Frank Bruni on the Paula Deen “situation.”

You show me a truly skinny food editor or writer who frequents serious restaurants and — in two out of three cases — I’ll show you someone expert at a brand of knife work that yields infinitesimal bites and an illusion of gluttony where mere grazing occurred. They should be surgeons, these people. I know. Especially during my five years as a restaurant critic, I ate with many of them — and can assure you that people in the food industry are among the least likely to clean their plates.

Many of the acclaimed chefs whose television appearances, cookbooks or venerated restaurants whet our appetites have only an occasional, formal relationship with the luxuries they hawk. For a forthcoming book, Allison Adato, an editor at People, debriefed some three dozen of them about how they themselves ate.

“When I asked them what kind of food they cooked at home, it was surprising to me how many said roast chicken and vegetables,” she told me. “You can’t imagine. And none of them are particularly known for roast chicken.”