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........

© The Guardian