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Let’s talk about hypocrisy. On Jan. 17, Paula Deen, queen of the Southern Fried aesthetic, told Al Roker on the Today Show that she was saddled with Type 2 Diabetes.
Across the United States, viewers of all stripes kind of went, “Duh?”
She’s the woman who espouses down home cooking, using enough butter and sugar and plain old fat to give fitness junkies a blockage just from reading her cookbooks. She’s put together doughnut sandwiches with fried eggs. She’s deep fried your dog and put powdered sugar on it. (This is unsubstantiated rumor, however).
The fact that she has the kind of Diabetes brought on by poor diet and weight isn’t really all that shocking, right? I always say never trust a skinny chef, because they obviously aren’t eating their own food. It makes sense that she’d have weight-related health problems. If anyone’s surprised and dismayed at this development, they’re probably surprised and dismayed that their ditches fill up with rainwater.
Moving past that, many more people are railing against her hypocrisy. She’s now employed as a spokesperson for Diabetes drug manufacturer Novo Nordisk.
Anthony Bordain, a New York chef and Travel Channel celebrity, tweeted that he’s thinking about getting into the leg breaking business, so he can profitably sell crutches later. This not so subtle dig at Paula Deen isn’t all that surprising, as Bordain has had a not so friendly rivalry with her for some time.
“When your signature dish is hamburger in between a doughnut, and you’ve been cheerfully selling this stuff knowing all along that you have Type 2 Diabetes, it’s in bad taste if nothing else,” Bordain told Eater, a food website.
It does kind of seem like she was secretly in the employ of Novo Nordisk all along, duping the American public into eating high calorie, high fat, high sugar foods, so that they’d have to turn to diabetes medication.
Of course, that’s not the case (or if it is, that’s the kind of high level conspiracy theory that gets you kicked off of a newspaper staff.) Still, it speaks to an amount of naivety on the part of both Deen and the company she represents that this hypocrisy wouldn’t garner negative attention. There is also the fact that she’s not wrong.
I know, double take, right?
There’s this logical rule, it’s called the Tu Quoque fallacy. It pretty much says that it is illogical to say something isn’t true just because someone isn’t following their own advice. If on death row, a mass murderer told everyone else on the block that murder was wrong, does that somehow disprove his argument?
If an unhealthy woman who sells unhealthy products, has diabetes, tells the world that it is unhealthy for people to eat unhealthy things, is she automatically proven wrong?
Novo Nordisk and Paula Deen may not be all that bright, to enter into an alliance were they don’t seem to follow their own advice. That doesn’t make their advice bad.
It just makes them unwise.
David Ryan Palmer is a staff writer at the Southwest Daily News in Sulphur, Louisiana. You can contact him on twitter via @SDNDavidPalmer, or email him at sdn.davidryanpalmer@gmail.com. He wants some chocolate covered fried cheesecake.
Let’s talk about hypocrisy. On Jan. 17, Paula Deen, queen of the Southern Fried aesthetic, told Al Roker on the Today Show that she was saddled with Type 2 Diabetes.
Across the United States, viewers of all stripes kind of went, “Duh?”
She’s the woman who espouses down home cooking, using enough butter and sugar and plain old fat to give fitness junkies a blockage just from reading her cookbooks. She’s put together doughnut sandwiches with fried eggs. She’s deep fried your dog and put powdered sugar on it. (This is unsubstantiated rumor, however).
The fact that she has the kind of Diabetes brought on by poor diet and weight isn’t really all that shocking, right? I always say never trust a skinny chef, because they obviously aren’t eating their own food. It makes sense that she’d have weight-related health problems. If anyone’s surprised and dismayed at this development, they’re probably surprised and dismayed that their ditches fill up with rainwater.
Moving past that, many more people are railing against her hypocrisy. She’s now employed as a spokesperson for Diabetes drug manufacturer Novo Nordisk.
Anthony Bordain, a New York chef and Travel Channel celebrity, tweeted that he’s thinking about getting into the leg breaking business, so he can profitably sell crutches later. This not so subtle dig at Paula Deen isn’t all that surprising, as Bordain has had a not so friendly rivalry with her for some time.
“When your signature dish is hamburger in between a doughnut, and you’ve been cheerfully selling this stuff knowing all along that you have Type 2 Diabetes, it’s in bad taste if nothing else,” Bordain told Eater, a food website.
It does kind of seem like she was secretly in the employ of Novo Nordisk all along, duping the American public into eating high calorie, high fat, high sugar foods, so that they’d have to turn to diabetes medication.
Of course, that’s not the case (or if it is, that’s the kind of high level conspiracy theory that gets you kicked off of a newspaper staff.) Still, it speaks to an amount of naivety on the part of both Deen and the company she represents that this hypocrisy wouldn’t garner negative attention. There is also the fact that she’s not wrong.
I know, double take, right?
There’s this logical rule, it’s called the Tu Quoque fallacy. It pretty much says that it is illogical to say something isn’t true just because someone isn’t following their own advice. If on death row, a mass murderer told everyone else on the block that murder was wrong, does that somehow disprove his argument?
If an unhealthy woman who sells unhealthy products, has diabetes, tells the world that it is unhealthy for people to eat unhealthy things, is she automatically proven wrong?
Novo Nordisk and Paula Deen may not be all that bright, to enter into an alliance were they don’t seem to follow their own advice. That doesn’t make their advice bad.
It just makes them unwise.
David Ryan Palmer is a staff writer at the Southwest Daily News in Sulphur, Louisiana. You can contact him on twitter via @SDNDavidPalmer, or email him at sdn.davidryanpalmer@gmail.com. He wants some chocolate covered fried cheesecake.
