How To Cook That is a Youtube channel by Australian food scientist Ann Reardon. She posts recipes and does other cook stuff like
And that kind of thing! I actually bought her cookbook back before I went vegan.
But lately, some of her content’s rubbed me the wrong way.
I’ll just get the big one out of the way first.
Should you stop drinking MILK? | How To Cook That Ann Reardon
She put this video out a while ago, “investigating” whether cows’ milk is as bad for you as people say, and comparing it to other alternatives like soy milk, almond milk, etc. She touches briefly on the ethical aspects, which honestly for me is the only thing I care about when it comes to animal agriculture — but then, I’m someone who doesn’t care one bit how healthy my food is, so like. Whatever.
Let’s look at some responses it got.
First, by Unnatural Vegan, is a very thorough point-by-point response video:
An Unbiased Debunking of Milk Myths? (Response to How to Cook That Ann Reardon)
I won’t summarize them fully here, but if you’d rather watch a video than read the rest of this post, that’s the one for you.
So Ann did talk a bit about the ethics of milk. At the beginning of the video she claimed that “ethical” dairy farms exist, which do not separate calves from their mothers, which results in the milk costing more.
Uplifting Vegan Logic did a response video about this:
Ann Reardon Is WRONG About Milk | “Ethical” Dairy Farms EXPOSED
One thing they point out is that the very farm whose footage Ann used in her video as an example of “ethical” farming does, in fact, still separate mother cows from their calves; they just do it later than factory farms do. The mother cows are still forcibly impregnated in the first place, and also, as Uplifting Vegan Logic asks, what happens when they can no longer produce milk? And what happens to the male calves when they grow up?
Also, as Uplifting Vegan Logic points out, Ann responded to a CosmicSkeptic video in which CosmicSkeptic suggested switching from cows’ milk to plant-based milk, and she points out that even if you stop drinking cows’ milk, the demand will still exist if you keep eating butter and yogurt and ice cream. Which is very “no duh”, but even more so since CosmicSkeptic was, at the time, an advocate for ethical veganism. (He has since sold out.)
So, like… yeah.
Ann also makes the absolutely busted “if we don’t breed dairy cows then dairy cows won’t exist, so if you actually care about cows, buy milk” argument. Somehow, we as a society are able to recognize how insane this logic is when it comes from Quiverfull Christians, but we continue to apply it to animals bred to be forcibly impregnated (and slaughtered, in the case of “meat animals”). If an animal doesn’t exist, it’s not going to care. Trust me.
On that point, Unnatural Vegan in their response video drops this banger of a remark:
I don’t think a “species”, in itself, has inherent value.
Speaking of intellectual dishonesty, Unnatural Vegan actually has a great section debunking Ann’s claims about how dairy “isn’t bad for the environment” — the usual bunk about how cows are fed plants we “can’t eat”, about how plant-based diets lead to deforestation (news flash: so does animal agriculture), etc. It’s nothing you haven’t heard before.
On the matter of greenhouse gasses and water consumption, Ann just faffs around about how complicated the subject is, when it’s really pretty clear that dairy farming is worse on every metric.
Ann claims cabbages are high in oxalates, which is… just false. Unnatural Vegan points this out, and some admittedly-brief research on my part seems to confirm it. So much for Ann Reardon, Food Scientist.
But on the topic of nutrition, there’s someone else whose response video I want to pivot over to. But that’s just a theory— a
MatPat, the Guy Who Does Game Theory, has a food channel. Who knew. His delivery does nothing for me, but he (and, crucially, the research team who helps with his videos) does seem to know what he’s talking about.
Ann spends some time responding to a Food Theory video on dairy. MatPat had suggested broccoli, kale, and beans as potential alternative sources of calcium. Ann responded by showing huge piles of beans and kale to show just how much you’d need to eat to get the same amount of calcium as a glass of milk.
Never mind that kale is a leafy green, so it condenses, like, a lot…
…which MatPat actually mentioned in his response video to Ann!
Food Theory: Should I DELETE This Video?
He pointed out that he’d chosen to compare foods gram by gram rather than by serving size because serving sizes aren’t standardized in any kind of way. An example he gives is “one serving” of Coca-Cola can be either a 12-ounce can or a 16-ounce bottle, but obviously those are two different amounts of an identical product. As another example, I’m sure we’ve all seen when brands make no changes to their products but simply reduce the suggested serving size so they can claim there’s “fewer calories per serving”. MatPat also talks about the bioavailability of calcium in milk vs. broccoli, which will be important in a second.
He also says that he and Ann actually agree for the most part on the points they were making about lactose digestion; and also, the bit about kale and broccoli and beans was just one small portion of a much larger section where he’d made other suggestions, such as tofu, which Ann did not so much as acknowledge.
And… that part’s really interesting to me, because the only response to this video I could find from Ann came in the comments of her initial video, and it was this:
Broccoli does not have as much calcium as milk whether you look at cooked / raw/ gram for gram / per serve / bioavailability. All of these calculations have milk coming out on top. To get it the other way around in the response video he starts with broccoli having 180mg of calcium/100g which is 4x what the usda data base says for broccoli. He seems to use a misdirection by discussing varying food manufacturers serving sizes on food labels - which while important in other comparisons is not relevant here. When you simply look at how much of this food do I need to eat to get the calcium - the “serve size” is the amount on the plate - nothing to do with food labels. Will you realistically eat that much kale in a day? Or that many beans? If so - great it is a viable source of calcium for you. If not choose a milk or milk alternative. It really isn’t that complicated.
Like… that’s the only thing she has to say. Not only to MatPat, either — this is the only response from her that I could find to any of the criticisms to her milk video. Once again, she picked out a small bit of a much more in-depth video to nitpick.
Major yikes.
I’ve spent enough time on that topic. Honestly, the milk video irritated me when I first watched it, and now it’s irritated me all over again.
Anyway, Ann’s whole thing is that she’s a Food Scientist. So 4 minutes 22 seconds into this video:
Debunking 5-Minute-Craft’s FAKE TikTok debunk!! | How To Cook That Ann Reardon
She decides to “debunk” the claim that darker baking sheets cook faster/hotter/more thoroughly than light ones. (The claim was not made by 5-Minute Crafts, but by what appears to be an independent baking Tiktoker. I think. I can’t differentiate the layouts of all the crappy streaming sites these days.) She winds up proving that the type of baking sheet you use is more important, but like… nobody was disputing that in the first place. She did “science” by mixing up a bunch of different variables rather than sticking to the one that was actually being claimed.
A Youtuber named Sugarologie came up with a method to get more color in frosting dyes by immersion-blending the frosting, then re-whipping it to get the air back in and re-buff the volume. Ann responded to this on her Debunking series, at 2 minutes 25 seconds into this video:
Does water EXPLODE in the microwave? Debunking fake hacks 2023
The weird thing is… this Debunking series started out as a way of putting content farms like 5 Minute Crafts on blast for their false and sometimes dangerous claims. One thing Ann constantly talks about in these videos is how it’s unfair that these content farms get so many views and so much money for their Absolute Bullshit when smaller creators struggle. Which is absolutely true! The Algorithm fucking sucks!
But now she’s blasting an independent creator, and one who apparently tries to be rigorous in their food science as Ann promotes on her own channel, and to top it all off… she’s not even right about it, according to Sugarologie.
The criticism here is that Ann used the wrong kind of frosting, so of course her test didn’t work. Also, in the comment section to “My response.”, Sugarologie has this to say:
(3 weeks ago)Ann: writes me an email saying: I can’t get the air back into my buttercream after using the immersion blender. So that must mean that the air loss is causing the color saturation.
Me: Ok, sure, let’s try to figure this out together. I write back email saying: ok, here’s how you whip air back to the initial volume, and also, notice how the color remains dark. In addition to air loss, there must be other things going on. Here is all my data for you to see. crickets for 3 weeks (at this point, I’m thinking she’s busy or just not interested)
Ann: Releases a new video without emailing me back or considering suggestions in the email exchange, and performs a similar technique to her first video, and says cannot rewhip back to the initial volume, therefore it must be air.
Again, no response from Ann on this.
Like most big Youtubers, How To Cook That has sponsored product placements. Which is whatever. People gotta eat. Ann’s gotta fund her videos somehow (even if she didn’t NEED to go out and buy a bunch of different baking sheets that didn’t actually help her test the thing she claimed to be testing). But like, some sponsors are bad.
Remember the baking sheets? Of course you do, I mentioned them two sentences ago. Right after the baking sheet test, she cut to a sponsor segment for Kamikoto Knives, supposedly a high-quality Japanese knife made using “ancient techniques”. I saw people in the comments of this video saying Kamikoto was a scam, so I looked into it, but all I could find were Reddit threads. I’m not gonna say one way or another, just noting it in case anyone else has more information.
She has also taken sponsorships from BetterHelp, who are widely-known to be Not Great. They don’t vet their therapists, they overwork their therapists, they lie, they sell users’ data, and they make fake profiles for real therapists that imply “This therapist works for BetterHelp” when they don’t. Ann was taking sponsorships from BetterHelp well after this information was known, so, yikes.
Anyway, on to the latest trash sponsor, from just a week ago!
One of the gadgets goes BOOM! Clever or Never | How To Cook That Ann Reardon
First, a caveat that a lot of the criticism against Temu is “omg they’re chinese they must work for the government and want to spy on you!!!” which is ridiculous. They’re clearly just Yet Another Garbage Dropshipper like Wish (or, increasingly these days, Amazon). Legit complaints range from lying about prices to shipping defective products to just not shipping products at all.
(Also, it’s really funny whenever people scare-monger about Chinese Communism when late-stage capitalist shit like this thrives in China. China is as “communist” as triangles are round.)
Anyway I think my biggest problem here is… Ann just doesn’t want to admit when she makes a mistake? Like everyone makes mistakes, it’s no big deal. What a lot of people aren’t very good at is admitting they’ve made a mistake.
It’s super disappointing because I honestly love most of her Debunking series, at least the parts about dangerous hacks and content mills. And she still does some good stuff, like her video about Why Fractal Wood-Burning Is Bad, Seriously Don’t Do It, You Will Die.
So I guess I’m just a bit disillusioned here.
The moral of the story is to have no heroes.