Vegetables, in my experience, rarely cause controversy. Yet last month I found myself in the middle of a legal storm over who gets to own the word sabzi – the Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Persian, Dari and Pashto word for cooked veg or fresh greens. It was a story as absurd as it was stressful, a chain of delis threatened me with legal action over the title of a book I had spent years creating. But what began as a personal legal headache soon morphed into something bigger, a story about how power and privilege still dominate conversations about cultural ownership in the UK.
When the email first landed in my inbox, I assumed it must be a wind-up. My editor at Bloomsbury had forwarded a solicitor’s letter addressed to me personally, care of my publishers. As I read it, my stomach dropped. A deli owner from Cornwall accused me of infringing her intellectual property over my cookbook Sabzi: Fresh Vegetarian Recipes for Every Day. Why? Because in 2022, she had trademarked the word sabzi to use for her business and any future products, including a cookbook she hoped to write one day.
My jaw clenched as I pored over pages of legal documentation, written in the punitive and aggressive tone of a firm gearing up for a fight. I was accused of “misrepresentation” (copying the deli’s brand), damaging its business and affecting its future growth, and they demanded detailed commercial reports about my work, including sales revenue, stock numbers and distribution contracts – information so intrusive that it felt like an audit. Buried in the legal jargon was a line that shook me. They reserved the right to seek the “destruction” of all items relating to their infringement claim. Reading the threat of my book being pulped was nothing short of devastating. It was also utterly enraging.
Because sabzi isn’t some cute exotic brand name, it’s part of the daily lexicon of more than a billion people across cultures and borders. In south Asia, it simply means cooked vegetables. Shout it loudly in any household and someone will instinctively start chopping. For Iranians, sabzi refers to fresh herbs and greens and is part of the national psyche. Iran’s national dish is ghormeh sabzi, a fragrant herb-laden stew, and sabzi is the scent of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, where we eat herbed rice and grow fresh greens as a symbol of rebirth and renewal. As someone of both Pakistani and Iranian heritage, when I first had the idea of writing a vegetarian cookbook back in 2017, I knew that I wanted to call it sabzi to honour the two food cultures I grew up with.
But back to the deli’s threats. My publishers sought legal advice – which was clear: the claims were overreaching and we should fight them. Book titles can’t actually be trademarked and common cultural words should be exempt from intellectual property law (can you imagine if someone tried to trademark common food words like curry, pasta or tapas?) The evidence of alleged business harm was weak, amounting to a few emails from customers who seemingly couldn’t differentiate between the deli owner and my name on the cover of the book. The legal team responded robustly, and I stepped away imagining we’d hear more in a few weeks. Then everything exploded.
One morning, I opened Instagram to find I was subject of a pile-on accusing me of copying the deli by calling my cookbook Sabzi. I noticed an unusual pattern in the people sending me aggressive messages: they were all women, all white, and all from Cornwall. I traced the comments back to the deli’s page and saw the owner had posted publicly about the legal action, naming me and framing it as a David-v-Goliath battle. This puzzled me, as business chains generally do rather better financially than food writers. Her statement also described herself as a “mother of two”, a detail that was later repeated in press coverage as though maternity itself conferred some kind of moral authority. As someone who has written extensively about infertility and recurrent pregnancy loss, I found the framing jarring. There are many places in the world where motherhood shapes your vulnerability – Sudan, say, or Gaza. But a privately educated deli owner, related by marriage to the former prime minister Clement Attlee, taking legal action against a writer over the title of a book whose title just means “vegetables” is not one of those situations.
The deli owner was working with a PR company to amplify her case so it wasn’t long before local and national journalists started getting in touch. I was dumbfounded as to why the case was being escalated in public, outside legal channels, but it was clear that she was determined to heighten the dispute. She reported my book for trademark infringement on Amazon and overnight it disappeared from the world’s biggest bookseller. Say what you like about Amazon (and I often do), but most books are bought there, particularly in the run-up to Christmas, so it’s an important platform for authors.
My editor explained that under Amazon’s policies, only the complainant can revoke an infringement claim, which meant we could be waiting months – possibly until after court proceedings – for my book to reappear online. It was around that time that I stopped being able to sleep. The stress wasn’t abstract any more, it was a direct threat to my livelihood.
It was then – in a twist that still feels ridiculous to write – that a letter arrived from the Duchy of Cornwall, one of the monarchy’s oldest feudal estates, on behalf of the deli owner as her landlord. The letter argued in support of the deli’s right to trademark the word sabzi, a plot twist so colonial that I had to check whether the East India Company had been revived. I didn’t have “correspondence with Prince William’s estate about vegetables” on my 2025 bingo card and wondered what would come next. A note from King Charles demanding a Tupperware of leftovers?
When a private estate providing income to the crown becomes involved in a legal dispute over the ownership of an Asian word for veg, the legacy of the entitlement at the heart of British colonialism is laid bare. And really, for me, it felt as if colonial entitlement were at the heart of this case. Throughout the saga, some argued that because the deli owner had some Iranian heritage (her father is from Iran and her mother is British), the dispute wasn’t about cultural appropriation. But people of colour know that heritage alone doesn’t guarantee solidarity. British politics offers its own examples of this – Priti Patel, whose family fled persecution in Uganda, and Suella Braverman, whose parents were economic migrants to the UK, have used some of the most inflammatory rhetoric against refugees and migrants in recent memory. You can share a heritage yet and still uphold the power dynamics of privilege.
Because my lawyers advised silence, I couldn’t comment publicly. My friends, however, made up for it. Desi WhatsApp during a scandal is its own news channel: one half outrage, one half jokes about your ancestors rising from the grave. Their fury was laced with a weariness, though. When words born in our grandmothers’ kitchens become entangled in legal battles backed by establishment power, something has gone seriously wrong.
Because this case is part of a much bigger pattern. For decades, companies in the global north, backed by western intellectual property laws, have attempted to control or commercialise food terms and ingredients from the global south. In the UK, the restaurant chain Pho sparked widespread outrage when it issued cease-and-desist letters to other Vietnamese restaurants for using the word “pho” in their names and later withdrew its trademark after public pressure.
A similar backlash ensued after the celebrity chef David Chang’s Momufuku empire attempted to trademark “chili crunch”, a spicy condiment popular in east Asian homes, or when the US company RiceTec tried to patent “basmati”, the name of a rice grown in, and deeply entwined, with the heritage of India and Pakistan.
Farmers and activists in the global south have also fought numerous biopiracy cases, not over words, but over seeds and plants. The examples raise the same questions about who gets to own and profit from traditional food culture. Monsanto’s patent relating to the use of Nap Hal wheat for chapati flour was later revoked; the Dutch company Health and Performance Food International secured patents over teff, Ethiopia’s 4,000-year-old staple grain (though these were later ruled invalid); and South Africa defeated attempts to trademark rooibos tea – yielding its manufacturers geographic rights over the term, in the same way that champagne, Darjeeling tea and Colombian coffee are protected descriptions.
Farmers in the global south have long argued that these cases and attempts represent a new form of colonial extraction, carried out not by armies but by intellectual property and patent lawyers. For those of us in diasporas, these ingredients and words carry a different but equally emotional weight. They are bridges to our families, our histories and our identities.
If my friends embraced me privately during this ordeal, the food world embraced me openly. As the news of the dispute spread, some of the UK’s most respected food writers rallied, with Rukmini Iyer, Rachel Roddy, Catherine Phipps, Olia Hercules, Debora Robertson and Nigella Lawson (among many more) posting clear-eyed arguments about why food culture belongs to everyone. It was incredibly moving to see others speak the words I could not and I’m for ever indebted to those who, through no ask from me, leapt to my defence. I suspect this happened because the food world is, by nature, collaborative. We blurb each other’s books and publicise the work of our peers. Food, after all, is a conduit to sharing. But also, I think it’s because we know that there is plenty of room for people working on similar themes to thrive. Just look at how many air-fryer cookbooks exist.
As public pressure grew, the tone behind the scenes began to shift. I was informed that the deli would drop the case and withdraw the trademark, a quiet admission that it should never have been sought or granted. To my relief the book was reinstated with online retailers and although there has been no apology or statement reflecting on lessons, it’s still a win for all of us who do not want our cultures to be commodified.
I hope the case leads to reflection in the UK trademark office and that training is introduced so that examiners develop greater cultural literacy. There also need to be safeguards against privatising common words and clearer routes of appeal. Food is something we share, not something we own, and it should stay in the hands of all those who keep it alive.
