A British Chain Tried to Trademark Our Word for Vegetables. Yes, Seriously.
On sabzi, oral tradition, colonial paperwork, and the strange afterlives of empire. Words by Nishad Sanzagiri.
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A British Chain Tried to Trademark Our Word for Vegetables. Yes, Seriously.
On sabzi, oral tradition, colonial paperwork, and the strange afterlives of empire.
On an otherwise ordinary day in late 2025, the food writer Yasmin Khan opened an email that no one writing about vegetables should ever have to see. A solicitor’s letter, sent to her via her publisher, accused her of infringing a trademark. The word in question was sabzi — the everyday Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Persian, Dari, Pashto term for cooked vegetables, spoken casually by more than a billion people.
But in the United Kingdom, sabzi had become someone’s property. A restaurant owner in Cornwall — who, like Khan, shares Iranian heritage, but is also related by marriage to former British Prime Minister Clement Attlee — had successfully trademarked the word in 2022 and was now demanding that Khan change the title of her cookbook, hand over sales data, and pay damages.