Gwyneth Paltrow's latest contribution to ameliorating the terrible malnutrition suffered by swaths of the world's population -- everyone but Paltrow, in fact --has just been published in the UK under the title ''It's All Good.'' And indeed it is, if your approach to food is completely crackpot served up with a hefty side of overprivilege. In short, if you thought Pippa Middleton's book ''Celebrate'' read more like an Internet parody than an actual book written by an actual person for which publishers paid actual money, you ain't seen nothing until you've read La Paltrow's contribution to the genre.While ostensibly a cookbook, It's All Good is a cookbook characterised by a complete fear of food. Paltrow explains in the beginning how she was inspired to write the book when she nearly died after eating too many french fries (I am not exaggerating here) and submitted herself to medical tests and came up with a diagnosis that her body was in crisis. A doctor duly decreed that she was allergic to pretty much everything, and should eat next to nothing...except quinoa and maybe some pomegranate , occasionally. I kid you not!
So, Gwyneth, with the kind of self-centred self-righteousness that only Hollywood A-listers can master, decided that if she needs to follow this medically dubious ''elimination'' diet (a diet one doctor has described as ''at best a non-evidence based hope, and at worst plain old malpractice''), then so does everyone else in the world. Hence, her cookbook is food-phobic, a treatise on nutrition that contains about as much science as a Thomas the Tank Engine book. In short, Paltrow's concept of nutrition casts extreme doubt on the efficacy of the private schools system in Manhattan that educated her so expensively.
The food and literary establishments have described It's All Good as ''laughable Hollywood neuroticism about eating taken to the next level'' and ''plainly quack science''. Yahoo gleefully pointed out that to eat as Paltrow suggests would cost $300 a day! There are some cheaper tasting recipes in it, if you like lots of brown rice. It's easy to make fun of Paltrow -- I've just done it for 450 words without breaking a sweat -- but it's sad that there must be a whole generation that doesn't know Paltrow was once a talented actress as opposed to a cheerleader for tofu. However, the reality seems to be that during the past decade Paltrow appears to have decided to jettison her career and become a full-time spouter of nonsense about food, exercise and her own ''inner journey.'' all detailed on her website, Goop.com.
These are the cliched characteristics of a celebrity today and Paltrow embodies them all to an extraordinary overblown degree. The net result is that she now gets far more press for being this parody of a celebrity than she ever got for being an actual celebrity. Sure, a lot of the attention might be negative, like this week's STAR Magazine poll announcing that Paltrow tops it's Top 20 list of most hated celebrities, but at least it's attention. Mail Online is so enthralled with pronouncements from Gwyneth's boasting ''I have a butt of a 22 year old stripper'' or saying ''I would rather die than let my kids eat Cup-a-Soup", and her gluten intolerance that they have a whole section dedicated to her. Columnists are learning that making oneself into a laughable figure can be very lucrative sideline.
The Way I See It....aside from her myopic sense of overprivilege, giving her children silly names and the tendency to dabble in embarrassing hip-hop parlance, Paltrow seems to have realised at just the right point that the difference between being a 20th and 21st Century celebrity is that the former required some talent and the latter requires only self-exposure. So if that means becoming a laughing stock along the way, she can laugh herself all the way to the bank. Her nonsensical book has currently garnered twice as many Google hits as Iron Man 3. Gwyneth Paltrow: modern-day genius or embodiment of modern day ills? Whatever...it's all good.
No comments:
Post a Comment