F off
I hated The F Word, which finished slightly too long ago for me to write about it with any credibility.
[pauses, thinks, shrugs, carries on]
The basic problem with any cookery programme is that you can't taste the food. No matter how closely a show's guest exudes simple orgasmic pleasure from tasting the partridge and banana fricassee you will never know what it will taste like.
So, the next best thing is to be equipped with the information to make the dish in order to taste it. A recipe supported with some instructions on what goes where, Deliah Smith style. Ramsay dispenses with such triviality; he cooks, sure, but he doesn't tell you what he's cooking or how. So, stripped of any value, the programme is little more than self-conciously over-styled claptrap fronted by a man who says fuck. A lot. This is the essence of the programme. Oh, and killing the pigs he's raised as pets in front of his kids, which may actually be child abuse.
Pig killing and swearing aside, he also instigated his own campaign; clearly smarting from Jamie Oliver's ascendance to deity status with his school dinners thing. The best that Ramsay came up with was an amnesty on cookery books. So not only does the programme fail to enrich us with any cooking knowledge; it tries to take away some that we have.
Personally, I would like to see Ramsay campaigning on something useful; like Casseroles or human cheese. The casserole, we're told, is a good wholesome dinner; warming and tasty. This defies all modern logic; a food can't be good when you put all the ingredients in the same pot and cook it for days. And then there's human cheese. A baby can't drink cow's milk but a baby can only drink milk whereas humans drink almost exclusively cow's milk. This doesn't make any sense. Why do we drink cow's milk? Would you find it odd to watch a cow suckling a human? Of course, shouldn't we, as humans, be drinking human milk? And therefore human cheese? I did start to Google this, but what you find quickly becomes unpleasant.
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