The Paula Deen Conundrum

People are shocked, just shocked that a heavyset older woman has diabetes, and that she hawked food under such deplorable conditions.  Again, I have to call BS.  Not on Deen, but on the people who pretend to be horrified that she was so "dishonest" in running her business.  So here we go, Bon The Geek style, down a list of bullet points of why this is ridiculous.

She's famous for cooking.  That doesn't change no matter what her blood sugar is.  She's not a vegetarian cook, she's not a trendy lean grilled kind of broad.  She is famous for deep fried and chocolate coated yum yums, and always will be despite her diagnosis.

Type II diabetes is not always the result of poor eating or health habits.  While it's true that our lifestyle has caused a boom in the number of cases, it doesn't mean that genetics or other factors don't come into play.  I take this personally, because I also have had to deal with people assuming things about my lifestyle.  In reality, both parents and three out of four grandparents were diabetic.  I could be a rail thin marathon tennis weight cruncher and still have this condition.  We hear so much about how to prevent it that we forget there are people who are diabetic, and would have been no matter how many pies they baked.

Paula Deen is a cook and a businesswoman.  She is going to do her job, which is to sell cookbooks and make people drool.  There is no hypocrisy in her following the money doing what she does best.  It's what public figures do, and we should know that.  Again, celebrity is not a gauge of wholesomeness.  While Deen likes to drawl and flutter her eyes to work the grandma angle, she never promised to lead us to healthy food.  In fact, she was quite open about celebrating the opposite.

Are people going to say that she tricked them into eating chocolate cake?  Does someone feel deceived that an older woman with a common disease somehow misled them into the world of fried chicken?  Because she is diabetic, should she hide in the house and find a new career?  I've heard people say all of those things, somehow feeling entitled to an apology from her.  Bullshit, and shame on them.  We are accountable for what we eat, and expecting Paula Deen, the queen of southern fried bliss, to be a role model is like expecting the Marlboro Man to attend the funerals of smokers.

I am really not a Deen fan. I think she's creepy, and I fully expect to find that she sacrifices kittens or kicks little kids when nobody is looking.  But stupid is stupid, and the minute this story hit I knew where it was going.