Plagiarism? In cookbooks? Gosh.

"Food influencer" accused of plagiarism. Gosh. You think?

First of all, welcome to the world of food. Everybody steals, copies, and tweaks. It's normal, because food is ephemeral and imprecise. My own stance on intellectual property (Doesn't exist. Make your name with valid, tangible, and more permanent assets.) aside, this just starts a squabble where nobody involved looks good. 

Unless it's really, really obvious. 

The person in question is Brooke Bellamy- an Australian TikTok-er who has some robust internet notoriety and a place called 'Brooki's Bakehouse'. She's also got a book "Bake With Brooki", which is where the trouble shows up. The allegations of pilfered recipes are very much justifiable. I looked for myself to be sure. As a chef and a recipe developer myself, I'd back them up. I would never have allowed something so blatant to hit the shelves. It's not James Beard levels of pilferage, but it's a different sort of bad when it's not even your own previous publications you're pilfering from. Worse still, the recipes came from other easily found places with operators who pay attention to this sort of thing.

Recipe Tin Eats is a site I'm less familiar with, but I also don't do a lot of recipe hunting. The owner Nagi's recent post showed an easy to follow comparison between the recipes in question. By my standards, it's fairly cut-and-dried. It was pointed out in the first place by her fanbase, who discovered it after some digging and brought it to light. If it's that obvious even to non-professionals... yeah.

Sally's Baking Addiction is another name listed, and an absolutely extraordinary resource for the modern home baker. Sally knows her stuff, takes great pictures, doesn't overdo it on the ads or the storytelling, and the recipes on her site do what they say they'll to- I've used plenty of them myself. When I'm doing my own recipe dev work, her site is on a list of many I check for baseline recipes to compare with. 

Here's an easy to follow example for you. I went back to look- Sally's oatmeal cookie has a great deal in common with my own oatmeal cookie. Did I steal it? No. Why is it similar? Home baking has limits. Equipment, ingredients, and yield don't vary much at all, mostly because of storage and intent. Almost nobody's batching dough for a gross of cookies at once- they're making a batch they can fit in a bowl and bake in a home oven to feed a small number of people. Those fairly narrow parameters can make for a lot of very similar recipes. But don't underestimate the power of research. It's way too easy to be found out if you just lifted something wholesale, and the general public is veeeery happy to pour a little poison on someone's reputation, deservingly or not.

If you're going to just up and take something, do it more like Dylan does. His cookbook recipes all come from other places, but everyone is quite well aware because it's part of his schtick. Taking the horrors of home kitchens past and making modern and palatable incarnations is nice. Highlighting recorded-but-forgotten delights is even nicer!

Me, I don't use TikTok, and had no idea who this Brooke lady was. But I sure do now. I'm not linking her website, her socials, and especially not her cookbook. Screw that.

Chili crunch is older and better than David Chang.

 

That's all that needs to be said, really. Dude tried to claim "Chile Crunch", two words that describe a sizeable array of products with history in many parts of Asia, as a trademark of the Momofuku product line.

So, branding is a common horror, and taglines aren't new concepts either. The common pattern is a notion of "what it is, and what it does", whether the phrase is literal, figurative, or ironic. "Think Different", for example. That one from Apple got some serious mileage but also took no small amount of heat- particularly when Gandhi showed up as an example in their ad. Imagine the uproar if they'd also put in the Dalai Lama like they'd planned!

But how many things can you think of that use some variant of the word 'chili'? 

How many more that use 'crunch'?

Momofuku inexplicably owns the rights to the term “chile crunch” (spelled with an “e”, you know, like the country), as noted in a 2023 trademark from the US Patent and Trademark Office. This, to my mind, is a staggeringly unethical breach of linguistic protocol, using technicalities and semantics to put a thumb in the eye of 'truth in advertising' law and open up a massive profiteering exploit, made abundantly clear as Momofuku started selling licenses to others. They created an artificial chokepoint! 

Recently, Momofuku also filed for another trademark, this time to 'protect' chile crunch on a broader scale, expanding its territory to chili oils and seasonings, as well as taking swings at alternative spellings. Chile? Chili? Chilli? Talk about overreach.

I can't imagine how they managed to get such a thing approved in the first place. Did they want a brand identifier? Just add the notorious Momofuku name in front and I doubt anywhere near as many people would be complaining- but to keep it deliberately vague, using common descriptors that have decades of history on supermarket shelves? And then take swings at other businesses via Cease and Desist orders? It's clearly an attempt to cut off competitors' ability to openly access, use, and riff on an extremely common product.

Whose palms got greased to make this nonsense happen? I'd love to know.

This ham-handed shot at creating a rigidly defined proprietary product for the Momofuku brand -while deliberately avoiding the name or adding anything distinctive- has managed to aggressively highlight it anyway- and then drag that name straight into the mud where it belongs.

This probably won't sink Momofuku, but it's a solid hit that hopefully does some lasting damage.