The row involving Yasmin Khan’s vegetarian cookbook and Kate Attlee’s t deli, Sabzi, an everyday term in South Asia and Middle East, has sparked discussion about who gets to trademark the shared language of food
In July this year, Kate Attlee, the owner of the Cornwall deli brand Sabzi, was “incredibly stressed” and threatened to take legal action against Bloomsbury Publishing in the UK over the “infringement of her intellectual property rights” after the release of a cookbook titled Sabzi.
A former MasterChef quarter-finalist, Attlee had founded her deli brand, Sabzi, in 2019 in Cornwall, Britain. She claimed that Bloomsbury’s new vegetarian cookbook by celebrated writer Yasmin Khan bore not only the same title, Sabzi, but also a strikingly similar visual mark, and that this infringed on the registered trademark of her deli, which also covers books and retail.
Born to an Iranian mother and Pakistani father, Khan is a prominent British cookbook author, who celebrates food stories from the Middle East and beyond. Her previous books — The Saffron Tales: Recipes from the Persian Kitchen (2016), Zaitoun: Recipes and Stories from the Palestinian Kitchen (2018) and Ripe Figs: Recipes and Stories from Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus (2021) — combine recipes and travel writing, foregrounding food as social justice and cultural memory.
An everyday word
A Bloomsbury spokesperson told The Federal, “Khan has used the term as the title of a cookbook consisting of vegetarian recipes from or inspired by Iranian and South Asian culinary traditions. It is widely accepted that the use of a descriptive term as the title of a book in order to denote the book’s subject matter — as Khan has done — does not function as trade mark use.”
Attlee, a half-Iranian woman, wrote on her social media page, “The trademark for Sabzi is not about ownership of the word. This is absolutely not, never has been, and never will be about any kind of claim of ownership of a word. It is purely about the brand Sabzi in the context of it being the title of a cookery book.”
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According to the Bloomsbury spokesperson, “The common usage of the term Sabzi in connection with recipes for vegetable dishes is evident from a simple internet search. The term is commonly used in restaurants around the UK to describe various vegetable dishes. Besides, Khan commenced work on Sabzi in 2017, well before the first Sabzi deli was opened.”
Khan has found supporters, especially from the cookery book authors like Rukmini Iyer, who find the twisting of ordinary food words as ingredients for litigation shocking. Iyer wrote that what Attlee has done is “to trademark a wordmark with as little distinctiveness as ‘fish and chips’”. Over 1 billion online use the word sabzi across languages like Farsi, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi and Bengali interchangeably to mean vegetables, cooked greens or herbs and “as an everyday word.”
Speaking to The Federal, chef and cookbook author of Masala Mandi, Sadaf Hussain said, “In the case of my book, I found a shop with the same name in Delhi. We both shook hands on how the common term can be shared both as a shop name and a book’s title.” According to him, “In such cases of copyright of everyday terms, it’s best to collaborate than chase conflict.”
War over veggies and more
The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) defines “traditional knowledge” as “knowledge, know-how, skills and practices that are developed, sustained and passed on from generation to generation within a community, often forming part of its cultural or spiritual identity.”
Oftentimes beyond a legal trademark wrangle lies cultural commodification of traditional knowledge. Of food language being converted into commodity, of small business versus big publishing and of ethnic undercurrents in whose vocabulary does it become “brand” and in whose vocabulary it becomes “generic”.
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Again, a patent was granted for a neem-based antifungal spray in 1994, but it was challenged arguing that the fungicidal properties of neem were traditionally known and used in India, leading to amendments and challenges against the patent.
Who owns my turmeric?
The food world can oftentimes be stormy, outside the tea cup! Besides the issue of food copyright infringement, recipes, in most cases traditionally passed on, also prove to be tricky. Recipes cannot be patented, though oftentimes restaurants or eateries do claim that their dish was first made in their restaurant and thus claiming trademarks.
Even in India, sabzi is a common culinary word in Farsi, Urdu and beyond, meaning “vegetables” or “greens.” Therefore, it cannot be monopolised as a brand term but as a shared word. When the everyday word becomes a brand, who benefits? And who loses? Beyond semantics it is about power, food culture and legacy.
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As for Khan and Bloomsbury, they have breathed a sigh of relief since Attlee has decided to drop legal action. Four days ago, Khan wrote on her social media page: “Good News!! The legal case against my book Sabzi has been dropped and the deli owner has informed us they will be relinquishing the trademark… When language born in our grandmothers’ kitchens becomes intellectual property, something’s gone badly wrong.”
“For me, this case wasn’t just about a cookbook title but also a reminder of how the legacy of colonialism still echoes through our legal systems. For me, words like sabzi remind us that food and language should be part of what we share, not what we own. I hope this case leads the UK trademark body to reflect both their initial decision and any future processes for reviewing trademark applications on cultural terms,” she added.
