While often an open secret in many fields, and the primary goal of several (looking at you, finance and insurance industries!), the food world is and always has been known for being full of pilferage at every level, on all sides of the equation.
It could be guest and customer related stuff- a pint glass from your favorite pub, or a menu from a place you'll never be able to afford again. Restaurants sometimes call that 'shrinkage', and while they don't want to have to account for it, they do. Something that goes missing is no different from something that's broken or otherwise damaged- it has to be replaced to ensure the operation continues to run as it should, and so there's a line item in the budget for it.
It could also be employee miscellany- food and liquor tend to vanish first and foremost. Sometimes it can be cookbooks, tools, equipment, or even paychecks. Timeclock fraud by management is a universal issue, but it hits the food industry the hardest and most often because of how it's structured. Irrespective of industry, that's a problem not looked at nearly enough.
But notice- all of these things are physical. Tangible. What about the stuff that's harder to pin down? Methods, recipes, concepts, even phrases or logos? Those are where it gets tricky, and most of the time the little guy loses out. A few years back there was a small tussle over DC chef Kevin Tien leaving his restaurant and taking his signature dishes with him. The irony of such a thing happening in a restaurant named Himitsu had me shaking my head. (For non-Japanese speakers- 'Himitsu' / 秘密 means 'Secret'.)
And then there's me.
From the tail end of 2020 up till now, I've been streaming on Twitch in the Food and Drink category. The pandemic shut down the cooking school I was teaching in, so I took my instruction digital. Plenty of people stuck at home needed a reassuring voice and some inexpensive, beginner friendly food. My regulars are always very much appreciated, and I do right by them, offering all manner of useful information and techniques. Getting a message like "I'd never thought to clean my spice grinder that way, and it works beautifully!" is music to my ears, and I take some small pride in knowing I'm doing something to make lives easier, better, and more .
However.
No fewer than half a dozen times have I brought out obscure techniques, recipes, or even bits of trivia for my stream, only to discover suspiciously exact iterations or subtle variations of my methods, phrases, or results published a week or three later on media conglomerate-sized channels.
Sure, coincidences happen. But this isn't about the plausibly deniable stuff you can just spend five minutes casually Googling and get ahold of if you know where to start. Sometimes the information is from texts that are out of print, or have nothing to do with the subject at all. Sometimes they're from personal interviews I've given, or not even from English-language sources- I know my way around at least three other languages well enough to have hunted down that sort of thing in the past.
But it'd be my word against a brand- sometimes an entire organization. I can't compete with their media and legal teams- even when I can prove I was the one first past the post, I'll get washed. Their massive viewer bases have a pretty good appetite for constant new information, so smaller creators sometimes get their stuff snitched on the sly, to have it repackaged and rereleased without credit in a format better for binging.
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