Horsemeat Bigos

What is that, you might ask?

Well, bigos is a traditional Polish stew made from sauerkraut, fresh cabbage, and various meats. It simmers for hours, sometimes days. It’s delicious. But like many national dishes, it inspires strong opinions and endless arguments about the proper recipe. In Polish, narobić bigosu  (literally, “to make bigos”) has become an idiom meaning to create a steaming mess of things.

I remember stewing a batch during the final years of communist Poland, in the days of ration cards and empty shelves. Beef was hard to find. Pork was hard to find. But a neighbor had managed to source a substitute on the black market, so I bought what I could.

A friend came over. She ate with appetite, talked between bites, and reached for more.

“This is good,” she said. “And so much meat.”

“Horsemeat,” I said, perhaps unnecessarily.

She stopped chewing.

For a moment we looked at each other across the table. Then she spat what was left in her mouth onto the plate, picked up her purse, and left.

The bigos remained on the table, still warm, still fragrant, still exactly what it had been a moment earlier. Only the story had changed.

I thought of that dinner recently while reading the reactions to Olga Tokarczuk’s remarks about artificial intelligence. One might say she narobiła bigosu. Her subsequent explanation that she only used AI for research and to help her “dream” did little to calm the storm.

Many readers, literary critics, and authors reacted much like my dinner guest. For them, it felt like a betrayal or a disappointment -- a violation of an unwritten contract between writer and reader. For others, it was a non-issue. After all, Tokarczuk has already proven she can write. Why should the tools matter?

It turns out -- surprise! -- we rarely judge art in isolation. We judge it by the perceived honesty of the creator. Tokarczuk didn’t change her recipe. But by introducing the machine, she changed the story.

And for many readers, that spoiled the meal.