Welcome to Deep Dish, a weekly roundup of food and entertainment news. Last week we discussed how restaurants are helping with the SNAP benefits crisis.
Martha Stewart has stayed staunchly on the front line of culture for the past few decades, certainly in the food sphere but most impressively outside of it. Her side quests have been shockingly frequent and entirely unpredictable—she’s quite frankly never letting us know her next move. In her recent reissue of her first cookbook from 1982, Entertaining, she serves up a reminder to her fans, and perhaps our culture at large, that she’s a cook first and foremost.
Also this week, a former paralegal was acquitted after hurling a sandwich at a federal agent in August; Sabzi, a deli in Cornwall, England, is alleging that author Yasmin Khan’s new cookbook with the same name is trademark infringement; and more.
If Throwing Sandwiches is Illegal, Then Lock Me Up
This week marked the start of a second trial for Sean C. Dunn, a former paralegal at the Department of Justice who threw a Subway sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent in August. The projectile sandwich was part of his confrontation with a group of officers who were patrolling a neighborhood in Washington, DC. Viral coverage has made him something of a folk hero. The Department of Justice attempted to secure a felony indictment, and after that failed, charged him with misdemeanor assault.
“I could feel it through my ballistic vest,” Gregory Lairmore, the agent-turned-sandwich-attack-victim testified, adding that he “smelled the onions and the mustard.” Is there a law against throwing sandwiches? “You’re not going to be asked if you feel bad for the agent who took a sandwich to the chest,” Julia Gatto, the defense lawyer, said in her opening statement. “You’re going to be asked whether what happened that night is a federal crime.”
John Parron, a government lawyer, took a more obvious tact in his opening statement. “You can’t just go around throwing stuff at people because you’re mad,” he said. While he is technically correct (toddlers worldwide would disagree), in the end, the jury acquitted Dunn, and justice was served. —Sam Stone, staff writer
The Case of Sabzi v. Sabzi
Briton Kate Atlee launched Sabzi, her deli in Cornwall, in 2019 and trademarked the name in 2022. This year writer Yasmin Khan published her fourth cookbook, also called Sabzi. Now Atlee is calling on Khan and her publisher, Bloomsday, to change the name and cover design of the book, which the shop owner says has confused her customers. Sabzi, the name in question, is a commonly used term for vegetable dishes in Urdu and Farsi.
Khan and her publisher have responded, saying that Khan started work on her book in 2017—two years before Atlee started her business—and said in a statement that “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 Ms Khan has done—does not function as trademark use.”
Which Sabzi will come out on top?