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[Paula Deen] : Evil, Sadistic Monster of a Woman
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You're right. Every single person on the Food Channel is on the air because of their personality and the lifestyle they present on their shows.
However, I would argue that most people don't watch Giada, Guy, or Paula because they want to emulate their lifestyles. Rather they feel they connect in some way with these personalities and watch the shows as a result of that connection.
I started watching Paula because I grew up in a "Down Home Country" environment and she reminded me of my grandmother (as cliched as that is). I was already eating those types of foods before Paula came along. If anything, I eat considerably less unhealthy meals since I began watching the Food Network (though, that's almost certainly coincidental).
I don't think I'm necessarily atypical in this behavior, but I'd welcome an argument to the contrary.
Rigorous Scholarship
That's obviously a gross exaggeration, but she does make comments and have an attitude along the lines of 'go ahead and treat yourself, you can have one more bite'
Rigorous Scholarship
*reducing HbA1C to 9% if it is above is probably highly beneficial, but the trials have not yet been run.
And it's a pretty irresponsible cooking show that urges you to pig out constantly.
i have been fat most of my life, i am not a particularly choosy foodie, i love fast food and ice cream and americanized chinese and all sorts of syrups and creams and bad-fats and sugars
but watching her make food makes me dry heave
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
This is my whole issue with this entire thread. Why is it a cooking show's responsibility to tell you to lead a healthy lifestyle?
Oh I don't necessarily think that people want to emulate anyone on the Food Network. My mom watches her largely for the same reason you do; she was raised on a farm in Virginia and grew up eating Southern cooking. So she already connects emotionally with that lifestyle and represents it herself to some extent.
I actually don't really blame Paula Deen for cooking the way she does on her program because, like I've said, her recipes are so over the top that their unhealthy nature ought to go without saying. I don't think she's tricking anyone into being unhealthy. I do think it's a shame that she isn't going to translate her personal appeal into a voyage of discovery into delicious food that's lower on the glycemic index, but whatevs.
Here's the thing about Paula Deen: she's crazy. No, seriously. She had crippling agoraphobia and near-daily panic attacks for two solid decades. She started cooking because it was something she could do without leaving her home, and the repetition and sense of order and control it gave her helped her manage her condition. So I'm not in any rush to condemn her; this was the only way she found to improve her mental health to the point where she could function as an adult. Besides, I don't feel that it's particularly fair to hold a person with a long, long history of crippling psychological issues up to the high moral standard that people want to impose on her as if she's always a completely rational person, particularly since some of those same people simultaneously don't recognize the agency of her viewers to educate themselves about healthy cooking or eating.
But I'm perfectly fine with hating on Food Network as an organization because they have a lot of creative control in their programming, they have the ability to offer programs which focus more on education instead of lifestyle, and they simply choose not to.
go to 1:27
It's even worse when you realize that Deen's persona is the regular cook. She never uses words like "festive" or "holiday," and her food never really shows the careful staging of a special occasion. She uses terms like "family" and "home" constantly because she either thinks or wants the viewer to think that this is a normal, daily cuisine. Hell, her show's actually titled "Paula's Home Cooking."
Most people don't make recipes from TV shows. However, when they do make recipes, it will probably be a dessert, since desserts emphasize precise measurements and timing that's hard to screw up if you follow the direction. Do you remember taking cooking lessons in Home Ec? Chances are, all of the recipes they gave you were desserts. Have you gone to a Pot Luck? The vast majority of recipes people bring is dessert. Over 1/3 of Paula Dean's recipes qualify as desert. Paula Dean has diabetes. This is not a coincidence.
As Sammy pointed out, the purpose of these shows isn't to convince you to make these recipes everyday. It's to promote a lifestyle, a brand. Commercials do this all the time. Look at any beer ad, or any cigarette ad. The purpose isn't to show how your product is better than the competitor, the purpose is that you get recognized as a legitimate brand, so people feel comfortable about buying you.
So even if people don't cook like Paula Dean, they still walk away thinking it's okay to eat like Paula Dean. And it's really not.
I think part of the problems I have with any of the cooking shows that have seemingly absurd quantities of unhealthy ingredients is that
a. if you do any cooking at home you know you don't need X amount of something to achieve a desired tasty result.
b. the dishes they make are so clearly beneath the aspiring gourmand that an unhealthy ingredient is wasted on such pedestrian food.
If you compare any cooking show on PBS or Create vs. Food Network, the differences are so clear in what audience watches them.
0.
Blogging is where it's at.
Rigorous Scholarship
Well, Paula Deen gave herself diabetes.
"Eating like Paula Deen" implies eating that way often enough to have the same result.
The deep fried bacon thing is so fucking ridiculous.
Standing cooking bacon in a pan is the problem?
You can make 7-8 pieces of bacon at a time on a regularly sized cookie sheet. You can put 2-3 cookie sheets in an oven at a time. The bacon comes out awesome! You can't even fucking claim that the oven method deprives you of drippings you'd save or use to cook eggs because you're deep frying the fucking bacon!
I didn't think that deep fried bacon could piss me off, but here we are.
First off, I didn't say she was a bit mental a while ago. A few years back, I met her at a charity event for servicemembers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. She bumped into a sergeant who had lost both his legs in an IED attack and hadn't yet been fitted for his prosthetics. You could see in her eyes that her brain had just switched over to the blue screen of death until she successfully processed what she was experiencing, at which point she began screaming, "YOU DON'T HAVE ANY LEGS! YOU DON'T HAVE ANY LEGS!"
Trust me, that lady is still crazy.
Second off, my argument isn't about her mental health as exculpatory evidence to support making a bad decision, it's about the ludicrously backwards double standard where you expect a crazy person to stick religiously with a moral highground, but the people who watch her show are too mentally incompetent to be trusted not to eat three sticks of butter a day.
The main difference between how I eat and how Paula Deen eats is that I don't consume excessive amounts of sugar. I used to eat a lot of sugar, though still less than the average American, and I was 20 pounds overweight. I lost that weight when I cut sugar from my diet.
Corporations love HFCS because sugar gives them a cheap and easy way to get people to buy more product. Paula Dean promotes the idea that eating excessive quantities of sugar is okay. It doesn't matter if you follow her specific recipes.
This is my thought on the matter.
Because no man is an island?
We can pat ourselves on the back about how great we are, and if anyone fails to meet our exacting standards of health or lifestyle it's because of personal weakness, but at the end of the day we are tremendously influenced by the media and ideas around us.
On the other hand personal responability is a thing. If you're worried people are making the wrong decisions then the answer is to educate them better, and we could use better health education, not to baby and coddle them into making the right decision by putting disclaimers on the Food Network telling people hey this isn't healthy.
Anyone with half a brain knows that that much butter will eventually kill you. Should NASCAR come with a disclaimer telling you its not safe to drive that fast?
The FOX (ie, Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares) Ramsay may yell more than the BBC one, but it's always warranted. The schtick is that on the FOX shows, they surround him with stupider people than they do on the BBC ones, which gives him more cause to lose his shit.
When he's not surrounded by idiots (and/or doesn't have professional-level expectations of them) - ie, on Masterchef - there's very little yelling from Ramsay.
Alton Brown hosted Iron Chef America, which is a monument to food waste. I can't count the number of times I've seen a chef on that show use up a 40-lbs fish to produce 3 4oz servings, and the rest of the carcass gets slid across the table into a garbage can.
The big issue isn't so much that it's not telling you that it's unhealthy as it is that it's implying that the type of stuff it's serving up is normal and not problematic. Compare to Julia Child, whose recipes, while unhealthy, were incredibly impractical for normal use.
"hey don't do this" isn't education. Education is teaching why something is bad, what makes it bad, what better alternatives are etc etc. You're not educating anyone when you tell a kid not to stick his tongue in an outlet.
The answer to problems like this isn't to act like we're a nation of 6 year olds who need instruction from on high.
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Deep breaths. It's not like deep frying bacon makes it more unhealthy. The entire cooking process involves rendering fat out of the product, we're not worries about fat getting in.
--LeVar Burton
Impractical for those who view cooking as strictly a utilitarian means of feeding oneself.
The BBC version of Kitchen Nightmares is head and shoulders above the US version.
Rigorous Scholarship
That's an optimization issue. Cuisine is generally optimized for taste and price. If you change it for health, you are moving it off that optimum.
No, impractical as in wanting a meal that can be started after you get home from work and finished before you need to go to bed for work tomorrow without sucking up all the time that could be spent with your family.
You're absolutely right.
To be honest, I only eat healthy most of the time because of media. Obviously, different media.
But, short of taking her off the air (or fundamentally changing her show in such a way that she may as well be off the air) is there any real change that can be made to produce a non-trivial result?