For reasons that might have as much to do with TikTok and Instagram as pandemic-related stay-at-home orders, the past few years have seen a spike in interest around cooking shows hosted by celebrities who are not known for their culinary skills. There’s HBO’s Selena + Chef, Netflix’s Cooking With Paris, and soon we’ll even get to enjoy Delvey’s Dinner Club—though technically, those dinner parties will be catered. (Could you imagine Anna Delvey cooking for herself?) Now, Pamela Anderson has announced she will join the fray and release a cooking show of her own.
Anderson already has a show on HGTV Canada, Pamela’s Garden of Eden, in which she renovates a massive six-acre property on the coast of Vancouver Island left behind by her grandmother. Corus Studios, the production company behind the show, announced in a press release that not only will Garden of Eden be getting a second season, but the former Baywatch star will also host a cooking show, tentatively titled Pamela’s Cooking With Love, on Food Network Canada.
One thing that will set this show apart from other star-led cooking programs, though, is that it will focus exclusively on vegan cooking. In fact, Anderson is a longtime vegan, writing in The Guardian in 2018 that she first went vegetarian when she was just a kid.
“My father was a hunter and one day I found a dead deer, without its head, hanging outside our home, dripping blood into a bucket,” she wrote. “I cried for days.”
In addition to posing for PETA, Anderson highlights additional actions she’s taken to advocate for animals. “I’ve written to governments, delivered a petition to stop bullfighting and protested about foie gras in front of the French government,” she wrote.
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Following the release of Hulu’s unauthorized series Pam and Tommy last year, Anderson has been on a renewed mission to reclaim her narrative. She served a (rocky) run as Roxie Hart in Chicago on Broadway last spring, and this year she released both a memoir, Love, Pamela, and a Netflix documentary, Pamela: A Love Story. When she announced the doc in a handwritten note posted to Instagram last March, Anderson vowed to “tell the real story.”
Perhaps that is the common thread among all of these recent celeb-led cooking shows: They want to show the world an intimate and vulnerable side of themselves, however curated that glimpse through a TV screen might be. Cooking With Paris came on the heels of Paris Hilton’s YouTube documentary This Is Paris, in which she revealed that her famous vocal fry was largely just an act. Delvey’s Dinner Club is a chance for the “Soho grifter” to let people get to know her beyond her crimes (and beyond Julia Garner’s portrayal in Inventing Anna).
Who knows? With two home- and food-focused series on the horizon, perhaps Anderson could spend the next phase of her life as the new Barefoot Contessa.
