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The F-Word
Genre	Food magazine/Cooking show
Starring	Gordon Ramsay
Country of origin	United Kingdom
No. of episodes	18 (through Series 2)
Production
Running time	44 Minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	Channel 4
Original run	October 27, 2005 – present
Links
Official website

The F-Word is a British food magazine and cooking show featuring celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. The program covers a wide range of topics, from recipes to food preparation and celebrity food fads. The programme is made by Optomen Television and aired weekly on Channel 4.

The theme tune is a 2000 single of the same name by the UK band Babybird.

The first season was filmed at Ladbroke Grove, West London. The second season's restaurant is located in central London, near the Thames. A third series is set to air in summer 2007.

The show has been broadcast around the world, including in South Korea where it was renamed "Cook-King".

Contents 1 Programme segments 1.1 Series 1 1.2 Series 2 2 Controversy 2.1 Women in the kitchen 2.2 Turkey slaughter 3 External links

Each episode is centered around Ramsay preparing a three-course meal at the F-Word restaurant for 60 guests. The Times' restaurant critic Giles Coren acts as a field correspondent. Food writer Rachel Cooke also provides several reports on healthy eating. Regular segments within an episode include:

• Conversation with celebrity diners like Sharon Osbourne, Martine McCutcheon, Joan Collins, and Jonathan Ross. Ramsay often invites them into the kitchen to learn a recipe or cooking skill.
• Two (or three) commis squaring off to earn a position at one of Ramsay's restaurants. 12 commis chefs appeared in the series out of a thousand applicants. After several elimination rounds, Milla defeated Russell for the job in the final episode.
• Ramsay raising turkeys in his garden, so that his children gain a better understanding of where their food comes from. Chef and television presenter Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall regularly offers tips on raising free range turkeys.
• As part of the "Get Women Back in the Kitchen" campaign, Ramsay visits several English households to help women who wanted to improve their culinary skills.
• Pudding (dessert) challenge, usually between Ramsay and a celebrity guest. The winner has the honour of serving his or her pudding to the guests at the F-Word restaurant.
• Giles Coren and Rachel Cooke examining several food and restaurant related issues from male fertility to misleading packaging in supermarkets. Coren's segments also featured him sampling more unique foods such as squirrel meat and horse milk.

Janet Street-Porter is this series' field correspondent. There were other changes from the format in Series 1:

• The restaurant seated 50 paying guests. If diners found any of their food unsatisfactory, they could choose not to pay for that item.
• A different amateur brigade worked in the F-Word kitchen each week.
• Instead of turkeys, this series featured Ramsay raising pigs in his garden, which he named Trinny and Susannah. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall returns to offer tips on raising the pigs.
• The celebrity pudding challenge has been modified to a general cooking challenge. For example, the series premiere featured a lasagne cook-off.
• This series emphasized the importance of Sunday lunch, with Ramsay teaching families how to prepare this meal on a regular basis.
• Giles Coren only appeared in the series in a limited capacity; he reported on the Pimp That Snack phenomenon and even baked a "pimped" Jaffa Cake for submission on the website.

A major component of the programme is Ramsay's "Get Women Back in the Kitchen" campaign. In a self administered survey he found that three-quarters of women couldn't cook, with some 78% never cooking a regular evening dinner. Women found cooking to be a chore, whereas men found it to be an enjoyable activity. Ramsay claimed that women "know how to mix cocktails but can't cook to save their lives." [1]

Ramsay's findings were met with mixed reaction. While some of his contemporaries like Nigella Lawson previously stated similar opinions, other celebrity chefs like Clarissa Dickson-Wright (Two Fat Ladies) felt Ramsay's proposition was "rubbish and about ten years out of date". [2] Wright felt that these comments undermined the increased enrollment of women at culinary schools across the United Kingdom.

As a result of this survey, The F-Word features a segment where Ramsay goes to the house of a woman who has requested his assistance. There he shows them how to cook a typical meal and gives them encouragement to attempt other dishes on their own. His intentions have been misunderstood by some who believe that he thinks women belong in the kitchen or should be doing the cooking for their husbands, whereas his real desire is to help women who want to be able to cook but lack the confidence or motivation.

The penultimate episode of the first series featured the slaughter of six turkeys raised in Ramsay's garden. The scene had been preceded with a content warning. 27 viewers complained about the slaughter, leading to an investigation by Ofcom. Conversely, the media watchdog and Channel 4 also received 18 letters of support to counter the complaints. In 2004, Ramsay had also been criticised by the broadcast watchdog for swearing on-air.

It should be noted that Ramsay raised turkeys in his garden so that his children (and viewers) could gain a greater appreciation of where their food came from. A few months earlier, another Channel 4 series, Jamie's Great Italian Escape (featuring Jamie Oliver) also received similar complaints after it featured the slaughter of a lamb.

In the same vein, the end of series two sees the pigs that were raised throughout the series taken to an abattoir and slaughtered. Similar to the Lamb slaughter on Jamie's Great Italian Escape, warnings were given to viewers before the start of the program and before the actual scene explaining the graphic nature of the footage as neither involved any censoring of the death or evisceration of the animal.

• The F-Word at channel4.com
• The Daily Record: "How do you eat a plate of gannet? A. Er, like a gannet."
• Macleans.ca: "You go, Gordon Ramsay"
• BBC - "Complaints as Ramsay kills turkey