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.

Modern Inconveniences: Hybrid Theory

 

One of my most severe pet peeves is when a piece of equipment or technology gets it flat-out wrong. Not just mean visually or mechanically, but autonomically and ethically as well.

I had to rent a hybrid vehicle for a couple of days, and I absolutely hated the thing. Why? Because it constantly did things I didn't direct it to, that I would never have expected or wanted.

Bear in mind that this is decidedly not an Old Man Yells At Cloud problem. I'm a genuinely good driver- taught by professionals, including a former racecar driver. I can operate almost anything from a go-kart to a backhoe. This thing fought me at every step.

Audible chimes and dashboard notifications when I was 'too close' to a highway lane edge? Dinging at me while I backed up like it was a damn bulldozer, or even more loudly when there might be something nearby?

These aren't benefits or warnings, they're hazards. They're distractions.
But it gets worse.

I'd be stopped at a red light, and the engine would just... disengage. Then when I tried to move, the engine would start back up! Not only did that create another auditory distraction, it created a delay. It actively prevented the movement my pressure on the accelerator should have yielded- which is an obvious safety hazard to any competent vehicle operator.

Last among the stunners, the manufacturers appear to have dismissed the notion of personal responsibility. 

The sun was up, so I toggled off the headlights.
While switched off, they turned back on again! The damn thing wouldn't LET me keep them off!

In short, it appeared to be more dangerous to more qualified vehicle operators than to poorly skilled ones. Without a fair bit of time in the manual, I'm not even certain I could have fixed these dangerous settings. If a function doesn't suit my need, then the ability to readily disable it is absolutely essential, and this was anything but clear.

Now the question is- why? Why are the designs deliberately, obviously handicapped? The engine disengage problem is probably a hybridization issue- knowing where to put what in terms of optimal engine implementation seems a solvable issue, one currently technically functional but not ideal.

What also seems to be missing is the understanding of how to do so in a way that doesn't create a hazard for an operator with preexisting expertise, and so for those around them. Just as a skilled cook doesn't need a smoke alarm unless they're not in the kitchen, a skilled driver doesn't need to be told when they need their lights on, nor warned about where they are on the road... unless they ask for it.

Such things have a place. But they are only, always, and ever to be operator-engaged.

Notes On Stealing Shit

 

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.