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| Paula Deen, cute as a button. |
The point is, moderation and variety are beneficial to good health. As is knowing what your body does well with and what it doesn't. I don't feel so great after eating anything with ketchup, and I do even worse when it comes to anything from the cabbage family. My stomach gets hard, I get sleepy in that not so good way. I also have to keep in mind that there are certain foods I'm allergic to, and while the reaction is mild, I do best to stay away from those foods or to eat miniscule amounts here and there.
Why do I even bring any of this up? Because I'm upset about the flack that Paula Deen is getting about having diabetes and her cooking style.
We all know that certain things are done for entertainment purposes and entertainment purposes only. This includes all the stuff we do for holidays and for when we entertain friends and guests. We serve more during these few hours than we do on any other average day of the year. We don't even cook the same types of foods as we would normally cook. Alcoholic consumption is normally much lower on your average day.
The point is, there are a handful of days in a year that we go overboard, whether with what we cook, serve, or consume. Sure every day is a special day, but not every day is a holiday or a birthday, or a day in which we entertain special friends and guests, and so we should see that our creativity and consumption is balanced quite well with the rest of our daily lives. To say that "Paula Deen is a terrible person for what her shows and cookbooks entertain us with..." really is a terrible thing to be saying.
We may see her everyday, but her shows don't get filmed every day. And would we really be so in awe of her if her show were about dry diabetic foods? No, I don't think so. Cake Boss ranks much better than Diabetic Boss would.
In our quest for political correctness and ethics, the media and the public seem to be missing out on the fact that a constrained life is as destructive as a fancy free life. There is no perfect, one size fits all solution to health and happiness. We are each our own person. Paula Deen knows this. And if I'm remembering correctly, and I am, she's the first to say how rich her recipes are. She's also the first to instruct us all to moderate our intake.
Enjoy her show for what it is, entertainment. There is no misleading you in that.
Jose Andres makes a good point (from about 4 minutes in, in the backlash video below), Paula Deen is NOT the cause of obesity in America. And I don't care that it took her so long to come out with the fact that she had diabetes, she didn't know what to think of that fact herself. It's time for ALL of us to move forward.
