FOOD FIGHT

Cookbook 'Sabzi' has been withdrawn from sale on Amazon after a deli of that name complained. Yet it's a common term in Farsi.

- Hannah Twiggs

When a word that literally means “vegetables” becomes the subject of a legal dispute, you start to wonder whether Britain’s food culture has finally eaten itself.

Last week, it was reported that Yasmin Khan’s latest cookbook, Sabzi, had been pulled from Amazon after a Cornish deli brand of the same name accused her publisher, Bloomsbury, of trademark infringement.

For anyone familiar with Khan’s work - elegant, soulful books such as The Saffron Tales and Zaitoun, which trace the flavours of Iran, Palestine and beyond - it felt surreal. Here was one of Britain’s most respected food writers, a woman of Iranian and Pakistani descent whose books have helped demystify and celebrate regional cuisines, now tangled in a row over a word so ordinary that more than a billion people use it every day.

Kate Attlee, the 37-year-old owner of the Sabzi deli chain, said that Bloomsbury’s decision to publish a book of the same name had caused confusion among her customers. She founded her business in 2019 and trademarked the word “sabzi” in 2022, later discovering that Khan’s book had been released under the same title. Some customers, she said, had come into her shops asking for the book, assuming it was hers. “I just want them to respect the trademark and the future of my business,” she said.

Bloomsbury, for its part, argues that “sabzi” is a descriptive term, not a brand name - and, crucially, that Khan began work on the book in 2017, two years before Attlee’s first deli opened. In a statement, the publisher said the word is “part of the shared culinary vocabulary of many cultures, including Ms Khan’s own heritage”, meaning vegetables or greens in languages such as Farsi and Urdu, and commonly used in UK restaurants to describe vegetable dishes.

The publisher added that