Paula Deen’s Butter Warmer

Paula Deen, the obese celebrity chef who hid her diabetes for three years while encouraging her viewers to make unhealthy recipes, still sells a 1-quart saucepan as a “Butter Warmer.”

Unhealthy probably isn’t the right word for the recipes she’s been pushing for years. Her most recent cookbook, which came out only three months before her endorsement deal with diabetes drug maker Novo Nordisk, includes a recipe called “Sweet Saltines With Bacon.” The recipe is to pour maple syrup over saltine crackers and then stick bacon on it. I’m not making this up, it’s on Page 18 in her book “Southern Cooking Bible.”

Let’s move past the fact that maple syrup on crackers has nothing to do with southern cooking and return to that butter warmer. A quart is 32 ounces, and 32 ounces of butter contains 6,510 calories. Considering that obesity is closely tied to diabetes, and Paula Deen is financially linked to a diabetes-drug manufacturer, her whole schtick is suddenly looking less like bad nutrition and more like an eerie plan to push Food Network fans to eat themselves into insulin resistance.