Foods Gwyneth Paltrow claims to love: fried chicken sliders, sweet potato fries, dim sum, onion rings, pizza, fish and chips, cheese, fried shrimp, Guinness ale and eel.
But she draws the line at pork: “No, I won’t eat that,” she sniffed to W magazine in 2007.
Now the willowy, impossibly thin actress, six-day-a-week exerciser and macrobiotic sometimes-vegetarian who hates wheat and loves kale is coming out with a cookbook next spring. Called “My Father’s Daughter,” it’s a collection of favorite family recipes like corn chowder with bacon, pancakes, chicken dumplings, french fries and pizza.
Really?
The icy blonde famous for her WASP-y good looks suddenly insists she loves to chow down just like normal folk. For a recent Vogue profile, she showed off her deep-fat fryer and outdoor pizza oven. Yet strangely, when she cooked with food critic Jeffrey Steingarten, she made two batches of the corn chowder — one with bacon (for him) and one without (for herself).
Talk about food issues. How can a self-proclaimed epicure be so damn picky?
True foodies aren’t buying Gwyneth’s claim to down-home cooking.
“You’re limiting yourself greatly” in the pleasures of new tastes when you have a diet like Gwyneth’s, says Amanda Kludt, New York editor of food blog Eater.com. “Most of my revelatory meals have included meat.”
“It’s being a little precious to call youself a foodie when you are so restrictive [with your diet],” agrees Sarah Katherine Lewis, author of “Sex and Bacon: Why I Love Things That are Very, Very Bad for Me.” “To me, a foodie is someone who is very adventurous and voracious.”
Paltrow’s “righteous, locally grown, organic, non-this, non-that” attitude, Lewis adds, makes it seem like she sees food “not as a sensual pleasure, but as an intellectual pleasure — of being more politically correct than anyone else.”
Also, by bragging about all the unhealthy food she allegedly eats, Gwyneth is not-so-subtly broadcasting her superiority to the world. She can do it all — from wolfing pizza to having time to work out, raise two kids and cook all their meals at home, like she says she does.
“People do use [food] as a bragging right, whether it’s a macrobiotic diet or an
organ-meat society,” says Kludt. “People have weird relationships to food that they like to talk about in public, as a way to define who they are — especially women. I think she wants to come across as this Martha Stewart type.”
Still, you don’t have to pig out on pork to be serious about loving food.
“There are different levels of food lovers,” Kludt says. “Being a food lover is more about where you’re sourcing from, and how far you’ll go to get something delicious.”
You might, for example, go all the way to Spain, only to refuse the jamón serrano — as Paltrow did when she road-tripped with chef Mario Batali. To show her ability to sautée with the best of them, she joined meat-loving Batali on a PBS show about eating his way through the Iberian peninsula. Yet she famously became squeamish at the meat-grilling scenes, and couldn’t bite a chocolate-dipped churro without remarking, “So fattening.”
“Why would you go to Spain with that one bitch who refuses to eat ham?” asked outspoken chef Anthony Bourdain when he was on a panel with Batali last year.
And why does Gwynnie need to prove herself as a foodie when there’s no way she enjoys all the fried food she claims to love?
Her daughter is named Apple partly because the name sounded “wholesome and clean,” she once said.
Then consider Paltrow’s mysterious, nutrition-related ailments. The budding chef is the same girl who fainted and had to be checked into Mount Sinai two years ago, reportedly as a result of a strict juice-and-salad cleanse. And last moth she divulged — via her lifestyle Web site, GOOP — that her doctor told her she had “the beginning stages of osteopenia,” as well as “the lowest [Vitamin D levels] they had ever seen.”
Sounds like the afflictions of the undernourished, not a rich movie star and self-proclaimed foodie who owns every possible frying device.
Her foodie routine looks like a poorly cast role, and she’s not playing her part very convincingly.
“I can’t pretend to be somebody who makes $25,000 a year,” she once said. And she can’t pretend to be a girl who loves to eat, either.
Stick a fork in it, Gwyneth — this act’s done.