Some of you may have seen the heart- and star- shaped cucumbers on the Cheezburger Network the other day. If not, here’s a picture:
One of my friends expressed interest in this culinary phenomenon, so I figured I would track down the original source of the article. After all, the internet is notorious for poor citations. Here’s where the search went.
- We started out at the Cheezburger Network’s “My Food Looks Funny” blog. The blog author made a witty comment about Rainbow Brite Cukes. Then, per usual, they watermarked the cucumber image with their website address and failed to link to any original source for the material. This was July 29th 2010. Here’s the picture they used:
By adding their website URL at the bottom, Cheezburger Network leads you to believe they own the picture.
- I Googled “heart and star shaped cucumbers” to attempt to track down the original news source for this savory story. The first hit from Google was a post from Geekologie, titled “Finally! Heart and Star Shaped Cucumbers.” Geekologie made a witty comment about Japan’s penchant for growing oddly-shaped food, linked to a previous Geekologie post about heart-shaped watermelons, talked about Lucky Charms breakfast cereal, and cited Weird Asia News as their cucumber story source. Providing inadvertent proof that Cheesburger Network does not own the above picture, Geekologie included a non-watermarked version of the same one, posted almost a year prior to Cheezburger Network’s. Geekology had an additional picture – the one of the salad. This post was from August 24th 2009.
- Clicking through Geekologie’s source, we’re directed to Weird Asia News. They titled their cucumber post ”Heart-Shaped Cucumbers Make Salads More Lovely.” Weird Asia News includes the same two pictures above, provides a link to a website where you can purchase heart-shaped cucumber molds, and — surprise! — links to another source. This was August 24th, 2009 as well.
- Now we’re at My Interesting Files. Post is titled, simply, “Heart Shaped Cucumbers.” My internet investigative senses think that this has to be close to the original source, for a few reasons. First, it’s dated December 11 2008. Second, because these cucumbers are a byproduct of Japan, the first sources in English would most likely be poorly translated from Japanese. This post doesn’t have the best grammar. Third, the post includes far more pictures of the cucumbers than we’ve seen until this point. In addition to the two above, the post includes some pictures of the cucumbers actually growing. But is it the original?
- In doing due diligence, I went back to Google and tried a couple of other searches. I wanted to see what other websites were out there posting about strangely-shaped cucumbers. Xorsyst posted “Grow Heart Shape Cucumbers” in July 24 2008, which is early, but not before My Interesting Files. Google showed a site, EatnineGhost, that posted on “Heart Shape Cucumber” on Sept 8, 2007, but warned that a site that could “harm my computer.” [Links withheld in case the website is actually harmful. I didn't visit it.]
I headed over to Google Insight and found out how many times the phrase “Heart Cucumber” had been searched for on Google since 2004. This is a very cool tool; Google Insight effectively shows you how popular a search term, or trend, is over time. According to Google Insight, nobody searched for “Heart Cucumber” before approximately June 2007. At that point ,the number of instances spiked — my guess is that’s when these mysterious vegetables hit the internet scene. That’s earlier than the earliest news article I could pull up.
What’s going on here? Why can’t we find the original source for this story? Why is nobody who’s reposting it citing their sources? Why does every link on this topic just lead to another link, and another, and another? Is it links all the way down? Why has nobody tracked down and shared the original source? Why did the Cheezburger Network, in order to drive traffic to their site, imply ownership of material that clearly doesn’t belong to them? Importantly, who took the cucumber pictures that have been posted and reposted across the internet?
The New York Times recently published an article, by Trip Gabriel, titled “Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age.” According to the article, educators who study plagiarism believe that, because of the digital age, students understand ownership in a fundamentally different way than their parents do.
Concepts of intellectual property, copyright, and originality are changing. Perhaps that’s because it’s just so easy to exchange information online. According to Gabriel, “the Internet may be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.”
Susan D. Blum is an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame. The New York Times summarized what she said in an interview: “The idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law.”
Perhaps the idea of originality is changing. For the younger generation of internet users, copying, pasting, and rearranging are standard operating procedure.
As for the heart-shaped cucumbers, I still haven’t found the original news source.
