The Bronx cheer for Deen, a prototypical Southern mother with a lifetime's recipes of irredeemably deep-fried dishes, is less a reflection of the culinary elitism that runs through Bourdain's vice-ridden travelogues than the regionalist snobbery that fuels its appeal.
From food to faith, the mythic Dixie--soulful and abundant, passionate and insubmissive--has always clashed with the rigidly cosmopolitan north, which keeps an ever watchful eye on we, her unlearned, drawling wards.
Yet the northern perspective of the South amounts to little more than a crude distillation of the most specious of stereotypes, the uncouth yang to their cultured yin. Reserving unparalleled contempt for the region's myths and manners, fundamental to northern exceptionalism is the notion of southern inadequacy.
She will surely be ripped for many things, but for me the biggest let down is the piling on of needless put downs of the south along with the Deen hits.
