May 2006
Suppose the world’s high-class chefs awoke this morning consumed by a fear that their recipes would be used in ways they didn’t intend. Suppose they were tortured with constant visions of people going home after a nice meal at Chez Indulgênce and whipping up an enormous vat of the asparugus gazpacho they just paid $10 for. The more extreme of these visions may involve serving the gazpacho to other people or modifying the recipe without permission! Suppose these chefs suddenly felt compelled to protect their creations, at any cost, from the legitimized espionage of the recipe-swapping black market.
Might as well try to stop the tides, right? Cooking is inherently an open process — when you eat dinner at a nice restaurant, you can guess 90% of what’s in it and how it was made, just by looking at it and tasting it. But most restaurants provide much more. The food industry has learned that maximizing openness maximizes customer satisfaction. With all these conventions in place, what’s a paranoid chef to do? I offer some advice.
- First thing to do is make the menus more vague. The average swanky menu has twelve to fifteen items on it, each accompanied by a biographical sketch of the ingredients, as well as a detailed account of their preparation. Sometimes, these menus are published online, which invites recipe-swappers to steal ideas without even paying for a meal at the restaurant! That’s got to change. Dish descriptions must reveal only enough information to let a customer decide whether they want to order the dish. Something like, “Lamb with a red, sour-ish sauce and some kind of potato.” Diners don’t need to know how the lamb is cooked, what the sauce is made of, or the exact type of potato. Anyone who inquires about such things should be regarded with suspicion, and their bill should be “accidentally” miscalculated by the waitstaff.
- No more cookbooks (too easy to photocopy) or contributions to cooking magazines. Cooking shows should be available only on DVD, so as to dodge the Tivo-armed bandits. But really, why tempt fate by recording the creation of your dishes at all? If you want to make your trade secrets a public spectacle, don’t come crying to me when you find your trademark wasabi cheesecake being sold on Taiwanese street corners for $2 a pie.
- Chefs should also consider selling secret sauces and other complex ingredients, so as not to give away recipes for crucial components of their ouveres. Why should I publish my famous barbecue sauce recipe in Gourmet when I can instead invent dishes which require generous helpings of Big Dan’s Secret Sirloin Slather, now available at your local supermarket?
But chefs who are truly suspicious of their customers will find these measures insufficient. The abstract challenge is how to exercise maximum control over the customer’s process of eating at your restaurant, so that your food gets eaten (and paid for) but none of your proprietary culinary information leaks into your patrons’ theiving minds.
- You can tell a lot about what you’re eating just by looking at it, so you want to start out by blindfolding people as they walk into the restaurant. Don’t wait until they’re seated at the table! Customers have been known to recconoiter as they’re being led to their seats.
- Even if customers can’t see the food they’re eating, they can still reverse-engineer recipes with remarkable precision by taste or touch. If left unsupervised, they may covertly hide portions of their meal in their napkins for future analysis, but even in an epicurean Panopticon, a clever customer could store food in his or her cheeks, chipmunk-style. A device exists which could close this breach. Originally invented in the 1930s to increase worker efficiency, it could easily be repurposed to protect you from your patrons:
- Finally: doggie bags? Don’t be silly.
So, I worked a little bit with the
Free Software Foundation on their new
Defective by Design campaign, and that’s the analogy that kept coming to mind. Restauranteurs aren’t preoccupied with the scourge of recipe sharing — lucky for them, since it saves them from an exercise in futility.
The music and movie industries, on the other hand, are terrified by their producers, distributors and customers. At every step in an album’s lifecycle, from its inception in the studio to the moment it comes out your speakers, there is a way to copy the information and subvert its restrictions. If you protect songs on iTunes, someone can rip the CD. If you protect the CD somehow, someone can pipe the music to a recorder instead of their speakers. And even if you manage to lock down your customers’ computers, it just takes one guy in a production studio to leak an album to the Internet to render your complicated, expensive DRM endeavors worthless.
Nevertheless, they’re trying. That whole recording-music-from-the-speaker-jack workaround? Hollywood has floated legislation to mandating all video recorder doohickeys to have their input jacks approved by movie studios. And then there’s the Sony rootkit misfire that reads like a modern-day Chelm story. Sony didn’t want computers to be able to see its audio CDs. Unfortunately, in order to do that, they had to mess around with some of the deep internals of the operating system. The software that did this was automatically installed when you put in the CD. But what if users find the software and uninstall it? Well, Sony also made sure that the software was invisible — which required further twiddling with fragile operating system components. Computer security professionals discovered the spyware and caused a stink (like copyright infringement, it only takes one savvy geek to make your secret copy-protection tactics useless), but it’s doubtful that Sony saw the uproar as a sign of the futility of DRM.
This stuff annoys me because I’ve run up against silly DRM obstacles many times while trying to make legitimate use of my media, and no other industry is so hell-bent on destroying its relationships with its customers. It would be interesting to do a Guns, Germs and Steel-style analysis of the cultural, political, psychological and economic pressures that made the food industry so different from the music industry. In the meantime, I’ll continue to rip my music into ogg vorbis and wait for Songbird to release a Mac client.
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So they figured out which came first, the chicken or the egg. It seems like a sensible enough solution, and it also makes the other chestnuts (One Hand Clapping, the Tree in the Forest, blah blah blah) seem a little more tractable. Perhaps with a couple of well-placed grants from the National Institute of Deep Thinking, we could have the inner workings of the entire koan canon published in our journals, a triumph of focused human energy accomplished in the same spirit as the moon landing and the Golden Gate Bridge, though perhaps not as useful.
But if we solve all the great riddles, what questions will serve as shorthand for the deep unknowables of life? One possibility:
What is punk rock?