“What on God’s earth was that supposed to be?” Gordon Ramsay asks, slinging the remains of his barely touched food into the bin.

“The pigs at the bottom of my garden wouldn’t eat that crap. It’s just lazy, and there’s no bloody excuse.” The object of his fury? No, not some unfortunate sous-chef in one of his kitchens, but me, you and anyone else tempted by a ready meal – in this case “roast beef with gravy and Yorkshire pudding” – in front of the TV.

“No wonder people don’t eat together any more if that’s the rubbish they sit down to.”

He’s got good reason to be angry. To a man famous for his extraordinary passion for food and the conviviality that comes from sharing it around a table, we live in strange times: only one in ten of us still cooks from scratch, and fewer than a third of us eat together as a family more than once a week. A quarter of us don’t even have a table to eat at, for goodness’ sake.


“I just find that incredibly sad,” Ramsay says. “I know all the excuses – that British parents work longer hours than those in the rest of Europe, that our children have much busier social lives than we did – but it’s a question of sorting out your priorities. There’s so much to be gained in eating together. It should be the bedrock of family life.”

Recent research shows that children from families that eat together regularly are 32 per cent likelier not to have smoked and 24 per cent likelier never to have tried drugs. They also perform better academically and have fewer mental health problems.

“I have such happy memories of family mealtimes growing up in Stratford-upon-Avon,” Ramsay recalls. “Sunday lunch was a religion. It didn’t matter what else was happening, we always had a family meal – invariably a big main course followed, if your plate was empty, by an apple pie or trifle. Now Tana and I try to instil the same thing in our four children, and eat together at least three times a week.

“You assume other families are doing the same, but they just aren’t. I had a letter from one 11-year-old boy begging me to help his family eat together more often. The only day they sat down together was on Christmas Day, and even that was in front of the telly.”

That’s why he has made it his mission to get more of us sharing a family meal at least once a week. His new book – and next month’s series of The F Word – see Ramsay doing what he does best: tempting us back into the kitchen with the sort of dishes that make cooking a pleasure and will lure the most reluctant teenager away from the TV.

And here to test-run the first batch of recipes are Times readers the Nicholson family from Bath. Margaret Nicholson’s situation must be familiar to many. It’s not sitting down together that is the problem, but finding something that she, her husband Lindsay and their children, Felix, 12 (loves meat, hates potatoes and green vegetables), and Lily, 8 (likes eggs, cheese and potatoes, but hates most meat), can all eat. Most evenings she ends up cooking three different meals.

Ramsay, of course, has no truck with that. “Christ, your household sounds more complicated than my restaurant in Chelsea,” he says. “‘Don’t like’ doesn’t sit well with me, but instead of forcing them, I disguise ingredients to make new flavours less intimidating. Children eat with their eyes, so it’s amazing what you can get away with.”

He also recommends getting the children involved in the cooking. “They are less likely to reject it if they’ve had a hand in cooking it.” So, while Margaret takes charge of a wild garlic and parsley risotto (“the flavour of the garlic is really gentle, so it’s a great way of introducing it to children,” says Ramsay), Felix is voluntarily getting his hands stuck into a spinach salad. Lily, meanwhile, happily tops and tails some green beans with her aunt, Becky, while keeping a wary eye on the pork chops that her father is marinating in honey and mustard.

The proof, of course, is in the eating and, while the plates might not be entirely clean, the children still make impressive inroads. Certainly enough to earn their pudding of frozen berries with white chocolate sauce. And there are no dissenting voices about that one.

EATING AS A FAMILY
The Stones, Lancaster

“We have two sons – Will is 12 and Dan is almost 15. They both need a lot of feeding, but we only eat as a family a few times a week, and even that’s a huge effort. Dan plays for two football teams, so trains a lot in the evenings, and Will is heavily into golf. My husband spends a lot of time
running his own business, and I take Greek lessons one evening a week. Now the nights are getting light, the boys want to be out with their friends,
too, so you can see how hard it can be. I get fed up when they ask to eat at 5pm, but you have to tread a middle ground; there’s no point in forcing them to sit down and eat if you know they’re going to grumble about it. In an ideal world, we’d eat as a family every night, because it’s a wonderful way of catching up and finding out what’s going on in each other’s lives. It
never really feels like a chore. I’m doing sweet and sour pork tonight, and
I know they all love that.”

EATING AS A FAMILY
The Digweeds, Ipswich

“My partner Jane has three kids and I have five, all between the ages of 8
and 16. We all get together on Sunday for a meal, but it can be a logistical
nightmare, especially if other relatives come and you’ve got a few dogs
running round your feet. Sometimes there’s not enough oven space or a big
enough pan, and the living room becomes a sea of people eating off their
laps. We try and give the kids an interesting choice of food, but there are
too many of us to all help in the kitchen at the same time, which is a shame
because they’re all keen, not afraid of food at all. Jane and I both want
to lose a few pounds, but teenagers tend to want stuff like pizza and chips
– a good compromise is fajitas, because a 16-year-old can have four and an eight-year-old two. Barbecues are easiest; there’s much more room in the garden and a lot of variety in what you can have. It’s always Jane and me who end up washing up.”

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