Is Gordon Ramsay good for our health?
Authors: Des Spence
Journal: BMJ (2006)

Despite the millions of unopened boxes of health promotion leaflets rotting in landfill sites and the deafening whine of chainsaws felling forests to produce ever more, health promotion makes an F word of a difference to people's lifestyles. Television and celebrity chefs, however, directly affect our diet and attitudes towards food. Remember the beaming faces of Jamie Oliver and Tony Blair as they shook hands in 10 Downing St after Jamie's series on school dinners (see review BMJ 2005;330: 678)?

In his new series of the F word prolific swearer Gordon Ramsay is campaigning for families to sit down and eat. He shows a family who ditched their dinner table, as they never used it. Surely it can't be worth upsetting the kids by going retro at meal times? Remember sitting at dinner upsetting your parents with your radical views and the blazing arguments? The excoriating silences and stilted conversation when your girlfriend or boyfriend came to tea, and how you laughed afterwards? Peeling the vegetables and washing-up rotas? Cooking and eating are an expression of family identify, communication, and social norms—a microcosm of society and life. Today eating has been reduced to little more than a bodily function, and “quality family time” is eating off our laps while watching someone being evicted on Big Brother. Good luck, Gordon.

Gordon Ramsay rages on. This time it is those beloved middle class takeaways, the readymade meal. An English family living in France is profiled, so addicted to this homogenised slop that they ship in readymade meals from England. A generation of families has been lost, apparently without even the most rudimentary of cooking skills. France may have many flaws, but at least its citizens seem to value the importance of food, family, and farming. Our schools teach “food technology” rather than cooking, no doubt done in the name of risk reduction and the fear of the Health and Safety Executive. It is clear that we have lost our way with food.​food.




Figure 1



Back to basics: Gordon Ramsay




Likewise society has become uncoupled from farming. Our children are suspicious of anything that doesn't come wrapped in cellophane or cardboard. Animals have become “Disneyfied”—cute, clothed, and talkative. The reality is the forgotten, factory farmed animals abused in the name of cheap meat. Animals, no longer respected in a symbiotic relationship that can be traced back to when humans first became farmers, are just another disposable product. To counter this, the celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall persuades Gordon Ramsay to fatten some pigs in his back garden. These beautiful animals churn his lawn in an instant, and whether he will eat them in the end only time will tell. Involving his four children in rearing these animals is laudable.

There is much to commend in Gordon Ramsay's F word, for he has unwittingly touched on the issue of our time: affluence and convenience. The domestic monotony of previous generations has been replaced by something far more tedious: leisure and celebrity. I doubt Gordon Ramsay will enjoy a good swear with Tony Blair off the back of these programmes, but he is watchable none the less. Will we see families sitting together for meals and the demise of the ready meal? I doubt it. As any chef or parent knows, the most popular dish is the course of least resistance. Anything for an easy life.