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Most influential, most essential, best vegan and bestselling – many ambitious home cooks regularly rely on cookbook rankings to flesh out their collections. But a criterion that’s much more rare than publication year, style of cooking or cultural influence is animal welfare.

This is something that researchers from the University of California San Diego are seeking to change with their “animal kill index” of popular cookbooks. Authors Andy Lamey and Ike Sharpless examined 30 cookbooks by 26 celebrity chefs for the study – Making the Animals on the Plate Visible: Anglophone Celebrity Chef Cookbooks Ranked by Sentient Animal Deaths – which was recently published in Food Ethics.

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Lamey and Sharpless selected chefs with an English-language national television presence since 2000, and books that were published between 1993 and 2015. They determined that when it came to animal welfare, food choices weren’t necessarily aligned with public personas.