Paula Deen: A Southern-fried hypocrite?

TV chef Paula Deen can’t “have her cake and deep-fry it, too,” said The Baltimore Sun in an editorial. When the bubbly Georgia native, 65, announced last week that she has type 2 diabetes, it set off a predictable chorus of “told you so” from longtime critics of her high-fat cuisine, which features such dishes as bacon-cheeseburger meatloaf and deep-fried mac ’n’ cheese. Dean is hardly the only celebrity chef to whip up “calorie bombs,” said Frank Bruni in The New York Times. But Deen knew she had developed diabetes even while getting rich off her catastrophically unhealthy recipes. For “three long, greasy years,” a woman whose signature dish is a burger topped with bacon and a fried egg between a pair of glazed doughnuts “promoted the deep-fried life without acknowledging her firsthand experience of how a person can be burned by it.”

“Stuff it,” you Yankee snobs, said Tom Barton in the Savannah Morning News. If Paula were some scowling Frenchman, deep-frying goose liver in a high-priced Manhattan eatery, blue-state foodies would be hailing her as a genius and lining up around the block. Instead, she’s a folksy, big-haired woman from Savannah who looks like she shops at Wal-Mart. As such, she’s become a lightning rod for the indignation of elitists who consider the South “one giant grease trap,” peopled by “ignorant, fat, and uncouth slobs” too stupid to take responsibility for what we eat. Deen is so popular because she turned “working-class American” cuisine into decadent feasts fit for special occasions, said J. Bryan Lowder in Slate​.com. She never told anyone to eat like that every day. As Deen said on the Today show last week after revealing her diabetes, “Honey, I’m your cook, not your doctor.”

If Paula Deen isn’t a doctor, said Daniel D. Snyder in TheAtlantic.com, then why is she telling people to inject themselves with “Victoza”? Deen only admitted she had diabetes after signing a lucrative endorsement deal with Danish drug company Novo Nordisk to promote its new diabetes medication. Rather than encouraging her fans to eat a healthier diet and thus avoid diabetes, Deen is now telling them to keep buying Paula Deen cookbooks and eating Paula Deen food, because later on, when they develop diabetes, they can mitigate the damage with Paula Deen–approved medicine. For a down-home country girl, “the level of ruthless business acumen on display here is deeply disturbing.”

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