Paula Deen slams Anthony Bourdain

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It’s been more than seven years since Anthony Bourdain’s death, but Paula Deen is still speaking ill of him.

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There was no love lost between the celebrity chefs, and Deen discusses her feud with the late Bourdain in her new documentary Canceled: The Paula Deen Story, which premiered on Saturday at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.

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The film chronicles the Southern foodie’s love of all things deep-fried and her rise to fame in the late ‘90s. But it also highlights her public feud with Bourdain.

“Anthony Bourdain did call me the most dangerous woman in America,” Deen says in the documentary, according to the Hollywood Reporter, amid flashes of old news clips from 2011 that featured journalists recounting Bourdain branding Deen as the “worst, most dangerous person in America.”

Bourdain, who died by suicide in 2018, is seen in the film saying, “This is not Southern food she’s been selling. Her brand has been all these years, novelty food.”

He is also shown blasting Deen becoming the face of a diabetes drug-maker.

Archival footage of Deen on The Joy Behar Show includes her taking another swipe at Bourdain’s love of exotic foods.

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“Let me tell you something, girlfriend. Maybe [my food] is bad for you, but I don’t go around eating or serving unwashed anuses of wildebeests,” she told Behar at the time.

In the documentary, Deen didn’t relent from her previous thoughts on Bourdain.

“I don’t know what he was off in these foreign countries eating. Bat brains or something like that,” she said.

“I think I’ll just stick with my fried chicken.”

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She adds later while speaking about his death: “God rest his soul. I felt like he didn’t like anybody. Not even himself, maybe.”

The documentary then plays an older clip of Bourdain referencing another one of Deen’s critiques about him.

“I like the quote, it was, ‘Well, he has had his demons, I hope he had them under control.’

“He’s probably still shooting dope, is probably what she’s saying in a nice kind of Southern way,” Bourdain says.

The film shows Deen calling Bourdain, inviting him to come over for a home-cooked meal, but he never took her up on her offer.

“He started something with me, and I’d never even met him,” Deen says in the doc, as the Bourdain segment of Canceled ends with a shot of the late chef telling a journalist that it would take “nuclear war” for him to agree to eat Deen’s cooking.

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Canceled also explores the 2013 racism scandal in which she used the N-word during a legal deposition while being sued by a former employee.

“Yes, of course I’ve used that word,” Deen says in the film.

However, Deen’s lawyer Bill Glass insists in the doc that people “should not take any issue” with her using the racial slur in context.

Deen maintains throughout the film that she is not racist, while many of her associates are captured saying they don’t believe she has ever racially discriminated against others.

At the time of the deposition, Deen’s company, Paula Deen Enterprises, released a statement saying she “recounted having used a racial epithet in the past, speaking largely about a time in American history which was quite different than today.”

It added: “She was born 60 years ago when America’s South had schools that were segregated, different bathrooms, different restaurants and Americans rode in different parts of the bus. This is not today.”

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