As lockdown took over all over the world a year ago, so an Australian food blogger had an idea. What she didn’t realise, however, was that her creation would highlight the open-source nature of our pandemic survival.
In March of 2020, as much of the world realised shutting down their societies was the only way to survive, panic ensued. In the most famous example, toilet paper vanished from the shelves of western supermarkets.
But so did many other things. Sydney-based blogger, Nagi, creator of Recipetineats.com, decided she wanted to help.
Canned goods are also a popular item to hoard during times of crisis. With their long shelf lives, these is the stuff we were supposed to value above all else were the bomb to drop in the Cold War of the 1980s.
Noticing the trend, Nagi figured that what the world needed was a quick-fox recipe for canned tomatoes. Being an essential ingredient in a multitude of dishes, it turned out a substitute was dead easy.
Nagi wasted no time in sharing with us the “code” for her solution.
The toilet paper and the canned tomatoes were gone, for sure, but tomato paste was abundant. And this was key.
But tomato paste is sour stuff. Turns out you can make canned tomatoes with tomato paste, loosened with water, thickened with flour and sweetened with sugar. Putting them all in a simple blender is all it takes.
Recipes are the classic example of open source, especially those ones passed down from grandmother to mother to daughter. Today, the vast majority of culinary goodness is free for all, except if you’re Coca Cola or the lifestyle section of a struggling publisher.
Just as with its digital cousin, recipes are free to be tinkered with. And in China especially, that’s a blessing. With some of the exact ingredients missing for many a western recipe, the fix is to open source it. Adapt, modify, contribute and evolve.
And then put it out there for all, just as Nagi did.
Still in the kitchen, some of us took up cooking Chinese food too, buoyed on by the bell weather of open source that is Douyin. For as everyone knows, once something is on TikTok, it is the property of all humankind.
And it is the wide acceptance of this which has given open source a rocky ride. Some 17 years ago, in another life/career with a video production company, this correspondent had the audacity to suggest that the use of copyrighted music without permission might not be a good idea. He was told to not be so naive. After all, why penalise ourselves when “everyone else is doing it”.
But the concept of proprietary was not completely alien. On another occasion, a representative of the Anhui division of a Scandinavian mobile communications giant insisted on using the opening scene from “Mission Impossible” in their company introduction video. We complied, but only after requiring a signature taking full responsibility for the theft.
Such widely held views were, until very recently, quite pervasive in China. Need an image? Just download it from the Internet. That’s the real reason why every image on Baidu is watermarked with internet giant’s logo.
And who could ever forget the pirated DVD shops? Therein also available a copy of PhotoShop for ¥8. Again, the real reason why everyone in China claiming to be a designer is so proficient with the software that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive.
Our grandmothers, who lived before copyright and open source, might have been all rather proud of this, proud that the bulk of us learned last year (or relearned) how to cook. Hence, and again thanks to Douyin, this correspondent was delighted to tinker with the creation of his favourites, “油条” (that breakfast dough-stick staple), and, “藕圆” (lotus medallions).
For they, and at the end of 2019, us, could have not fathomed becoming not only a chef, but also a teacher and a hairdresser in the coming few months. And we open sourced it all.
