The snake offering Eve a deep-fried apple
Look, Paula Deen’s shenanigans with the pharmaceutical company are reprehensible, but that’s far from the only reason people are getting judgy about the recent news that she has diabetes. Even when writers are careful to specify that her drug dealings are the real problem, the most venomous commentary seems reserved for the mere fact that she has diabetes. Her not admitting she has diabetes for three years is criminally negligent, they seem to feel, since she was fooling people about the health problems with her style of cooking. The logic goes like this: Paula Deen cooks extremely fattening food on television; people watch Paula Deen cook extremely fattening food on television; there is an obesity problem in America; therefore, Paula Deen is responsible for the obesity problem in America.
There are a lot of problems with that line of reasoning. Here are some numbers: her show attracts around 750k viewers. Her magazine guarantees advertisers 600,000 readers. She sold about 97,000 books in 2010, and has sold 4.5 million books over the course of her career. Are those a lot of things? Sure! But they represent a minute portion of the US population, somewhere between one and two percent even at the most generous formulation of the reach of her empire. People like Deen are useful representatives of a particular eating style. But are they the cause of that eating style? I don’t think so. If we’re pinning the obesity problem in America on something, it would be something more like the combination of:
- Changes in the economy requiring family members to spend more time per capita at work than in the home, resulting in more prepared than home-cooked food being served.
- Food subsidies making unhealthy ingredients cheaper than healthy ones.
- Restaurants being more accessible than sources of fresh, healthy food.
Rising along with this is a culture of abundance where pleasing food is cheaper than ever before, food lasts longer than ever before, it’s more possible for us to have careers that don’t slowly destroy our body (but afford us fewer opportunities to move around), and there are more enjoyable but also more sedentary forms of leisure. So on the one hand we have a series of public policy fuck-ups; on the other, we have some real progress in our standard of living. The former we need to reverse, but not the latter, and I think Deen belongs firmly to the latter. The culture of abundance has certainly produced some unintended problems, and these need to be addressed, but it seems to me they are really problematic (as opposed to the illusorily problematic nature of food-releated illness being the more common cause of death largely because we’ve been so successful at curbing all the other ones) because of issues that have nothing to do with Paula Deen deep-frying different things.
There are lots of other issues here (s.e. smith addresses many of them in this piece) but I don’t get a sense that Deen-bashers are particularly interested in them. As long as we attribute the rise of obesity as a public health problem to Americans’ lack of willpower or stupidity (or even media effects particularly), we’ll keep endorsing conservative solutions that emphasize “personal responsibility” over the sort of large-scale public policy fixes that the Obama administration has been so good about encouraging. Paula Deen is not the problem. Poverty is the problem.
