How BuzzFeed’s Tasty Conquered Online Food
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Edit: Some context: https://mic.com/articles/163958/the-secret-ingredient-to-buz...
“[The] recipes’ directions for preparing the assorted dishes fall squarely within the class of subject matter specifically excluded from copyright protection by 17 U.S.C. § 102(b).”
From : http://www.pddoc.com/copyright/publications_v_meredith.htm
“Copyright law does not protect recipes that are mere listings of ingredients….. Copyright protection may, however, extend to substantial literary expression—a description, explanation, or illustration, for example—that accompanies a recipe or formula or to a combination of recipes, as in a cookbook.”[0]
Clearly a cooking show or in my opinion a video showing the preparation of a dish in context and with commentary is protectable.
But all of the opinion on the internet matters about as much as wind striking the face of a mountain compared to an actual litigation.
Look for Serious Eats recipes/articles about Ramen, Pizza or Yorkshire Pudding for some good examples.
It definitely looks and feels like OC (I really know nothing about Tasty, so I cannot comment on their alleged plagiarism).
http://www.seriouseats.com/2009/10/the-food-lab-science-of-h...
Taking credit for the work of others in any context is still plagiarism.
If snippets of the video were direct cuts from another show, that's a different story. But making a dish yourself and filming it is your own creation, I don't see why you have to thank anyone for it.
It's equivalent to performing a symphony, but not mentioning the music was written by Beethoven. Not illegal, but wrong, even if you don't explicitly claim it's your own work.
It's the same as calculating force equals mass times acceleration, without thanking Newton every time. That's an example (natural law) which is always and immediately public domain, the same as recipes.
f=ma is an interesting example. I still think you should mention that it's Newton's Second Law if you're teaching it, and I doubt there's a textbook out there that doesn't. If Newton had discovered this law last year and you wrote a book about it without mentioning him, that would be deeply unethical.
Is BuzzFeed copying those parts or replacing them with its own?
Also, related, it appears you can patent a recipe: https://www.uspto.gov/custom-page/inventors-eye-advice-1, though it wouldn't help much here.
You can understand why people might be less inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt, given that in the past Buzzfeed has extensively plagiarized:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/editors-note-an-apology-to...
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/buzzfee...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/buzzfeed-vi...
>empirical technique he devised in-house to come up with recipes people love
This doesn't even mean anything. Empty words.
I get the impulse to defend the company you work for. It's commendable. But if you're embarrassed to see your employer be accused of plagiarism, it would be a lot more effective for you to pressure people internally to start providing proper attribution than to write comments like this. Internal pressure can often accomplish things that external pressure can't.
That said there's definitely always room for improvement.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/buzzfeed-ac...
You can't copyright a list of ingredients.
https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2015/03/24/recipes-copyright...
I guess that it makes sense, producing the clickbait equivalent for taste (you watch it and think "oh that looks mouthwatering") but I don't recall ever watching these and thinking they look healthy.
EDIT: To clarify, I am specifically referring to adding a lot more sugar, salt and fat than we need; I do realise a lot of these recipes use vegetables, have plenty of fibres and essential nutrients, and so on, but hyperprocessed foods that lack those qualities is a different kind of unhealthy than what I'm talking about.
For the record, I never actively look online for recipes on any of these sites, so maybe that is also the reason I only see these recipes.
Cauliflower Bites 4 Ways (https://www.facebook.com/officialgoodful/videos/137954362544...), Spaghetti Squash 4 Ways (https://www.facebook.com/buzzfeedtasty/videos/17693405533185...), Tornado Zucchini (https://www.facebook.com/buzzfeedtasty/videos/18670178935508...), Garlic-flavored zucchini chips (https://www.facebook.com/buzzfeedtastyjapan/videos/167296607...)
Take the cauliflower one: it's basically cauliflower, but now grilled with oil and topped with sweet/fatty/salt flavouring to make it more palatable.
Unless you mean that in a "it's worse than that" way
The "cotton" remark reminds me of the Cannibal Mouse episode of Mythbusters that will never be aired:
I mean come on, cauliflower with BBQ sauce? That's kind of the problem with all these recipes, you take just about any ingredient and either bake or fry it: it's crispy and chunky. Then you throw on flavoring with some kind of sugar+fat+salt based sauce, and you've got a yummy, crispy, chunky piece of food. I bet you could make an ingredient out of 50% paper and 50% something ridiculous taste good that way, but it's not healthy.
Like take the BBQ Sauce cauliflower's ingredients. There's 115% your daily salt intake from the sauce alone. You get 375 calories from your BBQ sauce which is mostly sugar btw. You get 120 calories from your olive oil, and 140 calories from the cauliflower, assuming you eat it entirely. Then ontop of the 130% daily salt intake, the recipe says to add more salt to taste and put more BBQ sauce ontop after baking, which alone takes 30 minutes.
It's ridiculous, you probably spend about 40 minutes making a recipe that's about 20% cauliflower and 80% (way too sugary - easily 2x daily amount - and salty) sauce. And that's assuming the entire cauliflower is used, in reality it's quite a bit worse.
Now sure it's not the most unhealthy dish in the world, but there's nothing healthy about it either.
I'm not sure they ever claimed that all their recipes were healthy.
Sure, they have more experience in cooking and you don't have access to the recipe, but you bet there is a whole assortment of salt, butter, sugar, other fats (vegetables may be "sauteed" in bacon grease or duck fat) or MSG.
Interestingly, the fast food industry has to publish nutritional information where "small business" restaurants are not held to this standard.
The problem isn't the nutritional content, it's that these videos are of recipes that just aren't very good to start with. They've nailed the ability to shoot something that looks incredibly tasty, but if you look at the recipes themselves, they lack flavour. Nothing has enough spices added, nothing is allowed to cook long enough, etc. Complexity and culinary sophistication is thrown out the window to make food-making look enticingly, deceptively simple and quick. They're not all bad, of course. You can sometimes make a good meal out of four ingredients.
In other words: The videos are designed to be addictive to watch, not to be realistic recipes.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/ariellecalderon/more-sugar-more-pro...
Personally, as someone who cooks regularly, I use Tasty recipes more of a guide than something to follow through to a T. e.g. they had a recipe for BBQ ribs in oven, and it suggests coating the ribs with BBQ sauce at the end, which is absolutely unnecessary. The fat and spices actually give it a pretty great flavor... no need for the sugar laden sauce!
I'm sorry, I don't understand. The techniques, or BuzzFeed? And how does social media protect them?
seems like a paid puff piece.
They just show up in your IG / FB feed all the time. From my experience people just "like" them because they look nice but never try to recreate them as the sped-up video format isn't great for that.
The america's test kitchen show is fun but the cookbooks I really kind exceptional. They tend to explain why your cooking.
Trying to burn through csa veggies, we're using platejoy (YCS15)
So lots of cheese isn't that much of a problem, in my opinion.
Most traditional recipes go into too much details, use unnecessarily complicated measurements and ratios, and aren't easy to visually memorize. These gifs or short clips are easy to skim through, easy to memorize and very accessible.
Are they the healthiest, most traditional or best tasting recipes out there? Probably not. Are they a great way to get people to start cooking? Absolutely.
But the medium isn't being criticised, it's the way it is used. And sure, even that can be explained in the context of everything being optimised for drawing attention these days, but that doesn't make it right.
There is nothing about video-based recipes that fundamentally goes against healthy recipes.
What the heck. Big content marketing push?
I'm surprised either group bothers with the recipes. The ingredients are American, as are the quantities (pounds/ounces), and the oven temperatures in Fahrenheit. I generally can't be bothered dealing with this, and in search results will prefer a British (or Australian) website to avoid needing to convert anything.
Of course, as one could have easily predicted, Buzzfeed has responded by slowly blurring the lines between its "viral" and "long form" content, and given the company's historically unethical control of content by the business side it hasn't surprised me at all to see "sponsored content" show up on the supposedly higher quality articles. I've often wondered, given the investigative bent they've shown how many articles have been quashed due to a timely cheque from a valued advertising partner.
I am quite positive that BuzzFeed's foray into recipes and the culinary world will soon be accompanied by a push with restaurant reviews, exposes on "trending" diets, advice on how twenty-somethings can eat healthy for cheap, etc. etc. This will also probably be given a thin veneer of respectability (i'm guessing a high profile hire or playing up the recruitment of minority writers[0]) until they've captured a profitable demographic and the corporate money starts rolling in. As many have already pointed out, they seem to see no harm in blatantly plagiarizing in order to bootstrap this product.
I guess in the end it's just really surprising to me that people are willing to forgive BuzzFeed for it's past and current crimes (seriously, they're given more leeway than venerable publications like the NYT and Washington Post, not that those publications deserve a pass) and continually compartmentalize parts of an organization that have been demonstrably proven to be ruled by the revenue department. Until people wise up and start wholesale banning all facets of BuzzFeed content they'll continue to get away with it. Fruit of the poisoned tree and all that.
[0] As a side note, since i'm already kind of ranting, buzzfeed's use of their hiring of minorities as a shield for their dishonest business practices has always tilted me the wrong way
Do you have more information about this? Sounds pretty gross.
While their listicles etc are still there, the investigative work they do deserves pretty serious credit.