Kentucky Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes appears to have stolen her family’s "favorite recipes" she posted on her campaign website, when commemorating Thanksgiving last week.
The Democratic challenger to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) displayed recipes for a "cranberry-pineapple salad" and a "sweet potato casserole," both of which were "near-exact copies" of recipes online.
The Hill reports:
Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes's family recipes, posted on her website on Wednesday for the Thanksgiving holiday, appear to be lifted from other websites.
One, for cranberry-pineapple salad, is a near-exact copy of a Kraft recipe for "Festive Cranberry-Pineapple Salad," as posted to the Motley Recipe Book blog in 2006.
Lundergan Grimes's recipe swaps pecans for walnuts and eliminates some of the specificity of the recipe on the blog.
Another, for sweet potato casserole, also tracks closely with the measurements and directions for a sweet potato casserole posted on the website of the Hartzler Family Dairy in Wooster, Ohio.
Lundergan Grimes's recipe swaps yams for sweet potatoes, generic butter for Hartzler brand and suggests baking, rather than boiling, the potatoes.
Both recipes can be found widely on the Internet with various, slight modifications.
John McCain received heavy scrutiny in 2008 when his presidential campaign posted "family recipes" from his wife Cindy, which turned out to be lifted from the Food Network.
A spokesperson for the Grimes campaign told the Hill that the recipes from the candidate’s grandmother Elsie Case who has often been used in the campaign to attack McConnell for being anti-woman.
Elsie tweeted on Nov. 27 that she "can’t wait to share more of the recipes our family enjoys over the course of the holiday season!"