website: Seriously Vegan. In other words, Serious Eats is going 100% vegan from here on out.

Radical, you say? Sure. We’ve spent years and years developing hundreds of recipes that are practically dripping with meat and eggs and dairy products. Sometimes literally dripping. We used to have a column that was completely about offal. We’ve manhandled whole octopus, sucked out every last bit of meat from a sea cockroach, and even broken into a giant ostrich egg for the benefit of our Instagram followers. We’ve published two recipes since the beginning of this year that are basically nothing more than vats of boiled meat.

Yet our formerly omnivorous readership has been so responsive, so engaged with our vegan recipes in a way that they never were with these animal-fat-smothered trifles. Once we saw the spike in our pageviews powerful emotional connection that these creations had produced, the decision was basically made for us.**

** At one point during our meeting on the subject, someone suggested we simply continue to publish a mixture of vegetarian and nonvegetarian content, as we always have. We collectively considered this for only a moment before laughing it off and yelling, “Pick a side, buddy!”

For the few of you out there who long for the old Serious Eats, consider this fair warning: At 11:59 p.m. tonight, every one of our nonvegan recipes, along with technique posts and equipment reviews specific to preparing animal products, will no longer be accessible. This drastic move isn’t just to underscore how committed we are to our new image, or even to hide our sordid past trade in animal flesh from the vegan mafiosi we’re frequently told are lurking among us. As is well known in online-food-media circles, vegetarian and meaty recipes are increasingly unable to coexist in the same digital space, as one set will inevitably overpower the other, sapping its life essence until it withers away and vanishes. And we want our baby vegan recipes to thrive, just like the soybean plants that fuel them! Soyyyy milk!

Over the coming months, we’ll be working hard to replace that old meaty content with exciting new recipes. We don’t want to ruin the surprise, but...let’s just say that, given the right treatment and enough Worcestershire sauce, a Brussels sprout makes a really convincing meatball. On the sweet side of things, we regret to inform loyal BraveTart fans that after the announcement of our pivot to vegan, Pastry Wizard Stella Parks issued the following statement:

That said, it gives us great pleasure to announce that we've entered a dessert partnership with upstate New York's Apple Bottom Orchards to produce a series of mouthwatering fruit-based content. You'll never be forced out on a reluctant hunt for buttermilk again!

So start your screen-grabbing, C&P-ing, and wayback machine–ing now, omnivorous ones. A new era is dawning at Serious Eats, and its name is Seriously VeganTM***

***pending

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