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.

I look back and sigh in disgust

I don't want to talk about AI. But as an educator, I have to. It's one of those Great Old One concepts, where the more you talk about it the more power it has to adversely affect its surroundings. Conceptually it's a bunch of gibberish, built by people who think in hours instead of centuries and powered by the ever-shrinking rainforests. It's an objectively unacceptable misuse of resources. Yet it's the Trendy Bullshit of the moment, picking up the slack left by fading or hiding crypto.

So. Consider one of my degrees: a B.Sci in Foodservice Management from Johnson & Wales University. It wasn't hard to get. The technical skills are largely a matter of repetition, but somehow the majority of the student body had trouble with the academics, something I found as astonishing then as I do now. Nobody who comfortably got through middle school in my hometown would have had any trouble with them. 

It was difficult to imagine how some (most) of the students in my classes were ever admitted to university in the first place. Often, as I proofread and (desperately) edited my classmates' work, it really just felt like "Can/will they sign the loan documents?" was the only real requirement, and that soured me on "higher education" quite profoundly. 

My distaste for industry-wide deceptive advertising and predatory loansharking aside, there was very little recourse for the students once enrolled. Either graduate and leverage the degree to try to get a job, or leave and hope for a wealthy benefactor or other miracle that lets them pay the bill. To that end, many instructors understood the limitations of the student body and resigned themselves to making the best of a bad situation. Now, though, things are very different.

The massive upsurge in AI-generated plagiarism and fabrication has left principled staff and faculty grasping at straws for keeping the learning process going and curricula moving forward. Grading has become an obligatory verification process before it gets to become what it's actually for- an improvement process. Instead of being spent improving the students' understanding of a given subject matter, that time is wasted making sure there's any hint of understanding to start with rather than fabricated and parroted bullshit artistry.

What, then, does one do about trade-centric schools, where academic classes are already unlikely to be paid beyond lip-service? I can almost guarantee that current JWU students are taking judicious advantage of AI to fake their way through academics even more desperately and empty-headedly than before, and graduating with even less understanding of / utility to the world they're being inflicted upon.

If they'd hired me like they ought to have, I could fix the problem. 

But they didn't- and there's no way they can. 

Bit of a shame though. If they'd learned how to do research properly they'd have made better choices. Irony.