Cooking With Cindy McCain
Cindy McCain wants you to cook with her. As it turns out, though, “Cindy’s Family Recipes,” are apparently, not so homegrown.
The New York Times and The Huffington Post reported that several of the hopeful First Lady’s ‘family’ recipes were in fact lifted word for word from The Food Network Web site.
Campaign officials were quick to blame the interns for being lazy, Rachael Ray chimed in suggesting that her recipes were meant to be “accessible to anyone” and McCain decided that she preferred “lemon chicken and beef stew” after all.
What this bit of news left me wondering about is, what makes an ‘original’ in today’s blogging, twittering, texting and emailing world? Certainly, calling something a family recipe creates the presumption that it’s not in Giada Di Laurentiis’ ammo, but times have changed, no?
My mother used to write down all of her recipes in a leather-bound, yellow-paged notebook that has seen better days. I remember penning my own “apple cake” recipe. Today, I can take a snapshot of that recipe and throw it into my Evernote. Or, I can post the contents of the book into my own personal blog. The amount of information out there seems to be boundless and originality is harder to come by.
How many rosemary chicken breast or chicken noodle soup recipes are truly ‘unique’? Perhaps my mother had one written into her recipe book, which was passed down to her from my grandmother and previously created by her mother.
While I may consider it to be my family recipe, another girl in another town may consider it to be hers. The same was probably true 50 years ago, only today, we know about it thanks to Google, FoodBlogSearch.com, Facebook and the like.
Cindy McCain and plagiarism aside, in my opinion, the Internet has taken a very personal and time-honored tradition into a globally-shared social activity. With cooking social networks, baking blogs and online video demos, the Web has managed to transform a second shift job into a technology-savvy, working professional’s hobby that still manages to honor both its roots and the technology-driven possibilities for its evolution.
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Comments (3 Responses)
I can’t blame McCain because I often pull out random pieces of paper to copy recipes I find on the Internet or magazine and after awhile - I generally forget where the recipes came from and lo and behold, it’s now a ‘Ruth Original’
Kase, I couldn’t agree with you more! A recipe is a recipe is a recipe. You can only tweak the ingredients of a well known favorite so much before it becomes a completely different dish. To be unique from what has already been published, online and offline, for such dishes is made that much more difficult in our food obsessed culture and during this information age. More often than naught, one would have to stretch beyond the confines of palatability (ie. Mac N Cheese with Pickled Herring…”Yum! Just how mom use to make it!”). But there will be that one TKO ingredient combo in the rough that will dazzle our taste buds and take us out of our gastronomical comfort zone into foodie euphoria.
And besides, can’t the media dig up more substantial anecdotes to undermine McCain’s campaign other than his wife’s culinary and publishing ineptitude? Hmm…I think I can come up with something. Anyone recall McCain’s affinity for the term “Gook” during his 2000 campaign? I assure you, it was not in the context of attempting to tell his wife to “cook” and it, definitely, wasn’t the moniker for a Cindy McCain homemade original. If anything, someone should have shoved one of Rachel Ray’s rosemary drumsticks into McCain’s hand before he so carelessly put his foot in his mouth with that Freudian slip.
Sarah
Posted on April 17th, 2008 at 8:47 am.
I love it! While its true that many recipes are going to be similar if taking copyright law has taught me anything, the way that you express your recipe will change. If she is saying her family recipes are word for word the same as the Food Network, she is lying. I am guessing there is not a whole lot of home cooked meals that go on in the McCain household.