NEW YORK — Celebrity chef Paula Deen on Wednesday pledged a portion of her earnings from a lucrative endorsement deal with a diabetes drugmaker to the nonprofit American Diabetes Association.
The queen of Southern cooking and author of numerous cookbooks disclosed Tuesday that she's had Type 2 diabetes for three years while promoting high-fat, high-sugar recipes as usual on her Food Network TV shows. She also said Tuesday that she'd signed on as the face of a new diabetes health initiative sponsored by Novo Nordisk, the company that makes Victoza, a noninsulin injectable medication she now takes.
In a segment of ABC's food chat show "The Chew" that aired Wednesday, Deen said she and her two grown sons, Bobby and Jamie, are working with the drug company's Diabetes in a New Light campaign "because we, like everybody else, have to work."
Such scorn! It was as if Paula Deen had become the modern Hester Prynne, condemned to wear forever a big scarlet "F" (for fat) rather than the infamous "A" of Hawthorne's Puritan heroine.
Her critics focused on her timing and on her tie-in with a drug company -- all valid points. But it was the ferocious criticism of her cooking -- and by extension, her eating -- that left me wondering if any of these saintly blue-stockings had never secretly munched on a Devil Dog or a Twinkie. Had they never poured too much butter over their popcorn, lavished canned tuna with real mayonnaise or fried up a pound of bacon while the tofu sat forlorn and neglected in the vegetable crisper? Heck, hadn't they ever gotten the munchies back in the '70s?
That, of course, led me to thinking about which of Deen's dishes should proudly and unapologetically be entered into some sort of Infamous Foods Hall of Fame, right there next to the cheese fries, chicken-fried steak and the "50 Fattiest Foods in the United States" as decided by Health.com
The queen of Southern cooking and author of numerous cookbooks disclosed Tuesday that she's had Type 2 diabetes for three years while promoting high-fat, high-sugar recipes as usual on her Food Network TV shows. She also said Tuesday that she'd signed on as the face of a new diabetes health initiative sponsored by Novo Nordisk, the company that makes Victoza, a noninsulin injectable medication she now takes.
In a segment of ABC's food chat show "The Chew" that aired Wednesday, Deen said she and her two grown sons, Bobby and Jamie, are working with the drug company's Diabetes in a New Light campaign "because we, like everybody else, have to work."
Such scorn! It was as if Paula Deen had become the modern Hester Prynne, condemned to wear forever a big scarlet "F" (for fat) rather than the infamous "A" of Hawthorne's Puritan heroine.
Her critics focused on her timing and on her tie-in with a drug company -- all valid points. But it was the ferocious criticism of her cooking -- and by extension, her eating -- that left me wondering if any of these saintly blue-stockings had never secretly munched on a Devil Dog or a Twinkie. Had they never poured too much butter over their popcorn, lavished canned tuna with real mayonnaise or fried up a pound of bacon while the tofu sat forlorn and neglected in the vegetable crisper? Heck, hadn't they ever gotten the munchies back in the '70s?
That, of course, led me to thinking about which of Deen's dishes should proudly and unapologetically be entered into some sort of Infamous Foods Hall of Fame, right there next to the cheese fries, chicken-fried steak and the "50 Fattiest Foods in the United States" as decided by Health.com
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