Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

EatingWell’s mission is to explore cuisines from all over the world and to celebrate fresh ingredients and the people—farmers, artisans, chefs, restaurant workers, producers and purveyors—who bring them to our table. Through science-backed wellness advice and smart stories about sustainability, we help readers make the best informed choices for their lifestyle. We’d only be telling half the story if we shared recipes without giving the context, the cultural attribution and the origins and evolution of a dish. It’s impossible to cover food systems, health and sustainable living—and to encourage healthy lifestyles—without addressing the systemic racism and biases that prevent some communities from having access to health care and culturally appropriate, nutrient-dense foods. We embrace the responsibility we have as a national media brand to cover all of these topics from a place of inclusion and representation. We devote resources to this by working with diverse writers, recipe developers and testers, editors, expert sources, illustrators, photographers and more to create our content.

In 2022, we followed through on our commitments, including these highlights: 

  • Conducted an anti-bias audit of the top 500 pages in our library with a team of independent reviewers and completed three review projects on our Mediterranean diet, clean-eating and “rice and beans” content so that we can ensure they are sensitive and free from biased language.
  • Started remediation projects to update problematic language in our content library. (2236 pages reviewed; 29 updated) 
  • Worked with the anti-bias review team to consult on and review article content prior to publication, as well as special projects, including the launch of two feature spotlights, “There's a Movement to Revitalize Indigenous Cuisines and Knowledge—Here's Why That Matters” and “African Heritage Diet as Medicine: How Black Food Can Heal the Community.”
  • Implemented an optional Diversity & Inclusion Contributor Survey to assess the effectiveness of our recruiting efforts and put a process in place to track active contributors quarterly.

These are the goals we are focusing on this year:

Content:

  • By the end of 2023, we will establish clear documentation for identifying, reporting and addressing bias and cultural appropriation in our content archive. We will also standardize our process for vetting new content for bias and cultural appropriation, where applicable, before it is published. This will include:
  • Creating an anti-bias best practices document, which can be referenced by editorial teams and writers for our nutrition content. This guidance will help to ensure that nutrition advice is covered with a perspective of gender and cultural inclusion and diversity and is free from harmful diet-culture language and imagery. 
  • Creating an anti-bias best practices document for our recipe, food and video content, which can be referenced by editorial teams, writers, recipe developers, testers, stylists and photographers.
  • Creating photo guidelines and review processes for cuisine-specific recipes to ensure the cultural accuracy of these photos (including food styling and plating recommendations from developers when possible).
  • As a follow-up to the anti-bias audit we conducted in 2022, we will do an update project of our Mediterranean diet content library to remediate instances of bias and diet culture language. 
  • We will conduct an audit of our celebrity news coverage with the ultimate goal of diversifying our portfolio of celebrity news and striving to report on celebrities, chefs, food bloggers, cookbook authors and other personalities ​​from many racial and ethnic backgrounds in order attract a more diverse audience for EatingWell and ensure that our entire audience feels seen and reflected in our content. 
  • Social media audit: We will conduct an audit of the content we are publishing and promoting on our Instagram account with a focus on both visuals and subject matter. Based on the results and recommendations from that audit, we will work with our social media and visuals teams and anti-bias experts to establish best-practices guidelines to ensure diversity of races, genders, body types and sizes and abilities.

People:

  • We will actively monitor our recruiting and hiring process to ensure that equitable opportunities exist for people of diverse racial backgrounds for every open role, and will follow anti-bias best practices when interviewing. We will do this by ensuring our full-time staff members have taken comprehensive training courses covering diversity in the workplace and unconscious bias.
  • We will continue to recruit and hire writers, recipe developers, photographers and other contributors from racially diverse backgrounds and underrepresented communities, with the goal of at least 40% of budgeted assignments being created by BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ contributors—when that information is available. In this work, we will take care to avoid race-matching or culturally pigeonholing contributors into certain content areas (for example, only assigning Korean recipes to Korean cooks).

Community:

  • By the end of 2023, we commit to identifying a nonprofit or community-driven organization that is aligned with our commitment toward fighting bias in the food and nutrition space, and planning to use our platform to further the work that they do, either through partnership, content coverage or monetary support.

We will provide regular updates on the progress of these goals.

EatingWell