McCain Family Recipes From FoodTV's Pantry?

In the latest case of alleged plagiarism during this presidential campaign, Huffington Post is reporting that recipes attributed to Cindy McCain are actually of far more expert provenance:

This past Sunday, Lauren Handel, an eagle-eyed attorney from New York, was searching for a specific recipe from Giada DeLaurentis, a chef on the Food Network. Yet whenever she Googled the different ingredients in the recipe, the oddest thing happened: not only did the Food Network's site come up, as expected, but so did John McCain's campaign site.

On a section of McCain's site called "Cindy's Recipes," you can find seven recipes attributed to Cindy McCain, each with the heading "McCain Family Recipe." Ms. Handel quickly realized that some of the "McCain Family Recipes," were in fact, word-for-word copies of recipes on the Food Network site.

This story is filled with rich ironies. After the jump, we'll cook up a delicious paragraph or two, and I'll tell you what the McCain campaign had to add to the pot.


First of all, one of the recipes here is for Farfalle pasta, a foodstuff that I had never eaten before in my life before last night. Weird, huh? It's a bowtie-shaped pasta. I served it with butter, salt, and pepper as an accompaniment to Broiled Meat Franks with a drizzle of Tomato and Vinegar puree.

This put me in mind of the fact that, just yesterday, John McCain was trying to paint Barack Obama as out of touch and elitist. I don't know about you, but I don't see a lot of Passion Fruit Mousse or Ahi Tuna emerging from lunch pails in the heartland, and it doesn't get much more out of touch than cribbing your recipes from the world's most popular culinary website.

Still, I am, surprisingly, not going to condemn this move. Far from it, in fact. I think that John McCain should broaden this practice and take more of his platform from the chefs at Food Network. They could hardly have anything worse in store for us than what McCain is cooking up.

A McCain spokesman had this to say:

McCain Camp: This was the result of a web intern who reached out to Rachael Ray as a policy adviser without her knowledge.

TC: Wait, you mean an intern contacted Rachel Ray without checking with Cindy?

MC: No, without telling Rachael Ray. It was a joke.

TC: (chagrined utterances)

MC: The execution of the recipe site was left to a web intern, who has been dealt with. The site has been taken down for revision, and our heartfelt apologies go out to the Food Network.