Fat Guy

Dougal, thanks for the amazing and comprehensive explanation. While I was reading I thought of a couple of minor points: Not everything that goes into a freezer is at the same starting temperature. When I buy a 5-pound bag of frozen strawberries at the supermarket, somebody else has already paid to freeze it. It may come up a few degrees on the way home but the input required to get it to my freezer's temperature is a lot less than with an equivalent quantity of room-temperature strawberries. At the other end of the spectrum, freezing something that's hot takes a lot of energy and something hot can also warm the things around it. So putting hot stock in the freezer is probably not a very efficient thing to do. Also, while the physics of the energy transfer may not be in dispute, I definitely find in real-world experience that full freezers (and refrigerators) hold temperature better. This echoes the experience I have with large volumes of pasta water. Even though the same amount of energy needs to be replaced once you add the pasta, and even though it takes more energy to re-boil a large volume of water, you still get better cooking performance and quicker rebound with large volumes of water because the initial temperature drop is so much less.

As Paul seems to be saying is his practice, I only use mitts for major things. For example if I have to deal with the Thanksgiving turkey I'll put on mitts. For most anything else, e.g. just grabbing hot pot handles or sheet pans, I use side towels (my preference) or pads (what most home kitchens seem to have). Mitts are cumbersome and slow to go on, so I only use them rarely.

Pesto freezes very well, and you can also do a non-pesto herb puree. Just herbs, oil and a little water in the blender. Freeze in ice-cube trays, then transfer to zipper bags.

Great to see you in the chat room, Mary. I rarely watch Top Chef, or any other food television, in part because I don't have cable. Last night's episode, viewed at my mother's apartment, was the first one I've watched this season. I really enjoyed watching it with a group of Society members, including one who was actually in Singapore. I hope to do this again next week for the final finale. At one point my mother wandered through and commented that Ed has poor posture. It seems clear to me that Angelo is far and away the best chef in the group. I've been to several restaurants where he was the chef and he's right up there. He has even done time with Alain Ducasse. Whether he's a good enough tactician and decision-maker to beat Ed is an open question. Ed, who is a decent journeyman chef with plenty of experience -- much of it with Daniel Boulud -- is a very capable cheftestant. Because the gamesmanship aspects of Top Chef are as important as the chef-ability aspects, Ed can beat Angelo if he plays the game better. I guess we'll see. I don't think the other guy is a serious contender, but you never know. I was shocked at how poor the wok skills of the cheftestants were. Only Angelo seemed remotely comfortable with a wok. You would think, they had some time to prepare to go to Singapore, they would have practiced a little more with that utensil. The food they cooked for that Food & Wine dinner was pretty impressive, though. I actually can't believe they pulled it together in an hour. Do you think they really did? Or when Tom said they each had to do two dishes, do you think they got extra time?

I'm not sure the things you say are or are not expressive are self evidently as you say, but I agree that it's ultimately a political decision whether to extend the copyright laws. My sense is that the entire culture of food and drink is evolving so much that it has become and will continue to become more like the types of things that are protected by the copyright laws. Right now we are still on our first generation of modernist chefs and diners. We're still entrenched in attitudes that say cooking is a blue-collar pursuit, where a chef's only value is his or her labor. As that continues to change, as more people choose culinary school over law school and more chefs become part of the global community of conceptual artists (as Adria already is), I think it will become clear that we need culinary copyrights for the same reasons we need them in the other studio and performing arts. Whether or not that protection extends to cocktails as well doesn't seem like a real question. The big issues will have to be the scope of what elements of cocktails can and can't be protected, and what the mechanism of licensing will be (an open playing field of enforcement, or an organized effort like ASCAP). I'm not entirely sure we're even talking about extending the law. It may just be a question of recognizing food and drink as the art that they are. That could be done at the level of interpretation and precedent, although a statutory solution might be quicker and cleaner.

KD1191, I think if you have a look at professor Buccafusco's piece on this subject you'll be impressed with how thoroughly he beats the heck out of the argument that recipes are not expressive. He goes on for pages and pages, but I can get into a couple of the points he makes that pertain to what you've said. Take, for example, music. Don't many composers, when composing, begin by tapping out music on a piano and then they write it down as music notation? Don't authors think about the story and the words before writing them down? As Buccafusco points out: "In truth, the recipe, the drawing, and themusical notation are simply means for fixing a work (the dish, the dance, or the symphony) in a tangible medium of expression. In the words of the Copyright Act, the recipe, the drawing and the musical notation allow otherwise ephemeral media to be 'perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated.'" He also notes: "It is no more true that the ingredients and directions for making 'Oysters and Pearls' is a statement of fact than it is to say that the arrangement of words in Joyce’s Ulysses is a statement of fact." I think he's got this aspect of the argument pretty well nailed.

How else would you suggest establishing or refuting the claim that recipes can be expressive?

As I mentioned above, I think Buccafusco's law-review piece does a great job of dismantling this received wisdom. To repeat, his argument is:

We have no absolute way of knowing whether demand or lack of creativity or lack of copyright protection is the chicken, egg, etc. If someone's goal is to skirt copyright by making minor changes then that's difficult to avoid in several fields. But in a world where cocktails enjoy IP protection if a bar wants to be able to say it's serving the original it's going to need to pay a royalty. The royalty doesn't have to be a villion dollars. It can be a few cents -- little enough to make the bother of a workaround not worth it, but enough to encourage creativity of the kind that earns royalties.

It's not that one could claim copyrights to the idea of a layered cocktail. That's more like the sort of thing that gets patented. It's not a fixed expression. But if someone comes up with a unique layered cocktail, that's more like the kind of thing that's already protected by the copyright laws. In other words, if you made it out of plaster and painted it, you'd be able to claim copyright protection, so why not if you made it out of booze? I figure there have already been so many combinations of various colors already done that it's not like someone could claim to have created the red-white-and-blue layered cocktail, but if someone does something new and unique with phosphorescence or vertical layers or whatever, that seems protectable. A unique glass design could also be a candidate for copyright protection, with no change needed in current law.

My initial reaction is that if a cocktail consists purely of X parts A, Y parts B, and Z parts C, shaken or stirred, it's harder to argue that it should be protected by copyright than it is to argue that the melon ball "cocktail" should. The melon ball is much more like the kinds of original studio arts creations that are normally protected by copyright. Then again, there are fewer notes on a piano than there are cocktail ingredients, and even simple melodies are protected by the copyright laws. I think, as in cuisine, if copyright is extended to cover mixology there need to be exclusions. All prior art of course has to be excluded, so nobody tries to claim copyrights over the martini. As for other exclusions, I'm not sure. The melon ball seems like a clear candidate for protection. Some of the work that has been done with layered cocktails seems protectable. Basic ingredients combined in a ratio and shaken or stirred, that may get closer to the "mere list of ingredients" theory that has prevented recipe copyright from happening. Incidentally, since this all started with Freeman, I thought folks might be interested to learn that I just got a press release saying he has taken a new job. Here's the first paragraph:

I think the best move is to get the Blendtec at Costco. If you buy the Blendtec from Costco you get a 7-year warranty from Blendtec as well as Costco's own unconditional warranty on top of that. So, for example, let's say you have the Blendtec for a year and it breaks. If you bought it from Costco you have two options: 1. You can send it in to Blendtec for warranty repair, or 2. You can return it to Costco for a refund. You can only buy it at a Costco during a Blendtec roadshow event. You can look on Costco's website to find out where and when these are happening. They only sell the Total blender standard package, not the bigger pitcher, but I've been entirely happy with that package. scubadoo97, I've never had an overblending issue with the Blendtec program cycles. If anything, I find myself adding time. I guess if your ratios of frozen stuff to liquid stuff are not ideal, the friction generated by blending will melt stuff too much. That's going to be an issue with any high-power blender, though, I think.

This website says China is the world's leading potato producer, with three times the production of the US. At first when I saw that I assumed the potatoes must be for export, but China is not a significant potato exporter according to the next list on the same site. So if the Chinese are growing 75 million metric tons of potatoes a year, what are they doing with them?

Architectural works are protected, and they tend to be substantially more utilitarian than culinary creations. Although it's possible to eat a culinary or mixological invention, it's not as though at the creative end of the spectrum anybody is eating or drinking this stuff for actual necessary nourishment. And I'm not sure how it follows that there's less opportunity for creativity with food and drink than with music etc. Each form has mainstream restrictions and the departures therefrom. A lot of these other fields are way ahead of the culinary arts, which are just now in their modernist period, but someone like Adria demonstrates the potential of the art. It may be that with standard cocktails in a glass there's nothing to stop minor changes from circumventing copyrights, at least not with any current works or their logical derivatives. (Likewise, if you paraphrase you can avoid literary copyright.) Or it may be that sometimes there's enough value in making and serving an exact copy, and marketing it that way, to justify paying a royalty -- which would make the ease of minor alterations irrelevant. Also, what Freeman's melon ball does, when it triggers the debate "is it a cocktail?" is demonstrate that there are directions people haven't thought much about yet. Right now the incentive structure doesn't encourage a lot of people to think that way.

I've been assuming (and saying) all along that And as discussed above I don't think the fashion industry parallels the culinary world. There is a lot of creativity, and a premium on creativity, in fashion. Maybe it would be increased or decreased by copyright protection. I don't know. But in the culinary world it's hard to imagine less creativity than we have now. Most cities don't have a single creative chef or mixologist. In the largest cities, places like New York where in fashion you have creativity galore, you have only a handful of creative people in a field that is largely entrenched and imitative. Granting copyright protection to culinary creations may be one way to shift the emphasis from imitation to creativity, by keeping pace with the reality of the changes in the way cuisine is perceived on the leading edge.

When I was doing blender research I came across the articleconnected with that Popular Mechanics video. It seemed so ill-informed, so clearly written by people who have no clue about blenders, that I was unable to extract any useful information. If you focus on unintended use when doing product reviews, you get silly results. It's like saying "We took these five automobiles and drove them into a lake, then measured how long they floated before sinking. Surprisingly, the Kia Rio floated the longest, easily beating out more expensive vehicles like the Porsche Cayenne. We give the Kia our highest rating." Fine, it can float, and it's still a piece of junk.

The hood has a fan, a couple of lights, and a digital clock/timer. Certainly it beeps any time you push a button to increase/decrease/activate/deactivate the fan or light. The timer seems to have a mind of its own and engages in random countdowns and alarm soundings. It also just spontaneously beeps once in a while. It's not that any one beeping appliance would be a big deal. But when you have four or five of them competing for your attention it gets impossible.

In the process of doing a little research on the relative energy efficiency of different refrigerator-freezer designs, I came across some surprising numbers regarding energy efficiency. For example, according to thisweb page: and Those numbers, if true, are pretty shocking. A 30 percent efficiency boost from keeping the coils clean? I have never in my life cleaned a refrigerator's coils. I guess I'll be starting. There are a number of other tips on that web page and others. Assuming most of the population doesn't know this stuff, I imagine there is a lot of energy to be saved out there.

I think the people designing these things must be moonlighting from their jobs designing children's toys. I remember back in the day toys were inanimate objects, silent and fueled only by imagination. Now every toy, even at the dollar-store price point, flashes and yells at you. I'd love to be a fly on the wall at the design meetings for these things: "We've got to figure out more ways to make it beep. How about if someone walks near it?"

We've been staying at a friend's house this week and the kitchen is equipped with a full battery of current-generation appliances. They work well, but they beep. This place has appliances beeping all the damn time. The dishwasher beeps when it's done, and keeps beeping to remind you it's done. The refrigerator beeps if the door is open for more than a few seconds. The oven, hood, microwave and toaster controls beep every time you press a button, and then they beep when they're done doing whatever they're doing. It's crazy. The combination of all the beeping means there's at least one thing beeping most of the time when you're in the kitchen. And much of the time it's hard even to tell where the beeps are coming from. At least there should be a way to disable the beeping. I'd be willing to take a step back from my general libertarian outlook and say there should be a law about that, enforced by the death penalty.

I think the cold-goes-down principle is why chest freezers are most efficient. But I'm not sure there's a huge difference in energy consumption between top freezer and bottom freezer. Bottom may be slightly more efficient than top, but both top and bottom are substantially more efficient than side-by-side. I imagine, though, that refrigerator design isn't as important as usage patterns when it comes to power consumption.

I've been having this exact same problem all week with our friend's LG. I've been having this problem not with the French doors but with the freezer drawer. The freezer is pretty full and stuff always seems to block the action of the drawer just enough to keep it from making a good seal. A couple of minutes after I walk away, the freezer alarm starts beeping. (Note to self: start topic on how so many kitchen appliances now beep all the time.)

Like I said, people who don't believe in intellectual-property laws at all aren't likely to be convinced that culinary copyrights are a good idea. But it may be possible to convince those who believe in intellectual-property protections in general that culinary creations are as deserving of copyright protection as anything else. Culinary inventions/processes are already patentable -- Homaro Cantu has dozens of such patents, and the big food corporations have thousands -- so that's not something that needs to be advocated.

Cost doesn't change the definitions but cost is a reason to offer copyright protection for works of authorship not just patent protection for invented processes.

Whether a patent or a copyright is appropriate for a given piece of intellectual property has nothing to do with cost. It has to do with definitions. Copyright protects works of authorship, so it is the appropriate type of protection for a restaurant dish. It also has the benefit of being a low- or no-cost form of intellectual-property protection (though enforcement can be costly), and therefore the only one realistically attainable by chefs as opposed to big food companies. Right now a chef can pursue a patent for a process if he or she invents that process, but there is no copyright protection available for works of authorship (at least that's the conventional wisdom; I'd be interested to see a test case where the briefs make the right arguments). It's like saying to a musician, if you invent the guitar you can get a patent on it. But, since the guitar already exists, if you write a song for the guitar anyone can copy it for free.