Health

Gwyneth Paltrow Would Rather Smoke Crack Than Eat Cheese

April 13th 2016

Actress and militant health guru Gwyneth Paltrow doubled down on one of her more outlandish claims about eating heavily processed foods, confirming that she would still rather smoke crack cocaine than eat "spray cheese."

"Hell yes," Paltrow said in a Q&A posted on her website Goop recently. Here's a screengrab of the exchange.

GP Goop - goop.com

Paltrow, who frequently comes under fire for a tone-deaf approach to issues around income inequality and access to healthy food, first made the comment in a 2011 interview with Jonathan Ross.

"I'd rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a can," she said.

At the time, Paltrow's crack-over-Easy-Cheese bid set off some predictable criticism. "[W]hat kind of example is mom setting when she talks about the evil of trans fats while guzzling Romane Conti straight from the bottle every time she puts on an apron," Salon's Drew Grant asked, pointing out Paltrow's propensity to "drink constantly while I'm cooking."

Gawker noted that Paltrow wouldn't opt for just any old street crack, either.

"[S]he wouldn't smoke just any crack, but rather the extremely delicate and hand-harvested fleur de crack, available only in the tiny seaside villages of Guérande and Noirmoutier off the Brittany coast. Costs a little more, but it's worth it."

It's not clear just how serious Paltrow is about whole crack thing, but her comment this week certainly did nothing to win over critics. Paltrow, one person wrote on Twitter, "is affluenza's Patient Zero."

The actress' efforts to promote healthful eating have frequently been criticized by observers for a having unapologetically privileged overtones. Last year, Paltrow embarked on the #FoodBankNYCChallenge to shop on $29 per week — what she said was the average amount someone on food stamps receives.

Paltrow failed the challenge after four days, but used the experience to highlight the difficulties lower income individuals and families face in trying to provide nutritious food: "I personally broke and had some chicken and fresh vegetables (and in full transparency, half a bag of black licorice)," she wrote. "My perspective has been forever altered by how difficult it was to eat wholesome, nutritious food on that budget, even for just a few days — a challenge that 47 million Americans face every day, week, and year."

It was no doubt a noble cause, but Paltrow — whose recently released cookbook would set you back $470 a week — might have found a more self-aware approach. Choosing crack over a (admittedly gross) cheese product doesn't exactly ring sympathetic, either.

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