Clearly Incorrect
Gordon Ramsay is a funny guy. Sometimes, this humor is intentional. Most of the time it’s not. Four years ago, he posted a grilled cheese sandwich recipe video in which he somehow managed to burn the edges of the bread without (seemingly) even warming up the cheese inside. It’s one of the worst grilled cheeses I have ever seen.
“Oh my god… Goodness me… Oh my god, that’s incredible,” Ramsay says, as he bites into a sandwich that would have gotten someone fired on Kitchen Nightmares.
Chef Ramsay must know this is a bad grilled cheese. He is not an idiot. On paper, Ramsay is one of the great living chefs. His restaurants have garnered 18 Michelin stars. So you kind of wonder how the grilled cheese thing happened.
I can take a baseless guess: there was a tight shooting schedule, they rushed through it, and Ramsay thought, What the hell, just ship it. Who cares? It’s grilled cheese.
There’s another Gordon Ramsay-ism that I find less funny and more frustrating: Take your steak out of the fridge at least 10 minutes before cooking it. You may have heard this advice because there are leagues of skilled professional chefs who repeat it.
But why does Ramsay tell you to take your steak out of the fridge? The justification, in this video and this article, is that the steak needs to warm up so that you get a better sear and more even cooking. It makes sense if you don’t think very hard about it.
The truth is that Ramsay’s steak advice is total bullshit.
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, a chef and food writer, put Ramsay’s (and others’) wisdom to the test. The even cooking rationale is plain wrong: a steak’s interior barely warms up at room temperature, even after hours of resting. And the searing justification is inaccurate, too, because that’s not actually how the physics of searing a steak work (read Kenji’s piece for the more detailed explanation).
So why does Ramsay keep giving this clearly incorrect advice? And why do people believe it?
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Some people may read the above and think: Gordon Ramsay is stupid. He’s actively trying to mislead people. He’s a terrible chef. Liar!! But that’s a lazy interpretation, and one that is not well-calibrated with reality. Ramsay is probably not horrible. Rather, the unappetizing grilled cheese and bad steak advice stem from a problem that is present in almost all of us: not really prioritizing the truth.
Philosopher Harry Frankfurt described “bullshit” as “speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn’t care whether what they say is true or false.” This is the category that Gordon Ramsay’s steak wisdom falls into. He probably just doesn’t care that much about being accurate (or at least not as much as other priorities). And that’s why he’s okay saying some bullshit.
Not prioritizing the truth has a much worse impact on society than might be obvious.
Take the steak scenario. Ramsay, by all accounts an expert chef, gives a piece of advice to millions of people. Many of those people blindly trust in his advice. They don’t stop to verify it. Why would they? He’s the Gordon Ramsay. He has a British accent! The chain of blind trust extends to more than just regular people, too: culinary school instructors give advice to chefs, chefs give advice to other chefs. Only when someone takes the time to investigate are holes in the chain exposed.
Okay, the whole world makes bad steak. What’s the big deal?
Well, this problem extends beyond cooking myths.
- Doctors frequently prescribe antibiotics (and tell patients they will work!) before they have confirmed that antibiotics are the right thing to prescribe. This is professional bullshit, and up to 43% of antibiotic prescriptions in the United States are inappropriate.
- Physical therapists may tell you that you need to put ice on injuries. The truth is that ice slows the body’s response and likely delays the healing of muscle injuries. The doctor who coined the term RICE—rest, ice, compression, and elevation—renounced his support of the regimen in 2014 because of this fact. And yet millions of doctors and therapists still give incorrect advice.
- Teachers often obsess over ‘learning styles’ in children, even though our current understanding of the topic is that traditional learning style wisdom is pretty useless.
- Startup founders, and maybe all of your coworkers, repeat “best practices” they read about online (i.e. Google did OKRs, we need them too!) many times with no real justification beyond Other X Company Did This So We Should Too.
This list could be much longer—most “experts”, in every industry, say some amount of bullshit. They say things that are clearly incorrect, things that can be proven wrong in 10 seconds. They don’t bother fixing their bullshit because trustworthiness is not their highest priority. You probably spew bullshit too. It’s just that you’re not famous, and so it may even be harder to be held accountable. Nobody writes essays poking the holes in some private belief you have.
(By the way, we probably make mistakes and you should call us out [0])
Gordon Ramsay can cook much, much better than I can. But he’s still a human. And humans (at least the ones I know) make mistakes. Being Gordon Ramsay, while impressive, does not mean everything he says about food is correct. And being a Gordon Ramsay viewer, while less impressive, does not mean you should go around repeating everything he says as gospel.
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It would be wonderful to live in a more trustworthy society. How do we get there? It’s probably not by being overly skeptical, or by complaining all the time, or by assuming that everyone else is bullshitting but you’ve never believed a wrong thing in your life. That’s how people end up thinking the earth is flat.
One real way to make progress on the problem we’ve written about here is to take a bottom-up approach: start with yourself. You can’t directly control whether your doctor cares enough about antibiotic prescriptions, or whether Gordon Ramsay cares enough about steak advice. But you can push yourself to be more honest, and to make accuracy and trustworthiness a higher priority in your own life. You can push the people around you to care more, too. You can lead by example.
You can also start looking for good role models of this behavior in real life. A year ago, my friend went to the doctor to see whether he needed foot surgery. The doctor said he wasn’t sure, so he sent the X-Ray into a Whatsapp group with more than 200 other foot doctors and asked them what they thought. He then used those ideas to help him build conviction in an opinion. The doctor, rather than spewing bullshit, was actually honest.
In the (difficult-to-achieve) version of the world where everyone cared more about the truth and didn’t default to blind trust, doctors might receive a lot more pushback when they prescribe antibiotics. Gordon Ramsay might hear more criticism about his steak advice. Your friend might get pushback about their flat earth beliefs. We might begin moving towards a more honest, trusting society.
Or we could just keep making average steaks and burning our grilled cheese. Honestly, it’s kind of up to you.
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[0] If you find something inaccurate in this essay or on this website, please let us know and if the thing is indeed inaccurate, we will fix it.
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