Friends Don’t Let Friends…..

Much has been made of the decline of civil discourse in our society, and with due cause.  A recent Wall Street Journal article is titled Friends Don’t Let Friends Bring Up Health Care.  A small sample:

After she posted a comment on a friend’s Facebook wall about the health-care reform, stating that people should help those less fortunate than themselves, she says she received a personal message in reply: “Screw you, Catherine.” The sender was her nephew.

So, it’s a difficult time for our great Republic.  In that same vein, Barbara Walters unloaded on Paula Deen on a television show, The View,  blaming her for contributing to childhood obesity.  Barbara Walters, the ideal spokesperson for the Nanny State.  As could be expected, representatives of both sides of opinion weighed in, largely in favor of Deen.

The David Kessler types had comments along the lines of “Good for Barbara. I think it’s high time more journalists start asking hard questions.”  Personally, I would prefer the hard questions to be asked about national politics, not cookbook promotions on fluffy television programs.  By and large, most responses were favorable toward Deen, and this blog entry is one of them.  As a member of He’s-always-in-the-kitchen-at-parties Party, I have to side with Paula Deen for a variety of reasons.

I first discovered Paula Deen on the way back to Atlanta from Cumberland Island.  At my wife’s insistence, we dropped into Savannah for lunch at Deen’s restaurant.  We were advised that there was a 40 minute wait, and I harrumphed that no restaurant in Savannah was worth that kind of wait.  After some brief counsel by my wife, I headed across the street to a bookstore and settled in.  20 minutes later, our table was ready and we were seated.

My first clue that this might be a good restaurant was when they brought fresh hoe cakes.  As we waited our turn in line for the buffet, the offerings appeared ordinary enough; this could have been any meat & three anywhere in The South.  If you had a church cookbook from any congregation in the region, you could have made this spread of food yourself.  All the classics were there, but it turned out that what was different was the execution.  As I wrapped my lips around the beef tips & rice, I came to the quick realization that this was possibly the best Southern cuisine that I had ever had, including my mama’s.

On the way out the door, we bought the requisite cookbooks, and as we drove along the boring I-16 toward Macon, my wife read aloud the Paula Deen trials and tribulations, and I became a fan.  It is hard to explain to outsiders, but the Deen saga is Scarlett On the Road to Jonesboro.  To an outsider, it is all so hokey, but there is a powerful undercurrent at work.  Hers is a story of triumph over adversity, and a story of creativity and talent.  She is no shrinking violet, and she is a lady of the South.

Yeah, I know what Paula Deen’s recipes are like, but nobody forces me to eat them.  And I don’t, but this is part of a larger issue.  To be sure, our household has several well-worn cookbooks including, (gasp!) a copy of Claiborne’s The New York Times Cook Book.  It sits on a shelf with dozens of other cookbooks, right next to Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking (which includes a section about preparing squirrel for cooking).  On the same shelf is The Lovett School Mothers Club cookbook (which has a fabulous cherry pie recipe) and Better Homes & Garden’s New Cook Book.  Also present is my wife’s Swedish family cookbook, which includes a recipe for lutefisk (which requires an environmental impact statement prior to preparation).  Nearby are a cookbook from a Chinese Baptist Church in Houston, Texas and the Cobb Junior League’s Georgia On My Mind.  Michael Pollan is there, too.  They are paper back, hard back, ring binders; some with stained dog-eared pages and others that look like display copies in a bookstore.  They represent promise, creativity and the shared experience.  In short, food is love, food is personal and food is special.

In point of fact, most recipes in most cookbooks never get made more than once, if that.  Likewise, more than a few recipes get a casual look, but get rejected because they require odd ingredients such as eye of newt, butterfly eyebrows or lizard.  In short, much of the food shows and many of the cookbooks are merely there for fun.

My wife has long suspected that I am seeing other women, women like Betty Crocker and Marie Callander, but she also knows not to be concerned about Paula Deen.  As much as I love her, I know that most of her recipes and television shows are largely for entertainment.  A common phrase in the South is: “It’s not the food, it’s the fellowship.”

One has to wonder about the skills of the talent bookers for The View.  Surely, they knew what Paul Deen’s recipes are like.  Surely they knew that there would be calorie-rich offerings made for the show.  One is left with the dark suspicion that this was all deliberate.  And to have some snotty New Yorker call out Paula Deen for being personally responsible for every fat child in America is just too much.

If you live your life in fifteen second sound bites, it’s easy to come down on someone, but, in the larger sense, Barbara Walters represents a mentality that says most people aren’t smart enough to make decisions for themselves.  Of course, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence for that, but there also is the sense that people are entitled to make bad judgments, ones which reflect their freedom to do so.  Yes, they’re making a terrible mistake, but they have the autonomy of choice.

The alternative is that someone else makes their judgments for them, and whether or not these judgments are wise, they are still the result of someone else’s actions.  In other words, you don’t have the right to make a personal decision, because the one that you make will be the “wrong” one.  If you live your life in the bold headlines of someone who is always the center of the news, it is easy to make a strong statement and then walk away, but ordinary life doesn’t work that way.  Which may be part of the problem.

The easy thing to do is to scold, to sue the manufacturer out of existence, to ban, to tax, or to regulate with the stated purpose of “helping people to make the right decisions”.  Personal responsibility is not easy, it requires thoughtful choice and awareness.   The right thing is to stand by your children and show them the way, to stand up and take responsibility.

Concerned about childhood obesity?  Teach your kids how to read a food label and determine how many carbohydrates, fats and sodium they should be consuming every day.  Even the fast food restaurants post that information, and it’s online, too.  The mere act of taking time for your children is a far better thing to do than let them watch television, for that will surely give them the wrong ideas.  So far, no comment from Barbara Walters about television’s contribution to child obesity.

And this is all part of a larger issue, that of personal autonomy; are you responsible for yourself or is someone else?  The current direction of the health care debate takes away personal responsibility, your freedom to choose.  And when we lose our freedom to choose, we lose a lot more.

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