Cookbook Wars

When I taught high school English, I waged three major campaigns:

(1) Try to get at least 5 hours of sleep each night.

(2) Catch students smoking in the female student bathroom next door to my classroom by using my youthful good looks to trick them into thinking I was a student also, though my conservative, decidedly UN-teenaged trendy clothes should have given it away, so that when I walked into the bathroom, they didn't immediately flush the evidence down the toilet. You'd think they'd learn to stop smoking in THAT bathroom, at least.

(3) Impress upon star-struck adolescents that cheating (which includes plagiarism) does NOT get you far in life, despite numerous multi-millionaire athletes' doping actions to the contrary.

It turns out that there's a controversy surrounding the new cookbook written by Jerry Seinfeld's wife Jessica. I bought Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food [published October 2007] because I liked the premise, the book's format is easy-to-use, and including comments from the Seinfeld kids (and Jerry) about the recipes is a clever addition. I was pleasantly surprised (or not surprised?) to find great humor throughout the book as Seinfeld tackles the monumental job of trying to get kids to eat healthy food.

But Missy Chase Lapine, the author of The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids' Favorite Meals, claims that Jessica Seinfeld plagiarized her book [published April 2007].

You can read about the lawsuit Lapine has brought against Seinfeld here. I hope that the allegation isn't true, but we'll see how it plays out.

In the mean time, student plagiarizers beware. Teachers know that you really DON'T write that well, and that if you were smarter, you wouldn't pick the very first article that appears in your Google search to plagiarize.