The Knockoff Economy Read Free

and bars at night. Manguera would hand out free samples to the club bouncers, who loved the food and spread the word to those waiting at the rope lines. Manguera also reached out to L.A.-area food bloggers, and they reciprocated with glowing reviews. And Kogi benefited from the tech savvy of Manguera’s sister-in-law, Alice Shin, who made extensive use of Twitter to help followers to know where the truck was at all times. But the overwhelming reason for their success was the creativity of the Kogi team, who cleverly combined two great tastes that had existed cheek-by-jowl in L.A. for decades, and, moreover, chose to “upscale” the plebian food truck rather than start a traditional brick-and-mortar restaurant.
    The rest is food history. In 2010, Roy Choi was listed as one of
Food & Wine
magazine’s 10 best new chefs, and today there are hundreds of gourmet food trucks in L.A. and nearly every other major city in the nation, offering everything from banana pudding to sushi. Inevitably, there are also many knockoffs of the Kogi taco. Even Baja Fresh, the fast-food Mexican chain, began offering one.
    From an innovation perspective, cuisine is a lot like fashion. Recipes are unprotected by copyright, so anyone can copy another’s recipe. Actual dishes—the “built food” you order in a restaurant—can also be copied freely. As anyone who has eaten a molten chocolate cake or spicy tuna on crispy rice knows, popular and innovative dishes do seem to migrate fromrestaurant to restaurant. The bottom line is that almost anything a chef does that is creative—short of the descriptions of the food in the menu, which are at least thinly protected by copyright law—can be copied by another chef.
    Copyright’s purpose is to promote creativity by stopping copying; if everyone could imitate, no one would innovate. By this logic, we ought to be consigned to uninspired and traditional food choices, since in the food world, it is easy and legal to copy. In short, the Korean taco should not exist.
    But the real world does not follow this logic. In fact, we live in a Golden Age of cuisine. Thousands of new dishes are created every year in the nation’s restaurants. The quality and variety of American cuisine today is very high, and much higher than it ever has been before. The so-called molecular gastronomy or modernist cuisine movement has innovated in myriad (and often bizarre) ways that have filtered down to more modest restaurants all over the world. But so too have the ideas of many “farm to table” chefs working in cities across America. Television shows such as
Top Chef
and
Iron Chef
challenge contestants to mix and match improbable combinations of ingredients with little warning or time. Our contemporary food culture, in short, not only offers creativity, it increasingly
worships
creativity—and many of us worship it right back. So how are chefs so creative when they know others can copy their recipes?
S TAND -U P C OMEDY
    Louis C.K. is a “comic’s comic,” which is one way of saying that while his fellow stand-up comedians esteem him, he is not exactly a household name. That has begun to change in the last couple of years, however, not least because of his new television show,
Louie.
The show has received adoring reviews, and viewers are beginning to notice.
    Dane Cook, on the other hand, is a stand-up comedy superstar. He has recorded five best-selling comedy albums, has a burgeoning film career, and has hosted
Saturday Night Live
twice. In 2007, Cook sold out two shows at Madison Square Garden in the same night. Dane Cook is the biggest thing that the world of stand-up comedy has produced in a very long time. He is, however, not well liked by some rival stand-ups. Some of the bad feeling may just be jealousy. But some is about Cook’s credibility as a comedian. Cook has a reputation for stealing jokes. And the most persistent allegations revolve around three jokes that appear on Cook’s 2005 album
Retaliation,
but