Paula Deen. Photo credit: Bristol Motor Speedway, http://www.flickr.com/photos/bristolmotorspeedway
The plump Southern chef Paul Deen, whose no-fats-barred recipes have earned her plaudits and opprobrium in equal measure, announced on NBC’s “Today” show on Tuesday that she has Type 2 diabetes and has had it for three years. Cue resounding chorus of “I told you so” from the internets.
Deen, a popular star on TV’s the Food Network and owner of the Lady and Sons restaurant in Savannah, Ga., has spent the last 10 years building an empire “on layers of gooey butter cake, fried chicken and sheer force of personality”, as The New York Times put it – she is, after all, the woman who made the Krispy Kreme donut bread pudding popular, who first advocated putting a hamburger on a bun made of glazed donuts, who actually deep-fried macaroni and cheese. So it’s perhaps no surprise that Deen, 65, is now dealing with the same obesity-linked disease that afflicts around 25 million Americans, or a shocking 8.3 percent of the population.
What may also not come as a surprise is that as Deen revealed her illness, she also revealed that she is the new spokeswoman for pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk’s diabetes treatment campaign. Health activists and other critics are now piling on Deen for promoting an unhealthy lifestyle – and the drug that’s used to treat its affects.
Moderation, y’all. Deen defended herself by claiming that she’s always been about moderation: “I’ve always said, `Practice moderation, y’all.’ I’ll probably say that a little louder now,’’ Deen said. “You can have diabetes and have a piece of cake. You cannot have diabetes and eat a whole cake.” But Deen says she has no intention of changing her show’s food style, though she has personally given up sweet tea and started walking on a treadmill.
So is Deen blowing it? Deen’s decision not to renounce “her deep-fried, butter-and-sugar dripping ways” has crisis management experts telling The Los Angeles Times that she’s blowing her chance to make the most of her illness. “She can say, ‘Throw out the deep fryer,’” Mike Paul of MGP & Associates PR, a New York-based crisis management firm, told the paper. “She can say, ‘No more fried chicken. Now, I’m going to make it baked, and it’s going to taste just as good.’” But she’s not: “Instead, he said, Deen appears to be playing a cagey game with the public by trying to have her cake and eat it too (pun intended). And it could undermine her fame and fortune.”
The Lady Brunch Burger: A giant slab of a beef patty, topped with a fried egg, bacon and sandwiched between two glazed donuts.
Lady Brunch Burger. Photo credit: Marshall Astor, http://www.flickr.com/photos/lifeontheedge
Deen’s most dangerous recipes. Several news outlets immediately looked for Deen’s most decadent and even deadly recipes: The AP flagged up her deep-fried, chocolate-covered cheesecake, and a quiche that called for a pound – a pound! – of bacon; Emily Weinstein at The New York Times’s Diner’s Journal cited Deen’s Krispy Kreme donut bread pudding, which adds a can of sweetened condensed milk to cubed donuts, and the bacon-wrapped deep-fried macaroni and cheese. A quick search on the Food Network conducted by Periscope yielded a “healthy” chicken potpie recipe that calls for a quart of heavy crème and puff pastry; baked French toast casserole; and something called “Paula’s fried butter balls”.
Anthony Bourdain slams butterfat belle. Notoriously crabby Kitchen Confidential chef Anthony Bourdain wasted no time slamming Deen in what TMZ called an “ultra transparent tweet”: Reacting to Deen’s announcement that not only does she have diabetes, but that she also is a paid spokeswoman for Novo Nordisk’s diabetes medication, Bourdain said, “Thinking of getting into the leg-breaking business, so I can profitably sell crutches later.” Bourdain has laid into Deen in the past, calling her the “most dangerous person to America” who is “proud of the fact that her food is f**king bad for you.”
Is Dancing With The Stars in Paula’s future? HollywoodLife said that rumours are swirling that producers are hoping to snag Deen for season 14 of Dancing With The Stars. “It’s good timing,” a source told the celeb site. “Paula just confirmed she has diabetes and this could help her a lot.”
