Stirring Up Awareness

I want to update you on the outcome of Sea Turtle Survival League's request of the publisher of Joy of Cooking to remove green sea turtle recipes from the well-known cookbook (Notebook, The Scientist, Jan. 20, 1997, page 30). In addition to contacting the paperback publisher, we got in touch with Scribner, publisher of the hardcover edition. In mid-January, Maria Guarnaschelli, a Scribner vice president and senior editor, told us that all sea turtle recipes would be removed from the next revised edition of the book. The recipes had been part of the book before green sea turtles were designated an endangered species in 1973, and, as we suspected, simply had been overlooked ever since.

In February, I received a letter from Ethan Becker, son of the late Joy of Cooking author Marion Rombauer Becker, expressing his unhappiness that the sea turtle recipes were still in the...