Is there anything wrong with “food plagiarism”? To get an actual cronut, you “must be willing to brave the sea of humanity that amasses each morning outside Dominique Ansel Bakery in Manhattan. You can also go to a Dunkin’ Donuts in pretty much any city and order something that’s kind of like Ansel’s iconic pastry, cut from croissant dough and then deep fried. Or, in Sacramento, you could have a Doissant. In San Francisco, you can scarf down a Cruffin, which is not a doughnut at all, but hey, close enough” or just pop by the nearest TBS here in Cairo, which markets a similar product in its stores under the exact same name. Where are we going with this? Cooking has always revolved on adapting and perfecting existing dishes using common ingredients, but now, the speed of this “evolution” is “happening so quickly, it’s impossible to control.” This is happening because chefs can protect the “names of their unique creations … [but] it’s far harder … to prove that someone’s dish is a knockoff, mostly because it’s a high bar to prove that yours is original.” Yet, this is not a major problem necessarily. At the end of the day, one chef argues, restaurants’ real intellectual property isn’t their dish recipes, but the intangibles: service, consistency, mood, and ambience. H/t Marginal Revolution