Posted by Erin Zimmer, May 2, 2008 at 1:00 PM
Paula Deen may not be all giggles this weekend at a cooking demo show she's hosting in Atlanta. Protesters like Al Sharpton, Reverend Jesse Jackson, Susan Sarandon and Danny Glover are expected to show-up and chastise her affiliation with Smithfield, a North Carolina-based food plant notorious for brutal, inhumane working conditions. But hey ya'll, "I have no particular expertise in these [labor] matters. I only have expertise in how ham tastes, and how it is processed," Deen told Diane Rehm last year.
Expert or not, she's heard the nightmarish stories about Smithfield workers losing arms and legs in the pig-processing factory. But that hasn't stopped her ties with the company, including a special Mother's Day menu for next weekend, filled with caramelized bacon and other forms of Smithfield piggy. Dean has always defended Smithfield in the past, arguing that "we all have complaints about our work. It's called work for a reason." But when does work become torture?
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Posted by Erin Zimmer, November 5, 2007 at 11:45 AM
Paula Deen's trademark cackle and urge to fry everything can be endearing. But her business partnership with Smithfield foods? Now that's offensive, at least for some animal rights activists in Washington this weekend. She was in town for the convention center's second annual Metropolitan Cooking and Entertaining show, and during her first cooking demo—she had three, each of which were sold-out with more than 500 in attendance—protesters scattered about the crowd and started yelling out against Smithfield.
"What's that they're saying?" She tried to zero in on chants but wasn't too successful in the huge auditorium. Security guards quickly yanked out the activists. They were dressed in average street clothes and got an early start that morning, protesting while in line for the 11 a.m. show. Why? According to vegetarian literature at GoVeg.com, Smithfield kills more pigs "than any other company in the world" and treats them pretty badly. Pumping the animals with so many drugs and hormones that the poor piggies can "hardly walk, and about one in five die before they can be sent to slaughter."
But this wasn't the only unexpected weirdness at the Paula portion of the trade show. Major tension charged the stage chemistry between her and husband Michael Groover, the white-bearded, Santa-reminiscent tugboat pilot from Savannah. As his wife babbled on and on about the mundane ("Mmm, gumbo") and the more serious (her agoraphobia, which she suffered from for 20 years and left her housebound), he got progressively more tomato-red and embarrassed.
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Posted by Ed Levine, April 20, 2007 at 2:30 PM
The New York Times today covered an organized labor demonstration protesting Paula Deen's status as spokesperson for Smithfield. The NLRB found that Smithfield unfairly tried to keep a union out of its North Carolina plant. Deen defended the company in no uncertain terms. She probably didn't know that a fired worker trying to organize "had been beaten by the plant's police on the day of the (union) election."
