If you want to see how far our food shows have fallen, take a comparative look at the British and American versions of celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay’s reality series.

On the British version of the show, “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares” (also aired in America on BBC America), the titular chef is dropped into a restaurant that is hemorrhaging gobs of cash and proceeds to kick it in the rear end until it takes its first shaky steps toward viability. The Fox Network’s reality show “Kitchen Nightmares,” on the other hand, is missing more than just Mr. Ramsay’s name from its title. The show is as phony as Chinatown Chanel, and I’d suspect it was an unlicensed rip-off if Mr. Ramsay wasn’t in every episode, tortured off camera with great lashings of cash until he performs his tired potty mouth routine with all the joy and enthusiasm of an organ grinder’s monkey.

The British “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares” and the American “Kitchen Nightmares” both give Mr. Ramsay a week to change the fortunes of restaurants that have dedicated themselves to failing spectacularly. Clueless chefs serve expensive-tasting menus in working-class communities; seafood restaurants are run by owners who refuse to eat seafood; depressed chefs yank precooked meals out of the fridge and nuke them in the microwave; walk-in refrigerators overflow with moldy food, and self-proclaimed culinary geniuses serve mashed potatoes cooked with apricots. It’s an exhibition of the many ways restaurants can shoot themselves in the head — that is, until they’re exposed to Mr. Ramsay’s merciless standards and all-seeing eye.

Despite the occasional vapid team-building exercises, “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares” feels authentic. Mr. Ramsay argues with owners who often refuse to accept his changes. He also pries open their finances and, most important, returns for follow-up visits. There’s not always a happy ending. Bonaparte’s Restaurant in England closed its doors and sued Mr. Ramsay for driving them out of business (Mr. Ramsay countersued and won). A Parisian vegetarian cafe, Piccolo Teatro, had its chef, a truly terrifying man who giggled at voices no one else could hear while brandishing a knife, forcibly removed, but later shut down thanks to an owner who shrugged while the cassoulet burned.

Fox’s “Kitchen Nightmares,” by contrast, feels like a clumsily staged inspirational video. The episodes inevitably end in an avalanche of non-words such as “positivity,” the interactions between Mr. Ramsay and the owners feel scripted, there’s barely any talk of finances, rarely any substantive mention of food, and never any follow-up. Instead, each episode ends with an unseen narrator proclaiming that the restaurant will be assured success now that Mr. Ramsay has redecorated the dining room and shouted at the hostess.

There are any number of practical reasons for the differences between the two shows (the British version uses a smaller five-person crew, for one thing), but it really comes down to the star. On his British show, Mr. Ramsay is presented as a real chef, spending extra time with promising young cooks, and usually only unleashing his famous anger when he sees food crimes being committed. In America, the producers don’t care about anything but the anger, so Mr. Ramsay is forced to forget about the food and sing a one-note song that starts with an “F” and ends in “uck.”

This is why American food programming falls short: The food has become secondary. During the past few years, the Food Network has replaced virtually all of its actual chefs with TV personalities, going from a network of cooking shows to one that exists to create celebrities and manufacture catch phrases (Emeril Laggase: “Bam!”; Rachael Ray: “Yum-o!”). Turn it on at random and you won’t learn anything about cooking, but you will learn how Jolly Ranchers are manufactured and how to bake a giant, inedible cake shaped like an armadillo.

The Brits aren’t blameless, responsible as they are for abominations such as Ainsley Harriott, but their food shows are refreshing for their aggressive engagement with actual food. Mr. Ramsay’s magazine format program on Britain’s Channel 4, “The F-Word,” spends each season raising a gaggle of cuddly farm animals who are slaughtered on camera and eaten in the final episode.

There’s something to be said for knowing where your food comes from. Mr. Ramsay was so appalled by his segment about industrial pig farming on “The F-Word” that he exclaimed, “It’s enough to make anyone turn f—— vegetarian, for God’s sake.” British television chefs are up to their elbows in the mucky realities of food, from how it’s killed to what it costs, and they are presented not as role models but as doubt-prone, short-tempered individuals who care deeply about what people put in their mouths. The 24-hour-a-day infomercial that the Food Network has become not only short-shrifts food, it is determined to cover Americans’ eyes from the realities of eating while selling them celebrity endorsed cookware they don’t need and hypnotizing them with pretty pictures of candy and cakes.

British chefs aren’t all saints, and American food television isn’t solely the domain of sinners — and let’s be honest, food television isn’t going to save the world. But it’s a strange state of affairs that when we want to see cooking shows on which food is the star attraction rather than a bit player, we have to turn on BBC rather than anything made in America.