he is right as rain about how sleazy it is for Paula Deen to sponsor medical treatments for an ailment caused — not exclusively, but increasingly — by the same willfully self-destructive lifestyle she also sells on her Food Network shows and in her numerous cookbooks.I don't really know what is causing Americans to get fatter, but I'm pretty sure it isn't traditional Southern cooking.
Being overweight does increase your risk for developing type 2 diabetes, and a diet high in calories, whether from sugar or from fat, can contribute to weight gain.So she has been pushing a diet that increases your risk of developing type 2 diabetes (for example: deep-fried chocolate-covered cheesecake) while, apparently, being aware that she has developed type 2 diabetes. I wonder what her doctor says about what she cooks? Can she eat her own cooking?
Fried butter and the use of donuts as bread in sandwiches are not traditional Southern foods.I'm not seeing those things on her top food network recipes.
True, but we live in a world where there are nutrition labels in fast food restaurants. I'm not saying each recipe should be lead off by a reading of nutritional facts, but even a casual word of warning could help her image. "Hey y'all, I know this looks delicious, but y'all may want to save this one for special occasions."The thing about home cooking is that you know what ingredients you're using. It's hard to imagine someone pouring a cup of cream into a sauce and thinking "I bet this is a really low-fat option!" Part of the problem with fast food is that when people don't cook, they get really distanced from their food.
Appetizer12 - 15 servings
A pack of bacon + 2/3 cup sugar
Salad6-8 servings (is 1 slice of bacon going to give me Diabeetus?)
6-8 slices of bacon
Dinner4-6 servings, IN THE SAUCE
One stick of butter
Dessert6-8 servings!
Two sticks of butter + a package of cream cheese + whipped cream (optional)
"I made the choice at the time to keep it close to me, to keep it close to my chest...I felt like I had nothing to offer anybody other than the announcement. I wasn't armed with enough knowledge. I knew when it was time, it would be in God's time."So, the launch of her new paid spokes-campaign just happened to coincide with God's time? What are the chances!?! Then she caps it off with this:
"I have always encouraged moderation," she said. "I share with you all these yummy, fattening recipes, but I tell people, in moderation... it's entertainment."I'd be eager to see a clip from one of her shows of her advising moderation, and/or telling people you're not really supposed to eat the recipes she demonstrates (or puts in her cookbooks or serves in her restaurants), she's just putting on a show for "entertainment."
AppetizerIf you go to the recipes section of Emeril Lagasse's website, you get this recipe with four cups of heavy cream, 1.5 cups of whole milk, two eggs and three egg yolks, and that's before you make the caramel sauce and the chocolate sauce. There's this recipe for grilled cheese sandwiches which includes a stick of butter for six sandwiches. (Plus, does anyone really need a recipe for grilled cheese sandwiches?)
A pack of bacon + 2/3 cup sugar
Salad
6-8 slices of bacon
Dinner
One stick of butter
Dessert
Two sticks of butter + a package of cream cheese + whipped cream (optional)
What is the benefit of adding butter? Specifically, what makes it preferable to lard or shortening?Butter tastes buttery. But lard and shortening have their uses.
Because on the other side of unhealthy food, Paula Deen is selling medication indicated for a disease that has an obesity risk factor associated with its prevalence. That's why she's being singled out.Except that the whole Bourdain vs. Deen grudge match predates the revelation that she had diabetes. The whole anti-Deen discourse started well before she started shilling diabetes drugs.
Bourdain doesn't like Deen (or anyone else he's criticized---he's been pretty consistent about this) because he thinks her food is offensive as food, and fraudulent in principleFraudulent in what sense? And who exactly appointed him the arbiter of authenticity?
That in essence, what she claims is food isn't really food. Yes you can eat it, and technically it won't kill you immediately, so it could be called food.Jesus Christ.
Bourdain doesn't think Deen's food constitutes anything close to what he considers food, so her calling it food is in a way fraudulent from his point of view.So what exactly constitutes food in Anthony Bourdain's world?
Do you consider dog meat food?Yes, of course, when people eat it. It's not food that I'd want to eat, but it's not fraudulent, anymore than bacon is fraudulent food just because many people I know would consider it a really gross thing to eat.
Sucking down fried butter balls will eventually kill you, even if you're thin.Yeah, no. No it won't. You can occasionally eat fried butter balls and be fine, just as you can occasionally eat those delicious duck fat fries at Hot Doug's, which Bourdain says is one of the thirteen places you have to eat before you die. (And before you say that he obviously doesn't expect you to eat at Hot Doug's weekly, all I can say is that when I lived in Chicago, I knew plenty of people who did eat there often. For less than $7, you can get a fully loaded hot dog and a huge plate of potatoes deep-fried in duck fat. It's a lot yummier than McDonald's, but it's available on a regular basis even to those on a budget, and I don't think it's healthier than anything Paula Deen makes.)
is the moral equivalent of Anthony Bourdain, who is a hypocrite for criticizing Paula Deen (as we all are unless we eat *perfectly* ...only the LaLannes may dare speak ill, there is no middle ground), and who contemptuously became addicted to heroin to look "cool" and then pathetically tried to claim it nearly killed him in a transparent attempt to gain some moral gravitas, and if you don't think so, you're a misogynist fatphobe?I was going to say that I didn't say that he became addicted to heroin to look cool, but then I did some googling, and actually he says he became addicted to heroin to look cool:
I wanted, very badly, to take drugs from the time I first read about them. When I was 9 or 10 years old, I remember reading about LSD, and Haight-Ashbury, and Jefferson Airplane, and that looked like fun. I wanted that. And when I read about the artists, writers, and musicians who were doing heroin, they happened to be the artists, writers, and musicians that I admired most. So I really had my mind set on becoming a junkie. Not necessarily in a calculated way, but I think it was a predictable part of the story arc. Drugs made me feel good, obviously, but it was a part of the Byron-esque figure that I wanted to be and that I'd imagined myself to be as an insecure, gawky kid. They did make me cool, and they did make me feel good. Unfortunately, they also destroyed my life.And no, I don't think that "unfortunately, they also destroyed my life" negates the way in which he romanticizes drug addiction. They obviously didn't destroy his life, because by all accounts he has a totally sweet life. They ruin many people's lives, but not his. And in interviews, he really does depict his heroin addiction as some sort of mark of gritty masculinity. Which is bullshit. I can think of nothing more shameful than some rich suburban kid who decided to move to the East Village and become a junkie because he thought it would make him look cool. And he doesn't talk about it as a shameful, humiliating fact about his past.
I'm amused by food nerds who say, "I'd never eat at a restaurant where the chef smokes." Almost all the chefs I know smoke. That said, I'm also a new father of a 6-month-old girl. I don't want to encourage anyone to quit smoking. In my experience, it really does make you cool. Chicks love it. But after 38 years, I quit.But hey, telling people that all chefs smoke and it makes you cool and chicks love it is really nothing compared to cooking food that has lots of butter and fat. Of course, Bourdain does that, too. But it's different, because it just is.
So your objection to Bourdain is that he is insufficiently miserable and failing to be wracked with shame? Gotcha.My objection to Bourdain is that he is hypocritically calling out Paula Deen for promoting an unhealthy lifestyle, while at the same time he promotes things that are demonstrably more unhealthy than cooking with butter.
But he's not selling medication for it.And she's not encouraging people to smoke by telling them it makes you look cool and chicks love it.
If she's as successful as she can be at promoting the kind of food she is known for, more people become susceptible to diabetes.I don't believe that you honestly think that Paula Deen is a factor in promoting diabetes. For one thing, she's a total throw-back. Her style of cooking, if you look at her actual recipes and not at the few things like deep-fried butter balls that her detractors obsessively harp on, is basically the kind of food that Americans cooked and ate in the '50s. I'm not saying that's a good thing: I personally would not be sad if no one ever used cream of celery soup in a recipe again. But her style of cooking is on the decline, and that's happened at the same time that rates of type II diabetes have increased. She isn't what's causing diabetes, and honestly, I think rates of diabetes would probably go down if people went back to cooking anything, even if it's just the cream-of-whatever-chicken-casserole goop that she promotes.
Your argument makes the same error as the argument that says homosexuals shouldn't be allowed to teach in public schoolsI'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you were mortified as soon as you hit "post" and now wish fervently that there was an edit button. Because, seriously, there's so much wrong with that argument, starting with the fact that it equates being gay with smoking cigarettes.
Sorry, but I just don't buy into the smoking cult-of-shame.You must be fucking kidding me. There is nothing lethal about eating fat-laden, buttery food in moderation. You can eat a fried butter ball once in a while and be totally healthy in every respect. There is absolutely no evidence that says that eating fatty food occasionally, in moderation, as a special treat, will give you diabetes. On the other hand, there is a huge raft of evidence that smoking will kill you. There is no moderation in smoking cigarettes. People who demonize unhealthy food but not smoking are people who are motivated by something other than concern for public or personal health.
If you can point out the group of smokers that started their habit because they watched a shitload of Travel Channel in high school and became enamored with smoking-sex-idol-Bourdain, fine.That's funny, because nobody has provided any evidence at all that Paula Deen makes people develop diabetes.
This is another area in which Bourdain and Deen simply don't compare: Deen's target audience is, in fact, at high risk of diabetes, while Bourdain's audience is not teenagers curious about smoking, it's middle-aged stoners.Right, and I think that's the bottom line. Deen's audience is people for whom many MeFites have total contempt. They're not thoughtful people like Bourdain's audience. They can't be trusted to think for themselves. If they see a deep-fried butterball, they won't think that it's funny and over-the-top but not something they'd actually make or that it's funny and over-the-top and they'll make it once for their Superbowl party, but it's definitely not something they'd eat on a regular basis. Deen's audience are assumed to be people who are defined by their fatness and unhealthy eating habits, and therefore they can't even be exposed to unhealthy recipes without being at risk for developing diabetes. And I mean, are we seriously arguing that middle-aged stoner guys aren't at risk for unhealthy behavior and resulting health problems?
Bourdain doesn't glorify smoking on his show, and he certainly doesn't get laid via cigarettes on his showBourdain glorifies his persona on his show. His persona is a hard-drinking, hard-living, adventurous guy who is open to any experience, and that makes him sexy and cool and makes other middle-aged guys think that they can be sexy and cool, too. That's what he's selling: the illusion of coolness that appeals to guys who are afraid they're getting soft and unmanly as they age. One of the ways in which he created that persona was to chain smoke in his early shows, at a time when smoking was pretty much absent in most pop culture. Smoking coded him as a rule-breaking iconoclast. When he gave up smoking, he went out of his way to specify that he was still a hard-living dude who thought that smoking was awesome. He gave interviews where he made it very clear that he wasn't advocating giving up smoking and that he still thought smoking made people cool and sexy. That's because he's selling a persona, and his persona isn't compatible with saying "hey, you know you really should take care of your body." His persona is utterly compatible with bashing some woman whom his target audience is going to despise anyway, but it's not compatible with telling middle-aged stoner dudes that hedonism is self-indulgent and irresponsible. What he's selling is the idea that your hedonism makes you just a little bit rock 'n roll.
"Naturally I am being compensated, my children are being compensated, because we, like everybody else, have to work."posted by argonauta at 10:39 AM on January 20, 2012 [3 favorites]
Bourdain practices hedonism, Deen practices (and preaches) gluttony.And I'm saying that hedonism is what you call it when you think the person is a good person, and gluttony is what you call it when you think the person is trash.
And not to defend Bourdain, but if you've ever watched his show "classist" is not a term to describe it and I'm not sure "regionalist" fits either.You can be classist and regionalist and still participate in slumming and cultural tourism.
and I'm not sure where the "misogyny" comes from.Do women ever fall on the "hedonist" side of the great hedonist/ glutton split? And it's very apparent to me that Bourdain's schtick is totally about masculinity and that his hedonism makes him a real man, in his own eyes. Whereas gluttony just makes a woman gross. How many women are there in Bourdain's awesome hedonist chef posse?
Southerners in 1920 were eating as well as Bourdain eats.I seriously doubt that was true, even if you take into account Bourdain's hot dog fixation and other unhealthy eating habits. Pellagra, a disease caused by niacin deficiency, was epidemic in the US South in the first two decades of the twentieth century, reflecting the prevalence of malnutrition. (You can google the wikipedia article if you want to see some nasty pictures of what pellagra does to people. It wasn't a pretty way to die.) I'm a historian, not a food writer, which colors my perspective, but I think you're romanticizing the past in a sort of unfortunate way.
« Older What were you raised by wolves? by Vera Brosgol.... | John McCain's entire 2008 oppo... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
Or is this somehow different?
posted by muddgirl at 2:50 PM on January 18, 2012 [10 favorites]