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NYT: Of Mouselike Bites and Marathons
January 21, 2012
Of Mouselike Bites and Marathons
By FRANK BRUNI
THE people who invite us to wallow in food seldom remind us to beware.
In the pages of their gorgeously illustrated cookbooks or on their delectably edited TV shows, they assemble and plunge headlong into lavish feasts, oohing as they baste, cooing as they carve and swooning over the side dishes. We respond as intended. We hanker and yearn.
Here’s what we don’t see: the yogurt and berries they had for breakfast; the salads and grilled vegetables they eat on nights off; the portion of each lovingly shot dish that they don’t touch, having satisfied their curiosity or the cameras with a few bites. If they’re fit, they often neglect to mention the exercise involved. If they’re not, they infrequently cop to their health worries or woes.
Last week Paula Deen copped. The woman whose best-known burger recipe uses glazed doughnuts in place of a bun announced that she has diabetes. It would have been refreshing if the circumstances hadn’t been so self-serving: she was plugging her son Bobby’s new Cooking Channel show, “Not My Mama’s Meals,” which is devoted to lower-calorie recipes. And she had recently signed on as a paid pitchwoman for a diabetes drug.
What’s more, she had waited three long, greasy years since her diagnosis to come out. During that period, she promoted the deep-fried life without acknowledging her firsthand experience of how a person can be burned by it.
That’s a profound, unsettling act of withholding. But it’s mirrored by many smaller, less calculated, more innocent ones in the world of food celebrities and food celebrators, including those of us who have written orgiastic accounts of sumptuous dinners. Deen’s revelation jolted me in part because people in the business of peddling gastronomic bliss rarely draw such a bold connection between indulgence and its possible wages.
It’s not that the wages are unpredictable or hidden. Every day seems to bring the invention of a new diet, and in a country with tens of millions of obese people, it sometimes seems that half of them are on reality shows, sweating or crying their way up the steep, broccoli-paved road to redemption. We once again have “jiggle TV,” only now it refers to the swoop and sway of second chins on a StairMaster.
