The authors of "FoodLaw" consider recipes serial works of applied art

2017-08-04 An artistic dish such as Gualtiero Marchesi’s “Riso, oro e zafferano” may be considered art, as the idea is incarnated in consumable goods which are intended to be infinitely reproduced right from the start. There is not one single “original” with many “copies”, but lots of “originals” of equal value. Its creative and original value makes this dish eligible for legal protection.
Carmine Coviello and Davide Mondin explain how to obtain legal protection for gastronomic creations in their book FoodLaw. La tutela della creatività in cucina (published by Edizioni Plan, 2017), written in collaboration with ALMA-La Scuola internazionale di cucina italiana, the International School of Italian Cooking.
Davide, does it still make sense to talk about copyright, in the cut-and-paste era of the internet?
“I believe it does. But first of all, we have to ask ourselves: do I only want to protect the form of expression I have given to my gastronomic idea, or the results of application of that idea? I can’t say I invented spaghetti alla carbonara, for example; but I may have my own way of explaining how to make it in words, diagrams or illustrations. In this case, I can protect the text I use to explain a recipe that is already part of the public domain. According to a decision of the Court of Milan in 2013, exploiting a gastronomic text by another person and copying it in full without their consent is plagiarism, even if we do cite the source: that text is a work of literature, and the person copying it obtains a moral or economic benefit from it.”
And what about the second case?
“If my invention is not a particular form of expression, but a new “gastronomic idea”, meaning a dish that did not exist before, or my own personal version of a traditional dish, I have to make a decision: either I don’t want to be recognised as having the paternity of that dish and be the only one to benefit from it, or else I do want to protect it, because I want to be the first to obtain the economic and moral benefits it produces. Let us take the case of the “homage”. If one evening I serve a dish paying homage to Gualtiero Marchesi”, I’m not pretending that he is the chef (and none of my clients will think he is), but is it right that I, through my own personal initiative, of which he knows nothing, which he is not aware of and may not agree with, obtain a profit from his idea? Could I be accused of unfair competition? And what if I did a bad job of reproducing his original dish? Our book is intended to help chefs feel they have some form of protection against such homages.”
So this is a private, not a public, interest.
“If the inventor of the recipe doesn’t mind other people using it, he can do what he wants, but if he does want to be able to make a living out of that recipe, for chefs are not non-profit organisations, then it is not scandalous that they should want some protection. Our book attempts to offer chefs solutions in the presence of the conditions for defining their recipes as original. It is only right that the author should be the first to consider if and how to benefit from an invention. This happens in all fields of production.”
When can a gastronomic product be considered a work of art?
“This question opens up an infinite debate, but one thing is for sure: no matter who decides when something may be considered a work of art in philosophical, social and economic terms, the law determines when this concretely happens and what its consequences are. Copyright laws date from the 1940s, and address the issue of forms of expression destined to be perceived and appreciated through the senses of sight and hearing only. But the gastronomic product must also, and above all, satisfy the sense of taste! A chef’s dish is, even more than a work of figurative art, comparable to a product of design. It is a reproduction of an “object” that responds to a practical need, in a potentially infinite number of copies. Each copy has a creative value going beyond the space and time in which the original dish was created. It is a work of applied art in series, and as such is eligible for protection. There are no legislative tools specifically protecting design in the kitchen, but we can probably “bend” the existing laws to this purpose! That is what we attempt to explain in our book.”

Mariagrazia Villa

Carmine Coviello and Davide Mondin, FoodLaw. La tutela della creatività in cucina (“FoodLaw. Protecting creativity in the kitchen”), ALMA-Edizioni Plan, 2017, 132 pages, 27 euros.