The High-Profile Fight Over Recipe Plagiarism

In Australia, a war is brewing over allegations of recipe plagiarism.

Yesterday, cookbook author and celebrity chef Nagi Maehashi published a statement on her site entitled When You See Your Recipes in $4 Million Book. On her site, RecipeTin Eats, she accused fellow Australian Brooke Bellamy, better known as Brooki, of plagiarizing at least two of her recipes.

The statement contained two sets of screenshots. One compared Maehashi’s recipe for caramel slices to Bellamy’s and the other compared two Baklava recipes. In both cases, the recipes were nearly identical, both in terms of quantities of ingredients used and steps to prepare.

According to Maehashi, she approached Bellamy’s publisher, Penguin Random House Australia, about the issue. She claims that Penguin denied the allegations and required her to talk with their lawyers. She engaged a lawyer of her own and claims to have spent tens of thousands on legal fees to date.

Bellamy, for her part, took to Instagram to deny the allegations. She claims to have been using the recipes since 2016, well before the recipes were published on RecipeTin Eats.

However, the story didn’t end there. The next day, US-based celebrity baker Sally McKenney also claimed that Bellamy plagiarized one of her recipes. She was alerted to the alleged plagiarism by Maehashi and McKenney thanked her for the alert.

Bellamy has denied those allegations as well. However, her Instagram has been set to private.

This raises two questions: did Bellamy plagiarize and, if she did, what can be done about it?

The Problem with Recipes

In her original statement, Maehashi acknowledges that recipes are difficult to protect, both from a legal and ethical standpoint.

In the United States, copyright law is clear. Copyright “Does not protect recipes that are mere listings of ingredients.” This means the ingredients and actual steps of a recipe cannot be protected by copyright law.

This is a big part of why many cookbook authors include lavish descriptions, photographs, and other protectable elements in their work. It’s also why many of those authors were upset with Recipeasly, a short-lived service that stripped out that information.

As such, there’s not likely a copyright infringement here. Even if the elements were copied directly, there’s likely not much Maehashi can do from a legal perspective.

However, just because there isn’t copyright infringement doesn’t mean that there isn’t plagiarism. But that is also difficult to show. After all, there are only so many ways to make baklava and all recipes for it will have similarities.

But that’s the major problem for Bellamy. Her recipes aren’t similar, they’re virtually identical.

Striking Similarity

The website Food52 has a recipe for caramel slices that was uploaded in November 2018, before either of the above versions was published.

The recipes are very similar. They call for the same ingredients and the same steps. However, when you examine them closely, differences begin to emerge.

First, the amount of the various ingredients varies. While both Maehashi and Bellamy’s version calls for 125 grams of unsalted butter, Food52’s version calls for 150 grams of butter. Where both Maeshi and Bellamy call for 45 grams of desiccated coconut, Food52’s calls for 40 grams of shredded coconut.

These are small differences and there are places where the three recipes line up exactly, such as the 150 grams of flour, but the small differences outweigh the similarities.

This is what I would expect from two recipes for the same item. Yes, there will be similarities, but they won’t be near-exact copies. However, that’s what Bellamy’s version is. Though the phrasing is different, the directions are identical, down to the gram, degree, and minute.

It’s that exactness that makes Bellamy’s recipes seem suspicious. Some overlap is bound to happen, but, if the two recipes were created independently, you’d expect some minor differences.

To be clear, this isn’t to say that Bellamy plagiarized Maehashi. For example, two recipes could share a common source that we don’t know about. It’s simply saying that the similarities go well beyond what is likely coincidence.

Though wild coincidences do happen, they are the exception, not the norm.

Though Bellamy claims to have been using these recipes commercially for years, that doesn’t particularly help her case. Part of the challenge of writing a cookbook is translating known recipes into written words. We can’t validate her claim and there’s no way to compare a recipe that wasn’t written down to one that is.

When you compare the two written recipes, the similarities are too much to ignore.

Bottom Line

In the end, I have to put most of the blame on Penguin. Not only did they handle Maehashi’s claims poorly, but they likely bear some responsibility for any issues in the book.

Celebrity books, even cookbooks, are rarely written solely by the author on the cover. Though the amount of help varies from case to case, it can range from the use of ghostwriters to create the book to having editors and packagers correct and reshape what the author wrote.

Though the author still has responsibility for the book published under their name, Penguin, at the very least, should have noticed these similarities before publication.

Ultimately, their handling of the case did no favors to Bellamy. While I understand treating this as a legal concern, the issues raised were purely ethical. By not taking these allegations seriously and investigating what was being accused, they turned a private dispute into a public mess.

Now, with other authors coming forward, it’s only likely to grow. Regardless of whether or not Bellamy committed plagiarism, it’s a bad place for both her and her publisher to be in.

To make matters worse, it could have been avoided. Either with prevention and detection before publication or by addressing Maehashi’s claims after. Both are opportunities that Penguin missed in this case.