Good riddance, Paula Deen — but too bad gloating over her belated ruination won’t make up for years of her televised, stomach-churning dominion over millions of Americans’ taste.
Deen was a prime mover behind the bulging national waistline, a food festival butt-barer and a diabetes profiteer. Now, she’s revealed as a racist, too (or sounds awfully like one).
But her antics wouldn’t have been remotely as destructive if the Food Network hadn’t propelled her from regional obscurity to global superstardom. Although the network’s acting like she’s an aberration — a blemish on its image as home to many great, non-racist chefs — Deen personifies, at its worst, the culinary cult of personality that the channel did more than anything else to create.
Of course, she’s no Mario Batali, Bobby Flay or Masaharu Morimoto. But, like another Food Network clown, Guy Fieri, she’s a hero to tens of millions of fans. To lots of viewers, what’s one toque from another as long as he or she enjoys TV air time and fame as a restaurateur/“author”/pundit?
Sure, repugnant Paula’s contract isn’t being renewed. That isn’t quite the same as firing her. In fact, yesterday, the network sent out a pitch for its “programming highlights.” Among them: a show premiering July 14 hosted by her son Jamie Deen, “Mom’s Garden.”
It said Jamie “doesn’t need a farmer’s market when his mom’s garden is around the corner! Paula’s garden features the freshest vegetables in the South.” Any awareness of inappropriateness in light of slurs she admitted using is nonexistent.
I could never stomach the Queen of Trailer Park Cuisine. My loathing peaked last year when she revealed she’d long been, as I happen to be, a type-2 diabetic — a disease her disgusting recipes helped to worsen in millions of sufferers — and was hawking a $500-a-month medicine of no more proven efficacy than others costing less than $20 a month.
But the reach of the Food Network itself, and the instant fandom it confers on just about anybody who appears on it regularly, is the larger issue — not the gross-out behavior of one of its profit-center personalities.
Rock-star chefdom made our culinary scene into a trashy, traveling carnival. It warped restaurants coast to coast, driving chefs to “brand” themselves so they’d never have to sweat over a real stove again.
The lowliest talents dream of a TV star turn — whether they’re a budding Batali or a wannabe Deen or Fieri. No wonder they drift from restaurant to restaurant like moths, leaving owners and customers in the lurch and menus as wobbly as panna cotta that didn’t set.
The Food Network is hardly alone in this, of course. But with 90 million US households tuning in, it carries slightly more clout than all other TV networks’ food shows, newspaper and magazine reviews and articles, cooking schools, blogs and Twitter feeds combined.
Whoa — aren’t we a happier nation to know so much more than we once did about barbecue, Japanese eggplant and desserts made from yuzu and seaweed?
Maybe not. True, a lot of people now spend big bucks to gorge their way through food festivals like the one in Miami where ever-classy Deen infamously mooned the crowd a few years ago.
But in the 1970s, when superstar dancers like Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gelsey Kirkland briefly popularized classical ballet, a wise friend said of suddenly over-subscribed performances, “Many attend, but few comprehend.”
Call me elitist. But for the proof of that in the food world, just look at what Paula Deen has wrought.