(Dis)claiming identity: Gordon Ramsay’s use of humor to manage public persona

Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, known for his crass, tough-love approach to kitchen management, epitomizes the masculine celebrity chef. Despite decades of ridiculing meatless meals, vegans, and vegetarians, Ramsay has turned to plant-based foods in his product endorsements and new recipe developments. Because meat consumption is an important method of performing masculine gender identity in Western food culture, Ramsay's celebrity persona as a hypermasculine chef is threatened with emasculation by practicing veg*anism. To safeguard his existing public persona, Ramsay utilizes humor to reconcile these incompatible identities. This humor occurs in both traditional media, such as the television show MasterChef, and in interactive new media, such as YouTube and TikTok videos. Through a critical analysis of content and comments posted to these platforms, this paper explains how Gordon Ramsay takes a masculine, egoistic approach to his plant-based cooking and uses humor to create distance between his hypermasculine persona and the veg*an identity. Rather than using his privilege and celebrity to model a new persona that combines masculinity and the ethical reasons for veg*anism, Ramsay's ridicule of veg*an diets ultimately upholds patriarchal norms of gendered eating by his distancing himself from the ethical underpinnings of veg*anism.