Food frenzy, or how Cook's Illustrated shows their ass to the cooks of America
Those of you who frequent cooking blogs know that it is commonplace, and polite, for a blogger to indicate an inspirational source for all recipes save an original. No matter how many ingredients are changed out, or what was done differently from the original recipe, a blogger will credit a source recipe as the inspiration for the new one
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But they haven't released a statement, an apology, or any word at all as to their response to this mess.
If this PR person were some kind of corporate loose cannon, or if she didn't truly represent the intent and the position of the company, surely someone, somewhere, would have said something by now, and this woman would have been summarily canned.
Because of the policies of theirs that have been in place all along (one must pay a subscription fee in order to even access their recipes online being a glaring case in point), it has appeared all along that their attitudes about sharing their recipes with the common household cook has been a bit different from those of Epicurious, the Food Network, Martha Stewart, Allrecipes.com and any number of other recipe sources. The difference being that they are extremely covert and exist solely as a commercial interest.
But this is an incredibly stupid move, because they are closing themselves off from the power of the viral advertising afforded by the internet. By pulling this kind of stuff, they are not only turning off people who have subscribed to their services in the past, but are shutting down opportunities for future growth by proving themselves to be of the elitist attitude that not only should the home cook pony up the bucks for the priviledge of using their recipes, but that the creativity and the abilities of those whose interest in food leads them to write and publish about it online are less than their superior standard.
I will grant you that there are times when I read horrors on the internet in regards to the culinarily criminal acts that people perform in their kitchens, and that I have headdesked on any number of occasions over the kind of rampant stupidity regarding food and its preparation that I've read in people's blogs and in cooking communities. But at the same time, I've also seen absolutely stunning representations of recipes from all sources, duplicated at home, both in their original forms and in variations on them, far more often than I've seen the stupidity, and I would think that those blogs would be a boon to any publication or medium dedicated to citing themselves as a reliable and superior source of food information. And most really smart food entrepreneurs make searching the internet a part of their research, and as a source of information regarding what they've done right, what they've done that they could do better, and how better to respond to the cooking public.
Sunny Anderson does this regularly--I know that because her searches have landed her here, to MY blog, on a couple of occasions. All this serves to do, for me, is show me that she is a person who is not only an intelligent marketer, but also sincerely interested in the job she's doing, and in making herself as responsive as she can be to her audience. And while I'm sure that there are times when she reads things that don't send her heart soaring over the moon in ecstacy, she learns her craft, and is willing to respond to those of us who are interested enough in what she does to try her recipes and write about them.
She could give people the smackdown for "stealing" her recipes, but she doesn't--part of the joy she feels in what she does is the idea that she has shared something that other people find valuable.
THAT, in my opinion, is a FOODIE. She GETS it.
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