Paula Deen Felt ‘Like a Turd’ After Gifting Vegan Ellen DeGeneres a Ham on Her Show

Paula Deen made a bit of a faux pas with Ellen DeGeneres back in the day.

In the celebrity chef’s new documentary, Canceled: The Paula Deen Story, which premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, she reflects on an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show where she accidentally gifted DeGeneres, a longtime vegan, a ham.

A clip is shown in the documentary of DeGeneres introducing Deen, 78, as the “queen of Southern cooking,” and Deen walked out to join the talk show host carrying a ham.

“I brought a ham for my favorite ham,” she told DeGeneres, 67, who thanked her. “Isn’t that sweet?”

“Listen, and he’s so heavy, he’s your pig to keep up with now!” Deen said as she passed the ham off to DeGeneres.

“And she took it and laid it down, and didn’t say a word,” Deen recalled in a confessional for the documentary, as a clip played of DeGeneres putting the ham down beside her chair.

“Well, I found out later she was a vegetarian. She didn’t eat meat!” Deen revealed. “I felt like a turd.”

A representative for DeGeneres told Entertainment Weekly that the former talk show host is a vegan, not a vegetarian, as Deen said in the documentary.

Deen’s documentary chronicles her journey from the catering business she started in her kitchen with $200 to her 11-year run on the Food Network, which ended when she was fired in 2013 after she admitted to using a racial slur in a sworn deposition. 

The deposition was part of a lawsuit filed by Lisa Jackson, a former manager of one of Paula’s restaurants, Uncle Bubba’s Seafood and Oyster House. Jackson accused Deen’s brother Bubba Hiers, who ran the restaurant, of sexual harassment and using racially offensive language.

The lawsuit was later dismissed by a federal judge in Georgia after a settlement was reached, but the controversy cost Deen numerous business deals and largely ended her career.

Following the settlement, Jackson said in a statement, “The Paula Deen I have known for more than eight years is a woman of compassion and kindness and will never tolerate discrimination or racism of any kind toward anyone.”

Deen told PEOPLE at TIFF of the documentary, “I’m looking for the truth. The truth, if you watch the film, you will find it out.”

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At the premiere on Sept. 6, Deen was joined by her sons Jamie, 58, and Bobby, 55, who also appear in the documentary.

“I’m most excited for my mom,” Jamie said at the premiere. “She wants to be able to speak for herself and she should be able to. She’s earned that. And the reason why she’s doing it is to receive something and I hope that she gets it.”