Jessica Seinfeld, the comedian Jerry Seinfeld's wife, has a hot best seller with Deceptively Delicious, a cookbook for parents of picky eaters. Ms. Seinfeld's celebrity and an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show have helped propel the book to the No. 1 spot on the hardcover Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous list in The New York Times, where it will make its debut a week from Sunday.
But a number of readers posting on Amazon.com and Oprah.com and other Web sites have pointed out some similarities between Ms. Seinfeld's book, which was published this month by Collins, an imprint of HarperCollins, and another cookbook published by Running Press, an imprint of the Perseus Books Group, in April.
That book, The Sneaky Chef by Missy Chase Lapine, who is not a celebrity, also suggests that parents puree healthy foods like spinach and sweet potatoes and hide them in childhood favorites like macaroni and cheese or brownies. A week from Sunday it will be No. 9 on the paperback Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous list.
It turns out that Ms. Lapine, a former publisher of Eating Well magazine, had submitted her 139-page proposal for The Sneaky Chef," complete with 42 recipes, to HarperCollins twice -- once in February 2006 without an agent and again in May last year, the second time represented by an agent. Both times she was rejected. She landed a deal with Running Press in June 2006, the same month that Collins won an auction to publish Ms. Seinfeld's book.
"Honestly I can't speculate, and I'm not going to accuse anyone of anything," Ms. Lapine said. "I suppose it's possible it's a coincidence."
In a telephone interview, Ms. Seinfeld said she had come up with the idea more than two years ago in her kitchen while pureeing butternut squash for her youngest son and cooking macaroni and cheese for her husband and two oldest children. "I've been obsessed with this for the past two years," said Ms. Seinfeld, who worked with a chef and a nutritionist on the book. "I don't need to copy someone's idea. I've got enough going on in my life."
Apparently, people who had read both books noticed that the recipes were the same -- spinach in macaroni and cheese (blech) -- and the like, which is suspicious because the food combinations are so odd. (Not to mention revolting, but that's another issue entirely.)
Jerry Seinfeld says he "doesn't think we have another Watergate here" and so far Missy Chase Lapine hasn't sued anyone. But VegetableGate may just be beginning to simmer, as the media picks up on the story.
It's time for another plagiarism controversy! This time, Jessica Seinfeld (she of the 
