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Paula Deen offered a simple explanation for many of her most controversial actions of the past few years at a TimesTalk with New York Times Atlanta bureau chief Kim Severson on Saturday: naivete.

“I was so naive, y’all,” she said. “I always think everybody thinks like me.”

She first pleaded ignorance as a defense against charges of animal cruelty leveled against her after she signed on as a spokesperson with Smithfield Hams, which critics say mistreats its hogs. “I was always of the opinion that God put [animals] on Earth for mankind’s survival. I had just never thought about it from another perspective,” she explained.

She was at least as eager to chalk her divisive response to her diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes up to a kind of blind optimism. “I was so naive about that, too, Kim,” she said, when Severson broached the topic.

Still, Deen gave probably her fullest account yet of what went on behind the scenes after she found out about her diabetes at the Times Talk. As she recalls it, her initial response to her diagnosis was denial. She just didn’t believe that she had the disease. Eventually, more tests by doctors convinced her that they were right — but even then, she didn’t feel ready to go public, because she was still “absorbing it.”

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Sylvia Woods, the woman behind Sylvia’s, the Harlem restaurant that’s practically synonymous with soul food in New York, died yesterday at the age of 86. According to the Times, her family released a statement, but cited no specific cause of death, though Woods had been battling Alzheimer’s disease. The restaurant originally opened in 1962 and, as Gael Greene discovered in her 1979 New York Magazine story “Harlem on My Mind,” went on to become a destination for all New Yorkers. The Times calls it “a culinary anchor and the de facto social center of Harlem” — an apt description of a restaurant that so clearly transcended its food.

Huff Post tells us: ‘Marion Cunningham, the home-cooking champion whose legacy can be found in the food-spattered pages of “Fannie Farmer” cookbooks in kitchens across America, has died at age 90.

Cunningham, who had been ill for some years, died Wednesday of complications from Alzheimer’s disease at the John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek, Calif.

Best known for her revisions of the classic “The Fannie Farmer Cookbook,” in 1979 and again in 1990, Cunningham also wrote several other books, including “The Breakfast Book,” “Cooking with Children,” and “Lost Recipes.” She also hosted a television series, “Cunningham & Company,” that aired on the Food Network.

Though she moved in rarefied circles that included culinary luminaries such as James Beard and Alice Waters, Cunningham resisted trendiness.

Burger King announced a special summer menu Wednesday that includes a 510-calorie bacon sundae perfected in one of the most obesity-stricken states in America.

“This limited-time soft serve dessert took Nashville, Tennessee by storm earlier this year and is now available nationwide to satisfy every sweet tooth,” the fast-food chain said in a press release.

“The sweet and savory dessert features the rich and creamy vanilla BK soft serve (ice cream), drizzled with chocolate fudge, caramel and topped with bacon crumbles, complete with a thick-cut, hardwood smoked bacon garnish.”

The New York Review of Books: ‘Gordon Shepherd’s stimulating and informative new book, “Neurogastronomy,” describes how the brain creates our sensations of smell and taste. Unlike our other sensory experiences—seeing, hearing, touching—the sensory receptors responsible for the brain’s creation of smells and tastes do not react to specific forms, such as the objects and paintings that stimulate our visual system or the waves of sound that stimulate our auditory receptors.

‘Our sense of touch, for instance, relies on input from nerve cells located in the skin that sense everything from pain to temperature. Yet the process of flavor perception is multisensory and interactive. As Shepherd explains, “A common misconception is that the foods contain the flavors. Foods do contain the flavor molecules, but the flavors of those molecules are actually created by our brains.”’

Salma Hayek may be slinking around the tube promoting Burger King’s new salads, but some of those salads aren’t exactly healthful. Read more here.