Eat your veggies.” That’s an order many of us have grown up with. But now a deli in Cornwall in the U.K. wants to have its veggies and eat it too. And let no one else have any.
SONG
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata
Recently, Yasmin Khan, who is of Pakistani and Iranian origin, was about to publish a book of vegetarian recipes. In a nod to her cultural heritage, she called the book Sabzi, the word for vegetables in both Pakistan and Iran and other parts of the world.
Her publisher then got a letter from a lawyer asking Khan to cease and desist, and pulp any copies of her book. It turns out the Cornwall deli had already patented the word ‘sabzi’. The owner, a contestant on BBC1’s Masterchef, had named her deli Sabzi and accused Khan of copying her brand and infringing on her intellectual property. The book had to be removed from Amazon.
It seemed like the most absurd case of cultural appropriation; it seems ludicrous that a word as basic as sabzi can even be copyrighted. But the owner of the deli rejected the claim of cultural appropriation because she herself is partly of Iranian heritage. That actually made it worse. It would be one thing for a clueless person from a different culture to try and copyright a common world like curry or dosa but someone of South Asian heritage should definitely know better.
Then the deli’s landlord, which happened to be the Duchy of Cornwall aka the private estate for Prince William, also sent Khan a letter supporting the deli, which was, she wrote in The Guardian, “a plot twist so colonial that (she) had to check whether the East India Company had been revived”.
In the end, it all fizzled out. Faced with a barrage of criticism, the deli backed down and Khan’s book returned to Amazon.
SONG
But this tempest in a crockpot shows that despite years of multiculturalism, it is easy to establish ownership over a piece of someone else’s culture. As cookbook writer Rukmini Iyer wrote in support of Khan on her sub stack, “Over one billion people use the word ‘sabzi’ daily. And they aren’t talking about a deli.” Yet, some authority granted this person the right to corner sabzi for her own personal use. And a legion of her supporters in Cornwall got excised enough to pillory Khan for daring to use a term that was a part of her own cultural roots. Khan wrote she suddenly found herself the target of an angry campaign — “they were all women, all white and all from Cornwall”.
SONG
Sabzi-gate has precedents. American company RiceTec received a patent for ‘Basmati rice lines and grains’ in 1997 provoking angry reactions from India and Pakistan. Eventually, the patent over the generic Basmati name was revoked by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2001. A British-owned Vietnamese restaurant tried to patent the world pho, Vietnam’s iconic noodle soup. The controversy erupted when restaurant Pho, which is white-owned, sent a cease-and-desist notice to a small Vietnamese-owned cafe in London, Mo Pho Viet Cafe.
But it’s not always about white vs. brown. While Bikram Choudhury was not allowed to trademark a sequence of yoga asanas, he managed to trademark the name Bikram Yoga but the Indian government set up a task force to prevent the U.S. Patent Office from allowing more yoga-related copyrights.
Sometimes the patent battle goes the other way. Escalator and Jacuzzi started out life as registered word trademarks but became so successful that they became the generic names for any moving staircase and hot water pools with jets.
The current backlash against multiculturalism makes everything worse. It suggests no-one has the need to educate themselves about the culture of the other. It’s not just about my pet peeve that the New York Time Spelling Bee refuses to recognize tiffin as a valid word. More seriously It allows for a new kind of colonialism where a business can take advantage of general cultural myopia and copyright traditional foods and knowledge as long as they are the first mover. It would be like someone in India deciding to copyright clam chowder or a po’boy sandwich.
It’s as if it’s not enough they took the Koh-i-noor. Now they are greedy for the humble sabzi as well. What’s next? Chai? Masala? Masala chai?
SONG
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW