British people tweeting pictures of their meals at Gordon Ramsay will make you weep

So a thing Gordon Ramsay started doing a while ago was ‘reviewing’ people’s food on Twitter. Someone would tweet him a picture of their dinner and he’d quote tweet it, sometimes saying it looked great or, more frequently, delivering one of his trademark putdowns - just look here or here for some of his spicy zingers. Now, you only have to look at his mentions for a few minutes to see some of the things people are attempting to cook. And they’re bad. Oh boy, are they bad. 

Some of them are just…normal bad. Just normal food made by normal people who don’t have Michelin stars and think tweeting banal things at celebrities is good. But beyond that lies: the other place. The bad place. 

There lives not just regular ‘bad food’, the bog-standard oven pizzas or half-hearted spag bols you’d make on a boring Tuesday night. This food transcends any concept of good or bad; defies even the most basic linguistic analysis. 

There’s also something profoundly sad and somehow deeply touching about scrolling through a feed where, daily, hundreds of people plaintively ask Gordon Ramsay ‘what do you think?’ about their sincerely crap food and don’t get a single response back. The palpable longing in these tweets: reaching out to someone, wanting approval and then having that rejected, like a horrible little microcosm of the entire internet. Essentially, Gordon Ramsay as tweeter acts as a vessel into which people can scream their insecurities and their heartbreaks, the yearning they have for human contact and acceptance. He is void. He is existential chasm. 

Their food is really crap though, to be fair. 

Plain boiled macaroni and what looks like chopped up spaghetti with some sliced radish on top. 

Literally just some sausages on sticks (why are they on a stick? Why?).

I don’t know what this is and have no way of working out what this is.

What appears to be a bunch of cockroaches boiled in some milk. 

This beige…thing.

This…cottage pie, maybe? It’s got potato and carrot and maybe mince? 

These incredibly sad cookies. 

Imagine being Gordon Ramsay: imagine, every day, looking at your phone and finding it full of images of burned sausages on sticks and macaroni and radish or what looks like cockroaches floating in milk. Imagine your reality pared back bit-by-bit, plate-by-plate, until all that’s left is an endless stream of overcooked meat and anaemic vegetables, of unbuttered bread and burned biscuits.

You try - you write some zingers, or you get your assistant to. “Looks like a baby’s carrier stuffed with sausages” you tweet at a man who’s made a Yorkshire pudding-mashed potato sandwich. “Congrats…. on the worst fried egg ever….” you say to someone who made a crap fried egg. 

And it is. It is a crap fried egg. But your heart’s not in it. Gone are the days where you gleefully scream “YOU ARE AN IDIOT SANDWICH” in a woman’s face. Gone are the days where your skin had any kind of texture and you could move your face. You close your eyes at night and all you can see are beige noodles and processed cheese oozing out of shrivelled bits of pastry. They slot into each other, Tetris-like, forming a teeming mass, a physical manifestation of pure tedium. 

You are Gordon Ramsay and this is your life.