A US company is trying to trademark the shape of its lettuce – but this is just the tip of the iceberg
Hannah Gadsby, a feted, award-winning comedian, has curated an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, about Pablo Picasso’s complicated legacy, called It’s Pablo-matic. This has absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand – which is lettuce. Rather, I am alerting you to the exhibition because it’s proof that terrible puns are now high art. Bear this in mind as I proceed to make as many terrible leaf puns as I can in the next few paragraphs.
OK, lettuce get back to the point. A US company called Little Leaf Farms is trying to trademark the curvy shape of its baby crispy green leaf lettuce. Is this some kind of GM-nightmare leaf, you might be wondering? Has big lettuce deviously planted cells in order to create a super-curvy salad? I wouldn’t rule it out, but in this instance it seems the lettuce’s shape is natural and the result of a particular seed being grown in a way that results in ruffled edges. Can you trademark that? US trademark experts seem to think it’s a long shot, but possible.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg, isn’t it? Please romaine calm, but we live in a world where absolutely anything can be commoditised, monetised, trademarked and privatised. If you make a joke on the internet and it goes viral, for example, it’s almost guaranteed that someone will try to profit from it. Just ask Dan Atkinson, who coined a (little) gem of a pun, “Wagatha Christie”, and then, three years later, discovered that Rebekah Vardy had trademarked the phrase so that, if she feels like it, she can slap it on a line of branded meat tenderisers.
While that sounds brazen, it’s nothing compared with the musician Drake, who trademarked “God’s Plan”, the title of one of his songs and a commonplace phrase, so that he could put it on cardigans. Nothing is sacred these days, not even salad.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist