TV chef Paula Deen now truly unrecognisable

But in 2013, a racism scandal saw her fired from her Food Network job and she lots many of her lucrative endorsement deals.

It means many who were used to seeing the cook on screens won’t have laid eyes on her in quite a few years – and based on these photos circulating on social media, they can hardly recognise Deen nowadays.

Deen, now 77, appears to have lost a significant amount of weight since her daytime television heyday.

“Baby what happen to Paula Deen?” one person asked on social media, sharing recent footage of Deen in her kitchen.

“What the hell happened to Paula Deen???” was another query, alongside side-by-side photos of the TV chef in the early noughties and now.

“Wait … THAT’S Paula Deen?” another person asked of the recent photos.

Deen’s career suffered a steep nosedive more than a decade ago now when she was sued by former employee Lisa Jackson, who claimed Deen had used the N-word in the past in a lawsuit alleging sexual harassment and a hostile work environment at Deen’s restaurant.

 

Deen released a video statement confessing her past use of racial slurs, and was soon dropped by the Food Network, the channel that had made her a star with shows like Paula’s Home Cooking.“I want to apologise to everybody for the wrong I’ve done,’’ Deen had said in the video statement.

“I want to learn and grow from this. Inappropriate, hurtful language is totally, totally unacceptable.

“I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way, but I beg you … for your forgiveness,’’ she concluded.

Weeks later she made a tearful appearance on the US Today show, insisting to host Matt Lauer (before his own cancellation courtesy of the #MeToo movement) that she wasn’t a racist.

She told Lauer that if those watching had never said anything they’d regretted, then “please take up that stone and throw it as hard as they can and kill me.’’

She said she wouldn’t have fired someone in her position, and argued of her use of the N-word that “most jokes are about Jewish people, rednecks, black folks. … They usually target, though, a group. Gays or straights, black, redneck, you know, I just don’t know – I just don’t know what to say. I can’t, myself, determine what offends another person.’’