Recently I've been thinking about recipes and copyright. Several Japanese blogs alerted me to this question; they had explicit warnings against "copy-and-pasting the copyrighted recipes" on their sites. "Copyrighted recipes!?" I thought. It had never occured to me that recipes could be copyrighted.

Curious, I went to the U.S. Copyright Office to see if a recipe could be copyrighted. According to the laws regarding the issue, it appears that recipes could be copyrighted as literature. While the method itself cannot be copyrighted, recipes "accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions" could. In the same vein, cookbooks could be copyrighted as a specific combination of recipes. Japan seems to have a similar understanding of the copyright surrounding recipes.

According to an article in Food & Wine, there is a movement in a corner of the culinary world to change the copyright law to include recipes--cooking methods themselves. Implicated in that movement is none other than Homaro Cantu, the executive chef at Moto. Given what he does with his molecular gastronomy (edible menus, foam of food extract, etc.), it is understandable that Cantu wants to copyright his recipes. Both in form and process, his cuisine might resemble an art object than food in the traditional sense of the word. And yet, there’s still something strange about the idea.

A part of that discomfort comes from the fact that recipes, traditionally, are a result of collaborative effort. Behind many dishes, there are generations of cooks, both amateur and professional, who learned, modified and shared the recipes. An innovative chef might make a radical change in the cooking method or the ingredients to a recipe, but chances are, there still is some sort of an original on which he bases his innovation.

Furthermore, even if a truly innovative chef comes up with a strikingly new dish that doesn't resemble anything else, his creation might very well be a mutated cross-reference of two or more traditional recipes or cuisines. (This process is sort of similar to that post-modern favorite idea of intertextuality, I suspect.) I realize that a similar confluence occurs in the area of arts, which does enjoy copyright protection, so the fact that there are many culinary traditions behind a dish alone cannot justify the lack of copyright protection in cooking methods.

And yet, copyrighting recipes seem to be rather contradictory to the communal nature of cooking and eating. I cook dishes I learned from my mother (who might have learned it from her grandma, or from her friend), eat it with my friends and family, and while eating, share the recipe with others around the table. I do modify recipes and sometimes come up with a new combination of ingredients and condiments, but sharing these ideas with others seem to be a rather crucial part of cooking and eating--because I might have learned the recipe from someone else who was also willing to share it, because I might have gotten the idea from someone’s suggestion, or because I might have simply combined two culinary traditions that usually don't mix together. I'd feel like I should reciprocate. Of course, there's probably a whole other set of pressure and competition when you cook for a living, and it must be quite frustrating to see someone else run a successful business with a menu that's a complete copy of your own (which you spent weeks to develop). But still.

The copyright situation surrounding the Japanese food bloggers may be closer to the professional cooks' than that of some random amateur like me. In Japan, quite a few cook-bloggers, not necessarily professional but with an admirable skills and talents, have had their recipe books published purely because of their popularity in the cyberspace. If you are looking for an opportunity like that, it is understandable that you would like to prevent others from copying your ideas and recipe modifications, for that would erode the appeal of your brilliant originality.

And of course, the food is not simply nourishment. As I wrote before, cooking exotic food, adding an original twist to an existing dish, and coming up with an unheard-of recipes are talents that are highly valued among the Japanese cook bloggers. Their food/cooking life seems almost all-encompassing: Who cooks the coolest food is deemed the coolest person. Although the cook-bloggers may not openly admit it (because they blog "for fun," "to make friends" and "to share recipes"), there is definitely an element of competition. Since the coolest cook on the block (pun not intended!) might get a chance to get her recipe book published, the competition only intensifies.

And, as you might have suspected, I see this competition with a bit of weariness. The cook-bloggers are creating a huge reservoir of cooking references as they reference each other and try to come up with something new, and I certainly do benefit from their effort. (Hell, I've borrowed ideas...) But at the same time, going for copyright protection for their recipes seem a bit too far-fetched. It is also true that there are predatory companies that exploit the accumulation of unprotected amateur recipes for profit, but when we start to think only defensively, we may be stifling our own creative freedom and our tie to all the other cooks and cuisines from which we draw.