Sneaky Food Books: Hot and a Hot Topic

NEW YORK -- It's a technique on the tip of a lot of parents' tongues _ and maybe their children's too: Puree healthy fruits and vegetables, and sneak them into regular kid food like macaroni and cheese or chocolate pudding. Watch the kids unknowingly gobble down their vitamins, and smile.

But what's got people talking isn't just the good idea, but the fact that two cookbooks released a few months apart focus on the strategy in strikingly similar ways.

Throw in the fact that one is written by the wife of Jerry Seinfeld, a waiting list for the book and you've got a recipe for intrigue.

First out of the gate in April was "The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids' Favorite Meals," by Missy Chase Lapine, published by the Running Press, an imprint owned by Perseus Books. (Disclosure: The AP has contracts with Perseus for its Stylebook and other publications.)

A former publisher of Eating Well magazine, Lapine writes about how she developed a "hiding technique" to get her picky eating daughters to eat what she wanted them to.

Then came "Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food," by Jessica Seinfeld, published in early October by Collins, a division of HarperCollins. In it Jessica Seinfeld tells of a weekly ritual she and her husband have of creating dozens of containers of vegetable purees to be added to meals for their three kids during the week.

Readers on Amazon.com immediately began comparing the two, testing recipes to see which book they liked better. And after Seinfeld appeared on Oprah on Oct. 8, sales of the book took off.

No one is accusing anyone of plagiarism. The idea of putting pureed vegetables in kids food has been written about elsewhere many times, and recipes on the Internet abound for such dishes as brownies spiked with spinach and pudding with avocado. But the timing of the two books has certainly stirred more than appetites.

"The overlap in recipes seems pretty suspicious," wrote one reviewer on Amazon. "It's a bit sad really."

Collins says it's just coincidence, but Perseus says some details closely mirror one another.

According to Steve Ross, president of Collins, his company received a 130-some page proposal from Lapine for her book in May 2006. The company rejected it because they believed it was similar to another book in the works called "Lunch Lessons" by Ann Cooper and Lisa Holmes.

In June 2006, Seinfeld submitted her proposal with the help of an agent, and HarperCollins representatives met with her, partly because of her high profile, Ross said.