The murky world of culinary ghosting  

Here's a column bemoaning the widespread use of ghost writers in food writing. I'm not sure what the fuss is all about (why should I care whether ghost writers are used or whether they get credit?) but there's still something interesting in this paragraph:

Who's to blame for this deception? The blame may lie with you, if you've bought into the absurd notion of personality as a central component in recipe writing. A recipe is rarely a personal statement, like a poem or a painting. True originality in recipe writing is exceptionally rare. Nearly every cook relies on other people's recipes as a starting point for experimentation, and the best recipes often come from collaborative effort. We readers should stop demanding the stamp of spurious authenticity from every single recipe writer.

I'm not going to argue that most people's recipes (or improvised lunches) rise to the level of art, but it does seem like there's a bit of intermodal snobbery going on here. Why is it OK to romanticize writing as a form of identifying expression but not OK to think about personality or originality for a recipe? It's no accident that he's using poems and paintings to make his point, and not the more workaday business of advertising copy or even (!) a column in the FT. No, we can't all be Ferran Adria, but we can't all be John Ashbery either -- don't look now, but there are plenty of "poets" out there whose work is banal, and we have no truck with them.

For the record, nothing on this blog has been ghost-written. The three recipes that have appeared (for spinach mushroom quiche, cream of poblano soup, and a lemon tart) can hardly be accused of "true originality" -- although they are yummy!