Gwyneth Paltrow backtracks after backlash over bizarre suggestion to use arugula as a dairy substitute

Gwyneth Paltrow has backtracked after she faced backlash over her bizarre suggestion to use arugula as a dairy substitute.

During a May appearance on the Today Show, the Goop goddess, 53, was sharing a recipe for turkey meatballs when she relayed the controversial tip.

‘If you want to avoid dairy, one trick that I do is I dice up arugula, and I put it in,’ Paltrow said. 

‘It sounds weird, but it kind of adds a nice texture to it,’ she explained. ‘And it’s delicious.’

At the time, fans were left completely perplexed by Paltrow’s ‘weird’ suggestion, even labeling it as ‘disgusting.’

Now, she has cleared up what she really meant during the segment in a new video posted to TikTok, claiming that she made a mistake.

The video showed her watching back the Today Show segment.

‘You know what, I said dairy instead of parmesan cheese, so this was my mistake,’ Paltrow admitted in the new TikTok clip.

‘What I meant to say is – this is a great trick if you’re dairy-free, if you’re making meatballs and you don’t want to put parmesan cheese in them, you dice up arugula and put it in, it gives it this extra dimension of flavor,’ she explained.

She joked that she really wasn’t sure why she said ‘dairy’ instead of ‘parmesan’ in the first place.

‘I said dairy, and the internet collapsed,’ Paltrow said.

However, in the comments section of her TikTok video, it seemed that many still had a problem with her explanation.

‘For the record, arugula does not compare to parmesan cheese either,’ one person wrote.

Someone else typed: ‘Girl, it still doesn’t make sense, the flavors are not even close and the texture isn’t either.’

‘I don’t think people were stuck on dairy, it was arugula,’ a third seconded.

Another user joked: ‘Gwyneth, this has been eating me alive since thank you so much for clearing it up.’

‘Thank you girl because we been wondering lmao,’ a different person wrote.

It turns out, this isn’t the only controversy that Paltrow has cleared up in recent weeks. 

During a recent appearance on Benny Blanco’s podcast, Paltrow shared more about her viral ‘This Smells Like My Vagina’ candle to co-hosts Lil Dicky and Kristin Batalucco.

She said that the spicy name was born out of a joke she made.

‘I like things that smell kind of unusual,’ Paltrow began. ‘I like woodsy, leathery. Our first perfume is called Church; it’s incensy.’

The Oscar-winning actress went on to share that she was working on finding an ‘earthy’ fragrance with the perfumer Douglas Little, sorting through tomato leaves and seaweed.

Paltrow said that a sentence she meant to be simply humorous, turned into something Little thought was a ‘brilliant’ idea.

‘I have a very bawdy sense of humor, and nobody really knows that side of me,’ she continued. ‘And I said to him, “Well, this one smells like my vagina.” As a joke.

‘So he thought I was serious, and made a candle called “This Smells Like My Vagina,” and my team bought the candle.’

In 2020, Goop released the candle with the company Heretic. It features citrusy bergamot, geranium, Damask rose, cedar absolutes and ambrette seed.

‘I thought I was joking and, anyway, the rest is history,’ she added on the podcast, clarifying for the record: ‘It definitely did not smell like my vagina.’

The $75 candle sold out immediately when it hit the market but the wellness company discontinued the product after three years.

‘It became such a big thing that we actually stopped selling it because it was distracting people from what we were doing,’ Paltrow said.