Welcome to Delicious or Distressing, where we rate recent food memes, videos, and other entertainment news. Last week we discussed Taylor Swift-themed football food.
Martha, oh Martha. She always keeps us on our toes: serving a five-month prison sentence for a shady stock trade one day and gracing the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue the next. The cooking maven and controversy magnet was accused this week, via CNN’s new docuseries The Many Lives of Martha Stewart, of stealing a cranberry nut torte recipe from an employee and crediting it as her own in her cookbook. Where Martha had an opportunity to bring visibility to an employee’s baking chops, she instead apparently went the route of plagiarism—distressing indeed. (Martha’s representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment from the Washington Post)
Also this week, Daily Harvest launched “calorie-conscious” meal kits meant for Ozempic-takers. Love Is Blind, known to feature lots of wine-guzzling, is selling branded Chardonnay so you can partake. Soup-slinging museum protests are back—and the target this time was the Louvre’s Mona Lisa.
Read more below on this week’s food news around the internet.
Martha Stewart was accused of plagiarizing an employee’s recipe
Martha Stewart is in headlines again—and did she ever really leave them? That’s headlines, plural, because the entire internet is abuzz with salacious stories mined from the new Martha Stewart docuseries on CNN called The Many Lives of Martha Stewart. In just two episodes we’ve already learned that Martha smuggled food into prison, during her notorious sentence, in order to bake for fellow inmates. At one point, Martha even managed to make a caramel flan—allegedly all with ingredients she’d snuck from the kitchen. The other revelation that’s surfaced so far is distinctly less cheery: Apparently Martha plagiarized one of the recipes in her cookbook Entertaining, one of her first publications that helped to secure a national audience. The whole story is that one of her former employees, Sarah Gross, went to work for Stewart, and brought in the recipe for a dessert she’d made, a cranberry nut torte. Soon Stewart’s then-catering company started making the torte often, before it ultimately appeared in her 1982 cookbook. A representative for Stewart didn’t respond to a request for comment from The Post. Technically, you can’t steal a recipe in a legal sense, because they can’t be copyrighted, but this seems like a pretty cut-and-dry case of torte theft to me. I’m giving this a 3.2/5 distressing —Sam Stone, staff writer
Daily Harvest is making meals for people taking Ozempic
I must admit that when I heard Daily Harvest was suddenly billing itself as Ozempic food, I was like, “Wasn’t it already Ozempic food?” I’ve tried my fair share of the brand’s healthy little snick-snacks (cup-sized grain bowls and brothy soups) and have always considered them tasty bases that need some serious beefing up (eggs,