Food Network fired star Anne Thornton for adapting recipes a little too closely. (Photo: Food Network)

Yes, one of my favorite subjects was in the news again recently: the perils of adapting recipes. Here are two recent developments that affected a cooking show host and a food blogger:

1. Show cancelled because of adapting recipes. The Food Network cancelled the show of TV Chef Anne Thornton because she adapted recipes based on making small tweaks to the recipes of others, apparently.

Media outlets went crazy when the news hit that her show, Dessert First, was not renewed because many of her recipes were “plagiarized” from Martha Stewart and Ina Garten, specifically a German chocolate frosting and lemon bars.

“You take what you learn from them and then you riff on that,”she said in her defense in a story in the UK Daily Mail. “As for lemon squares, there’s only so many ways you can make them, so of course there will be similarities.”

Her comment sounds similar to those I’ve received on this blog. And I don’t necessarily disagree with her, in principle. There really are only so many lemon bar recipes, and is it your job to find the original one? Here’s what I’d say to her: “If you have nothing new to offer about a lemon bar, move on.”

What’s great about the Daily Mail story is that you can see a side-by-side comparison of her frosting recipe and Stewart’s. Scroll down to the end of the article and read the recipes. Clearly, Thornton made a few minor edits. It’s one thing to be inspired from someone else’s recipe and write your own, and another to just tweak a few words and amounts.

That rule you’ve heard, about changing three things in a recipe to make it yours? It didn’t work for her.

I asked on Twitter and Facebook what people thought about Thornton’s recipe writing skills. Here are some of the replies:

Food blogger Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen asked, “Why is it plagiarizing Martha or Ina, not the other 10K people who have published riffs on these?”

Cookbook author Nancie McDermott said (in a series of tweets) the report’s tone was sensational. “It presumes we can & should come up w/Unique NeverB4Seen Creations. Stealing = bad&wrong. But…who created lemon bars? Where? What time? If I could come up with something “new,” why couldn’t another 1 come up with same thing on own?” This stinks of ‘faux-righteous’ outrage. Seldom can we track ’1st Ever!’ And why bother?”

Food blogger and cookbook author Beth Sheresh of Kitchen Mage tweeted, “Nothing is new. Created a recipe from nothing but my head. Found THREE different recipes that were exactly same thing.”

On My Will Write for Food Facebook page, food blogger Amanda McInerny of Lamb’s Ears and Honey wrote, “I just wonder if there isn’t another agenda here. It is a rare and remarkable cook who can come up with a recipe which doesn’t reference some other dish, somewhere in the universe. With the popularity of food books, mags, tv, blogs etc I can’t see this issue going away or being resolved any time soon. …not at all sure that rare and remarkable is what tv execs look for in anything. I suspect they are after looks and marketability to attract the advertisers – it would be nice to think I’m wrong, though.”

2. Food blogger harassed for adapting recipes. Lest you think that people only notice when televisions hosts adapt recipes, Australian Food Blogger Amanda McInerney (whose comment you read above) posted an adapted recipe by UK cookbook author Dan Lepard on her blog. She left the ingredients list the same, but wrote her own headnote and method. Lepard’s business manager, David Whitehouse, came after her in the comments of her blog post and requested she take her adaptation down. She refused. Read the blog’s comments to see what ensued. Two intellectual property lawyers came to her defense! Whitehouse’s argument is that her work was derivative, and therefore subject to copyright law.

I dug around and found three other brownie and sweet potato recipes:

• On The Kitchn, the writer linked to the original Leopard recipe and listed only the ingredients, converting them for an American audience. I like that, even though readers have to print his recipe and The Kitchn’s.
• The blogger of PaleOMG changed the ingredients to include honey, coconut oil and coconut flour and didn’t mention his recipe — if indeed she got it from him.
• Most fascinating was a brownie and sweet potato recipe from Body-Soul from April 2009, more than two years before Dan Lepard published his recipe in the UK Guardian. So whose recipe was it in the first place?

What is the message in these events? Adapt recipes at your own risk? Or should we all just get over it, because everyone does it, and recipes can’t be copyrighted anyway?

You might also like:

• Adjusting a Recipe Doesn’t Make it Yours
• Should Bloggers Be Praised for Recipes They Didn’t Write?
• Whole Lot of Lifting Going On
• Recipe Attribution

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Increasingly, recipe writers are finding their own content appearing somewhere else.

Part of the problem is how ridiculously simple it is to lift work verbatim. On the net, just copy and paste. Some online companies write code that does it. In print, just retype a recipe verbatim, and present it as yours.

Here’s what Gwen from Bunky Cooks said in the comments of a previous post here in Will Write for Food:

“I was amazed at the number of people who came up to me after I spoke on a panel on ethics at IFBC in New Orleans last year. They said they had no idea that there were ethics they should be adhering to when writing their blogs.

“Isn’t some of this just common sense? Aren’t we responsible for our words and actions just as you would be in a job or at school? Why do some people think the internet is a place where everything is free and anything is yours just for the taking?”

Good questions. At least she and I got the opportunity to educate. I also spoke on an ethics panel for IFBC last year, and talked for 50 minutes on the subject last weekend at Food Blog South in Birmingham, AL.

Here are some new developments from last week where both individuals and companies are involved:

1. Recipes ripped off as an e-book. Elise Bauer got Amazon to shut down a page where someone in Bangkok scraped the content of Simply Recipes into an e-book and sold it on Kindle. A reader of her site tipped her off. One week later, eight more Kindle e-books appeared on Amazon that ripped off Bauer’s recipes.

2. Recipes appear on a recipe database site — surprise! A food blogger emailed me to say she recently stumbled across several of her recipes on Tastebook. She didn’t add them. She has contacted the company but has not heard back from them yet.

Similarly, some big bloggers are fighting with Velvet Aroma and Feastie, which scrape blog recipes into their sites, without permission.

3. Recipes ripped off by a future cookbook author. That’s right, people don’t just steal online content. An editor at a publishing house emailed me to say that, after receiving a cookbook manuscript, she discovered two plagiarized recipes during a taste testing.

“Someone at the table said something like, ‘I swear this is just like a (celebrity chef’s/magazine’s) recipe I’ve made.’ We went online  and found the original recipes in a matter of minutes. Everything’s nearly a straight copy-paste, including a typo!

“We had an intern spot-check some of the recipes the author had submitted, and we found a third had also come from the Internet. We talked with the author, who blamed an assistant. The author sent us replacements and assured us they were original recipes and not taken from other sources. The plagiarized recipe we discovered today was one of those replacement recipes.”

I introduced the cookbook editor to Amanda Hesser, who deals with this issue of lifted recipes during Food52 contests. She suggested a search of recipes at Eat Your Books. The site won’t show you the entire recipe, but shows a list of ingredients that appear in recipes in cookbooks, magazines and blogs, so you can take a first step in determining which are similar.

What can you do if you find someone’s stolen your recipes verbatim? First, take a deep breath. Second, read Bauer’s post about copyright theft, and read all the comments. Not everyone who does this is evil. Some people are simply naive. I hope, if this has happened to you, the person is in the latter category.

Photo by chanpipat from Freedigitalphotos.net

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Has anyone not heard of David Lebovitz? He’s a super successful American food writer blogger living in Paris. He’s also a gorgeous photographer, author of five cookbooks and one memoir, and author and co-author of two apps.

I first met him on email in 2005, when he endorsed my book, Will Write for Food. Recently we spoke about his success and philosophy on food blogging, writing cookbooks, social media, and how he finds the time to get it all done:

Q. Why do so many people adore your blog? What is it about you and your subject matter?

A. It’s a combination of things. Part of it is I started a long time ago so I’ve had a long time to practice, to learn about blogging and build a site. Part of it is I live in Paris and that interests people. Plus I worked as a professional chef, which is part of the mix. People say they feel my blog is very personal; they know the person behind it.

My blog is largely about cultural differences because I’m a foreigner living abroad, and the longer you live somewhere, the more it gives you more credibility. And perhaps people can relate to being an “outsider.” Years ago I was more of a critic of certain aspects of French culture, but now I’m more of an observer and I try to be more neutral. The longer you live somewhere, the more you understand how people are and I’ve become more integrated, too, and understand the culture better.

Q. How has your blog changed since you started your website in 1999? What kinds of posts do you no longer do?

A. Now I microblog on Twitter (105,000+ followers) and Facebook (26,000+ followers). I used to do link round-ups on my blog, but now I’ll put links and short things on Twitter, and pictures on Flickr or Instagram.

Q. How do you decide what to put on Facebook and what to put on Twitter?

A. Facebook is more about linking. Twitter is more about thoughts. When I’m out and about I can easily tweet a social observation or a photo of a bakery. I find that when people link to too many things their Twitter stream becomes less interesting because it’s no longer about them.

Q. How many times should a blogger refer to his or her most recent post on social media?

A. Once. You’re allowed to do it twice, but only if you sincerely believe people missed it and it’s a truly exceptional, amazing post that will revolutionize the world of food blogging.

Q. What was the turning point for your blog, when you knew it was successful?

A. The day I actually ran my fingers through Michael Ruhlman’s hair.

Q. Right, I was there! It was at the Food Blogger Camp in Mexico.

A. Yes, it was. Actually, I don’t look at statistics very often. It’s kind of a waste of time. When I was selling my current book, I saw that they were looking to base the advance somewhat on my online readership so I did check then. In general, book sales have been healthy because of my site. That’s what every author wants.

Chocolate Mint Brownies (Photo by David Lebovitz)

Q. Are your posts getting longer and longer?

A. My goal is to write a post that someone can read in 3 minutes or less. Even if it seems long, there are a lot of photos that people can scroll through. But I aim to write something readable in a relatively short amount of time.

Q. What’s the most important change you’ve made on your blog in the last year?

A. Moving to WordPress and switching servers. WordPress is so much easier to use, compared to Movable Type — which is for developers, because you have to know code. I had a wonderful web guy who was a Movable Type expert and then he stopped working with clients and I couldn’t find anyone who did Movable Type work, which led me to change.

Q. Which is your first love: writing books, blogging, photography, or social media?

A. I actually like blogging. It’s more fun than writing books because I can write something and post it the same day. I like the immediate feedback. And I can go back and edit things.

Cognac press trip (Photo by David Lebovitz)

Writing a book is interesting, though, because the process is longer and I learn a lot when I’m developing recipes. It’s difficult in a small apartment to deal with the recipe paperwork and the notes, though. And, of course, all the leftovers!

Q. Do you have one post that you think is amazing?

A. My posts on food blogging, food photography, and Paris information get lots of feedback.

Q. On your post about food blogging, you suggest bloggers “find your niche.” Some people worry that they will get bored with their niche. How do they avoid that? Can you chance a blog into something else?

A. You have to start a blog about what interests you. Now I’m branching out doing more savory recipes, because there are only so many desserts. I don’t make chocolate tarts every day.

People should blog about what their life is about. You can start or stop a blog, but I never get bored with my blog so it’s not been an issue.

Vegan Strawberry Ice Cream (Photo by David Lebovitz)

Q. I was at a conference recently where someone told me that recipes are meant to be shared, so what’s wrong with sharing them on a blog?

A. Music and movies are meant to be shared, too. But you can’t copy and redistribute them. If you have nothing to add to the recipe, you should just link to it. That’s sharing. Otherwise you should adapt it and write it as you made it.

Q. My sense is that you are interested in technology and often one of the first to jump on new media. Is that essential to be a food blogger or social media maven?

A. If you mean apps, my publisher provided my first app. For the Paris Pastry app, I wanted to do a pastry guidebook back in 1993 when I first moved to Paris. (It’s amusing because I still have those notes!) So when a friend who is a publisher approached me, we did it together. But in terms of being a techie, I can’t read CSS, I have no idea what it is, and I have no idea how to switch servers.

Q. Do you hire technical people?

A. Yes. They oversee my site, dealing with any technical stuff like WordPress upgrades, changing a font, cleaning up pages, or having something redesigned to be cleaner to read. I’ve hired web developers since 1999 and I think they’re a worthwhile investment.

In 2000, just after I started out, someone else who was starting out said they wanted to do it all themselves. I said, “Do it yourself and you take that time away from your baking and writing.”

Q. Let’s talk about product placement. How do you decide which trip to take or which product to feature, such as cognac or a ride on the Queen Mary? Are you bombarded with offers?

A. I only do things that I would really want do on my own, or that give me an opportunity to learn.  For example, I didn’t know much about cognac. It’s part of life in France and visiting the region makes me learn and understand more about not just the item, but the culture and terroir surrounding it. I’ve been on a few press trips, which are important in France, because it’s very hard to get access to places unless you’ve had a formal introduction. It’s much, much easier to go see a place, and meet the people, if all the arrangements have been made in advance.

As for products, if someone wants to send me a spatula to try out, I would take it if I were actually interested in it. (Especially because it’s often extremely complicated to get something delivered here.) I was interested in green non-stick pans, and the Actify fryer so I gave them a try, and put my impressions on my blog.

Most important is that there’s nothing worse than losing the trust of your readers. It’s not worth a spatula, a piece of kitchen equipment, or a bag of nuts if readers get the impression you are just trying to get freebies.

Q. How do you feel about sponsored posts?

A. I’d feel funny about having a company pay me to write something on my site. If I wanted to make a lot of money or have a lot of visitors I would do three chocolate desserts a week instead.

Q. Of all your ads, which is the best moneymaker?

A. BlogHer ads. Like the line at Costco, it’s important to stick with something for a while and not jump around to what looks to be better elsewhere. I don’t judge it from month to month. The thing I like about them is that they’re bloggers. All my interactions with them have been extremely professional.

Lime Meringue Tart (Photo by David Lebovitz.)

Q. You have other ads and affiliate programs too.

A. I have a BlogHer ad between posts, plus Amazon, Google Adsense, and Platefull in the sidebars. The ads are geotagged and only show in the US so I can’t see a lot of them. A lot of my readers are outside the US and I don’t make money from those that appear outside the US, but I love working with BlogHer.

Q. How do you carve out time to start a new project?

A. It’s very challenging. I’m starting to write a book now, and the blog takes up a lot of time, and I live in a country where there’s a heavy amount of administrative tasks. Life is a little more difficult here day to day. Things take longer. For example, if you need an orange or a sack of sugar for a recipe and it’s 9 p.m., there’s not necessarily somewhere nearby to get it. You need to wait until the next day, or when your market is open.

It’s hard to find the time, and it’s something I struggle with. For my last two books, I’ve gone out to the country for a couple of weeks where there’s no Internet access just to finish things without distractions.

I don’t have a schedule for writing. Today I started at 5:30 a.m. and I tested a recipe this morning. It took 1.5 hours to prepare and cleanup took 1 hour. It’s been in the refrigerator for 8 hours, and now it’s probably ready to taste. It’s the fourth time I’ve made it. Doing the math, you can see how long it takes to get work done!

Since I work a lot with the US, people there are waking up at 5 p.m. my time and they expect me to respond to e-mail. I have dinner at 8:30 p.m. and then I don’t want to go back to the computer, so I have to log off. Otherwise I make myself crazy.

Q. Do you think people really know you as a result of reading your blog? Or have you invented a character?

A. It’s really me. I’m writing about my life. I’m probably more open about certain things than other people are, like flushing meringue down the toilet. I’m often presenting a realist view of the city I live in. I feel like I’m pretty open and honest about everything on my site.

Q. Any final messages?

A. Food bloggers should think of themselves as part of a community. Don’t swipe material from other blogs. It’s not “passing along information.” Create your own content for your readers, and link to other people. That’s what the world wide web is all about.

You might also like:

• David’s post on Writing Your Own Cookbook
• David’s posts on Food Blog Alliance

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How often do you think about farm workers when you choose your food, cook it, or write about food? Yeah, I thought so. Me too.

Last week I went to a talk about agriculture and social justice by writer Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation; Greg Asbed, co-founder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW); and Lucas Benitez, co-director of the coalition.

Schlosser spoke plainly about how conditions for farm workers have not improved since he took a year to write about the servitude of strawberry pickers for the Atlantic in 1995. In fact, he said, it’s worse now. Minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, is now one-third less than pay in the 1960s and 1970s. And on top of poor working conditions and pay, some states have passed draconian anti-immigration bills that have terrorized farm workers and cost farmers money.

What struck me most about what Schlosser said is how the food movement does not seem to care. As food writers, we’re part of the food movement too. We write about food, farmers, even animals, but we don’t write about who supplies our food. Yet we should be grateful to farm workers for making it possible for us to eat healthy food every single day, he argued, and help them earn a living wage, with decent working conditions.

So as food writers, how likely are we to cover this topic, and how does it fit in with the writing we already do? Granted, most of us aren’t going to choose a career as investigative reporters, such as Schlosser or Barry Estabrook. A contributing writer to Gourmet, Estabrook wrote about tomato pickers in 2009, with a provocative subtitle: “If you have eaten a tomato this winter, chances are very good that it was picked by a person in virtual slavery.” I’ve read that former editor Ruth Reichl said one of her proudest moments as Gourmet’s editor-in-chief was publishing that article. Estabrook went on to write Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, with an endorsement from Reichl on the cover. If you haven’t read the book, it’s an eye-opening look about how our thirst for tomatoes on burgers creates human misery.

It might be easier to take action outside our purview as food writers. We can educate ourselves on this subject, and it might affect decisions we make. We could ask the farmers at the farmer’s market we frequent about how they treat their workers, for example. Or we might write a letter to Trader Joe’s for not supporting the penny-per-pound increase desired by the CIW.

But if you write about about the pleasures of eating, or if you educate people about the food system and where our food comes from, where does the subject of compassion and fairness for the people who pick our food come in? What is our role?

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Does opinion still matter? Yes. (Photo by Stuart Miles.)

Now that the New York Times’ latest restaurant critic, Sam Sifton, has moved on, the hand wringing begins anew about whether career food critics are doomed because of Yelp and food bloggers.

Let’s ask a different question. How have food bloggers changed restaurant reviewing? Here’s what I see as the biggest shifts:

1. Food bloggers don’t wait to review. In the old days, reviewers waited a month or so for the restaurant to get its groove. Bloggers figure that if they’re open for business, they’re fair game.

I like this approach. It implies there’s no cozy relationship between the two. Except that sometimes, there is. See No. 2.

2. Restaurants have opening events for bloggers. Print reviewers go to restaurants undercover and hope not to be recognized. They have expense accounts or get reimbursed as freelancers, whereas most bloggers write for free, as a hobby. So restaurants pay for them to come sample a meal. The cozy relationship is back.

3. Bloggers are more likely to cover an event than to review the food. Cover means “I went there and this is what I had,” versus. reviewing, which requires opinions about the food. At a poorly-attended panel on restaurant reviewing I attended recently (everyone was next door at a molecular gastronomy demo), a blogger said she doesn’t write reviews because her trips to restaurants are comped, as that would be a conflict of interest. Instead, she writes about the event of eating a meal.

Does less reviewing by bloggers have something to do with their confidence in generating opinions? Perhaps. Josh Osersky made that argument in Time magazine. “The current crop of food writers, at least the online ones, are a cacophony of dazzled novices, opining confidently in an intellectual vacuum,” he says.

4. Blog write-ups are more positive than print reviews. Another blogger at the aforementioned restaurant reviewing panel said that she doesn’t write anything at all if she doesn’t like the food.

The idea about “not saying anything at all if you can’t say anything nice” is not new. Your mother probably told you that. But it is not that relevant in restaurant reviewing, since most restaurants are neither horrible or stupendous, but somewhere between. (Except in the case of these food bloggers, who got duped. They were served frozen food and videotaped, without their knowledge, so some of them outed the organizers.)

“Mostly good” is the norm that qualifies for a restaurant review, because  it allows critics to write the pros and cons while still recommending the place. Bloggers, however, are more prone to puff pieces, with gushing headlines such as “Yet another fabulous meal at [Restaurant]”  and “[Restaurant], Will You Marry Me?”

5. Bloggers celebrate all kinds of restaurants, not just fine dining. They write about food trucks, joints, far-flung meals in monasteries, underground dinners, and tons of topics most traditional reviewers won’t touch. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why some newspapers have added reviews of less expensive places.

So, some of these five trends are positive, and some, for me, are problematic. What do you think?

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You might also want to see:

• BlogSoop, a site that aggregates food blog restaurant reviews in major cities
• An anonymous blogger reveals himself in this Eater interview

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Strawberry Rhubarb Smoothie. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Strohmeyer of Virtually Vegan Mama.

What do you do when another blogger copies your recipes, ideas, and even gets the same freelance gig? That’s the situation food blogger Jennifer Strohmeyer of Virtually Vegan Mama found herself in recently, when another blogger took Strohmeyer’s recipe ideas for her own blog, and even got the same freelancing gig at the same website where Strohmeyer contributes.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. We’ve had lots of discussions here about adapting recipes. Everyone modifies everyone else’s recipes, it seems. Maybe Strohmeyer was imagining things?

I think not. Let me tell you what happened.

But first, a little background on Strohmeyer. She started her blog in mid-January (full discloser: Strohmeyer is a former client), sending photos to Food Buzz and other photo sites to drive traffic. She got higher visibility all right, when another blogger noticed Strohmeyer’s site. These four coincidences happened, one more infuriating than the next:

Qinoa Date Nut Truffles. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Strohmeyer of Virtually Vegan Mama.

1. The case of the similar truffles

In March, Strohmeyer wrote a post on quinoa date truffles. She sent her photo to Food Buzz, where it appeared. Shortly, a photo of similar truffles with a different offbeat ingredient appeared on Food Buzz. “She pretty much ripped off my content and made it into the Top 9, “ Strohmeyer recalls.

At my suggestion, Strohmeyer left a comment on the blogger’s truffle post, saying something polite about how fun it was that she had used a similar unusual ingredient (I’m not linking to her blog because I don’t want you all to go postal on her). The point was to make the blogger aware that Strohmeyer knew about the similar recipe. The comment appeared, but then the other blogger removed it.

2. The case of the similar pie crust

Soon after, Strohmeyer blogged about a no-bake date almond pie crust. She wrote that she wanted to make tarts, but she didn’t have tartlet pans. A week later, the other blogger wrote a post about tartlets with a similar crust, but made with a different nut. Her photo made the Top 9 in Food Buzz again.

“She was obviously reading my blog and getting inspiration from it,” said Strohmeyer. “Ethically she should have acknowledged my recipe.”

3. The case of the mentioned pasta dish

Two months later, Strohmeyer wrote in the comments of her pasta post, “I’m making Penna Alla Vodka next…yum!”

Guess what happened? Yep. The other blogger made that same sauce, using a different title, and posted it on her blog. “This one was kind of an F U,” said Strohmeyer. “Was it a coincidence? I don’t think so. I’m not crazy.”

“I thought, ‘How dare you? You took my next post. ‘I didn’t do the next post on that subject.”

4. The case of the same freelance gig

Strohmeyer landed a gig where her blog posts appear on a website that attracts vegans. She added that info to her bio. Soon, the other blogger’s vegan recipe posts began appearing on the site as well.

Was it a coincidence? No. Strohmeyer figures the blogger read her bio and pitched the site.

So what’s a blogger to do? Should she contact the other blogger and confront her? “I don’t want to start a whole big blog war,” says Strohmeyer. “I don’t want the negativity. I try not to look at her website, but I see her photos on Food Buzz, Foodgawker and Tastespotting. I don’t know if people are going to make the connection.”

“She has a great blog,” Strohmeyer concludes. “She has a lot of great things going on. I feel like: Do your own thing.”

So far Strohmeyer has put on her big-girl pants and looked the other way. What would you do in this situation?

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You might also like:

• Adjusting a Recipe Doesn’t Make it Yours
• Should Bloggers Be Praised for Recipes They Don’t Write?

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Earlier this year, former Gourmet Editor-in-Chief Ruth Reichl began her consulting gig (rumored to be worth $250,000 annually) at Gilt Taste, a high end web food store that’s paying her to advise on food writing on its website.

Gilt Taste is a new kind of media for Reichl, one that blurs the line between advertising and editorial. That’s a sea change from her days at Gourmet, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. To my surprise, she welcomed the switch.

“The notion of the wall between advertising and editorial,” she begins in an interview with Eater, “If you’re dependent on sales and you only have things you are really proud of, there’s no need for that wall and there’s no reason to be embarrassed by saying a product is great and this is why it’s great.”

Really? My eyes widened. So she’s assigning advertorial now, where a company pays to get an enthusiastic article that looks and smells like regular journalism? And her big name freelancers are going for this? The former magazine editor in me got ready to protest.

No, no, and no. It’s so much tamer than that. Some of the stories have links to products Gilt Taste sells. That’s it. Links.

(Here are two examples. For a recipe by New York Times regular freelancer Melissa Clark on steak and potatoes, the words “boneless ribeye steaks” are hot, and they link to a catalog item for $127.95 for four 12-ounce steaks. On another web page, a video shows how to cook dry-aged ribeyes, with copy beneath it about having a dinner party, followed by a recipe with another link to a steak for sale.)

Big deal. A link to a product seems quaint. I’ve been doing it right here on my blog for over a year, when I link to books at Amazon, where I receive a tiny referral fee. Okay, it’s not my own store. That would be a conflict of interest. But Gilt Taste isn’t Reichl’s store either.

Now, I could be sarcastic about these luxury food products, which she compares to being less of a splurge than a Chanel dress. But I’m going to control myself. I just paged through the last issue of Gourmet, featuring splashy ads by Cadillac, credit cards, Rolex, and Cartier. She couldn’t care less about those advertisers. She cares about food.

“You end up surrounding your fabulous editorial with ads for things that you hate,” she admits in the Eater interview. “There is a firewall, and that means that you don’t get to say a product shouldn’t be sold in the magazine, as opposed to here, where we are all involved with each other. We never have something we are embarrassed about. It feels more honest to me.”

What do you think? Does the editorial in Gilt Taste seem honest to you? Is there room for ethical writing on a commercial website? Can you think of other examples?

Update: Ruth Reichl wrote to tell me “the money stuff is all laughably wrong. I’m certainly not being paid that much.”

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You might also like:

• Reichl Says She’s Not a Food Writer
• Consider the Lobster – A Gourmet Classic (one of the most famous articles from Reichl’s reign. In the Eater interview she reveals that advertisers weren’t interested in it.)

(Thanks to Laura Taxel for sending me the Eater article.)

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An urgent email from a p.r. person offered me payment of $50 per post if I would write 9 to 15 posts about a bakery chain over the next three months.

Obviously, she had never looked at my blog, because I don’t qualify. And anyway, I wouldn’t do it.

The question remained, however: Should food bloggers write sponsored posts, and under what circumstances?

In the email, the p.r. person took it upon herself to suggest what I might post about:

1. Sharing recipes from the bakery
2. Talking about what breaking bread means to you
3. Sharing your thoughts on going to the bakery
4. Linking to video assets of cooking /baking lessons.

(And if I wrote the maximum of 5 posts per month, that would be 15 posts @$50 each = $750.)

The p.r. person also wanted me to drive traffic to the bakery’s website on Facebook and participate in a Twitter party. I’d get a few free meals from the bakery. I’d also get a guaranteed minimum payment of $150 to $250, but there was nothing about what I would have to do to receive it. If I was interested, she concluded, I should email her my “monthly uniques” (how many hits my blog gets per month from individuals) to see if I qualify.

This email prompted a few questions about sponsored blogging. Since I come from a journalism background, it’s not right for me. But I’m not saying it’s not right for anyone. I’d like your opinions:

1. When is a sponsored post justified? Would you do it/have you done it, and under what circumstances?

2. Do you tell readers/would you tell them you are being paid when you run a sponsored post? What kind of language would you use?

3. Have you come across other food bloggers who run sponsored posts? How could you tell? Does it affect your opinion of them, or would you welcome this kind of opportunity?

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While at a doctor’s office last week, I read  an editor’s letter in Conde Nast Traveler, about the importance of telling readers the truth. I tore it out (sorry) and brought it to my desk to ponder.

I started out thinking her credo was noble, but then lost out to cynicism.

Editor Klara Glowczewska invoked the words of the founder in her editorial: “We are wholly independent. We pay our way. We have no hidden obligations. We have no higher obligation than the one to you: to provide truth in travel.”

This philosophy, she wrote, is even more relevant now, “with the proliferation on the Web and in other digital formats of travel advice from thousands of unexamined sources, a tide of unfiltered bits of data masquerading as reliable guidance and clamoring for our attention.” Translation: she doesn’t respect web writers.

She’s tough on freelancers. They can’t even fly at a “discounted rate.” “If we discover that a reporter has accepted favors while on assignment,” she writes, “…that person can no longer work for this magazine.” Traveler correspondents must always be anonymous, too. “If we were to accept favors, our views and recommendations would lack authority — and we pride ourselves on being authoritative,” the editor concludes.

Okay great. Now, how does this mission apply to the content? Therein lies the problem. All these ethics give way to relentless boosterism. It’s easy to be truthful if you’re only going to say nice things. And that is how our business works. We write about what we like, whether books, travel, food, or products. We promote.

Can you imagine the cover blurbs of Traveler if some of the real stories came out?

• Where Not to Stay in Venice
• Caribbean Islands to Avoid
• Five Awful Days in Britain.

Who would advertise? Who would buy it? So really, how truthful is it when you don’t tell the whole story?

The bottom line is that we writers can function truthfully without getting all our expenses covered (even though we’d love that) and we don’t have to be anonymous. We go to conferences, press events, restaurant openings, and educational seminars put on by companies. It’s not a problem. Because we are almost always positive in our stories — extolling the greatness of a food truck, a baking technique, a restaurant, a chef — the stakes are very low.

You might also like:

• Freebie or For Review: What’s the Difference?
• Food Writer Busted on Free Wedding Meal
• Separating Hype, Opinion and Journalism

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Food blogger Amy Sherman of Cooking With Amy

First I just Tweeted about this offer because it was so outrageous. Then I decided no, it’s worth sharing with you.

Amy Sherman of Cooking with Amy sent me an unsolicited email she received from a company that wants her to feature its product on her blog. That’s not unusual, right? But read on, and you’ll find some crazy requests. Here’s how the email begins:

“The event is at a culinary trade show in Italy. You would be picked up at the airport  for the event, lasting two days. We would put you up in a hotel and cover all meal expenses for the 2 days of the show. “

Sounds reasonable so far.

The Request

But now it gets suspicious:

“We would also want you to cook a unique recipe for 30 to 35 people at the show.”

Make dinner for 35 strangers, for free? At a trade show? And to top it off:

“They don’t have a big budget, so you would have to pay for your own airfare. However, our thinking is that you could really generate some nice attention for yourself by blogging about the event.  In addition, we would be able to support you through our digital press releases.”

So she should develop a recipe for no compensation, fly to Italy at her own expense, make the dish for 30 to 35 people at the show, then post about it on her own blog to “bring attention to herself.” (Because she has no way to bring attention to herself normally? Hello? She has a blog, people.)

The Cost of an “Opportunity”

I called Sherman, and she and I figured out what this oppotunity costs. A flight to Italy costs $900 to$1200 from California. Recipe development is $350-$500. Then say, $25 per person (because she’s not paying for ingredients and it’s only one dish prepared on site) to cook and serve a dish for 35 people = $875. She’d be out anywhere from $1575-$2125.

Sherman’s Response

Sherman, as you might expect, was exasperated. “It’s not like ‘Oh, we’re inviting you as a guest.’” It’s  ’We’re inviting you to come and work and not even pay your expenses.’”

“Food bloggers are the new slaves,” she added. “You should do all this stuff and consider it a great opportunity — to be taken advantage of.”

Next Sherman decided it WAS an opportunity, but not that kind. She wrote the marketing company a long, polite email, educated them about how how she works and what she charges. She’s hoping to turn the company into a client for future recipe development, content for a client’s website, spokesperson work, or marketing writing for brochures. (For those of you wondering how to make money with a blog, I hope you’ve re-read this paragraph.)

She might as well work it. “My experience is that some of these people come back, and they come back with money. You have to set the ground rules of what you’re willing to do,” she said.

What’s the moral of the story? Amy has a message for food bloggers. “It’s fine if you want to blog as a hobby, but once you start doing this kind of work, you’re playing in a professional arena.” she said. “You can’t call yourself an amateur anymore.”

“They would never pitch this to professionals chefs or to professional food writers,” Sherman continued. “They would never ask Lidia Bastianich to come to a trade show on her own dime and cook for free. But somehow, it’s acceptable to ask bloggers to do this.”

I suggested to her that marketers would not make offers like this if they thought no one would take them. She agrees. “There’s this whole category of food bloggers who are putting their toe in the water as professionals, but they’re not conducting themselves in a professional way,” Sherman concluded.

Got an outrageous blogger request of your own to share? Tell me how you handled it.

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