Thanks to Netflix Watch Instantly and an always surprising boyfriend/roommate, I’ve now watched the entire first two seasons of Jon and Kate Plus Eight. That’s so many more episodes than I ever thought I’d watch. That, however, is not the paradox (if it is one at all.) The paradox is this: Kate Gosselin is, or at least comes off as, pretty crazy, BUT she is a staunch supporter of not only organic foods, but also locally grown and raised foods. I would not have guessed this.

I’ve run into this problem before, and I think the constant exposure I have to faces of the Good Food movement allowed me to miss it. A lot of people associated with Good Food are crazy. The boyfriend/roommate pointed this out to me while we were watching Food, Inc. He pointed out that maybe more people would listen to and take Joel Salatin more seriously if he weren’t completely crazy. Now, I never saw him as crazy. I saw him as driven, excitable, and in love with his occupation, but if you’re looking for it, you can definitely see the crazy in him. At one point in the documentary, I was really worried he was going to start rolling around in the mud with his pigs.

Kate Gosselin isn’t quite to crazy about food, but is just your run of the mill stressed, control freak mother of 8 who comes off as completely out of her mind 98% of the time (whether this is do to editing or not, I don’t know.) So when she took her whole family to the farm near their house to buy half a cow, I was impressed. This goes so far beyone buying you groceries at Whole Foods. It takes a lot of effort to source local, sustainably grown meat and to travel to the actual farm to purchase the meant brings her commitment to this to a whole new level. However, it caused me to cringe. Yes, she’s showing America that even someone with 8 kids has time to properly source their food, but on the other hand it also associates this practice with someone who America sees as completely crazy.

You can brush off pretty much anything if you see a crazy person doing it. For example, a guy running a marathon with a helicoptor hat on his head and crocs on his feet, that’s the kind of people who run marathons: crazy people, and if I’m not a crazy person, I will not run a marathon. If you’re looking for excuses, crazy people are good ones as its easier to take them less seriously. The mother of eight who allows her family to be a part of a reality TV show that originally leads to the end of her marriage? Maybe her decisions aren’t so solid and let’s wrap them all up under the label ridiculous and move on as we had before.

And that is the Kate Gosselin Paradox.