Well the guy forgets that what she cooks is based on what is cooked in the American south.
IMHO, she makes a mockery of Southern cooking. She has become a parody. I'm sure her origins were true Southern cooking but what she has done is turn it into a big joke. The time she iced a cake with lard I almost threw up.
Only loosely.
I am Southern from way back, with a family that merges several cooking traditions -- the "Pennsylvania Dutch" German cooking of Irma Rombauer's Joy, Southern Piedmont cooking as done in the old days by live-in cooks, and Southern Coastal cooking with heavy emphasis on seafood. I've made forays into Thai and Indian cuisine, and I love northern Italian food, but the Southern stuff is still the daily standby.
While Deen's fried chicken is impeccably straight up (though I could live without the CUP (!!!!!) of hot sauce in the beaten eggs), a lot of her recipes add a whole lot more butter, mayonnaise, shortening, and sour cream than I'm used to (in fact, some of them add ALL of them - ick!)
And her desserts are much heavier on the fat than I think is customary in Southern cooking.