Ann Reardon

Ann Reardon is an Australian food scientist and dietitian — a former youth worker and mother of three — who launched the How to Cook That channel in 2011 and built an audience of millions with elaborate baking builds. In 2018 she began a debunking series that made her the internet’s foremost prosecutor of fake cooking content, methodically recreating viral “hacks” from content farms like So Yummy and 5-Minute Crafts to show they do not work, and in some cases — fractal wood burning, poison-level ingredients — can kill.

From content farms to AI slop

By 2024 the fakery she chases had a new engine. Reardon’s debunking turned to AI-generated recipes and food images flooding Facebook and recipe sites — content where the ingredients, method, and glossy photo are all generated by a model that has never cooked anything. In her March 2025 video “AI Cooking Disasters: Debunking Facebook’s Fake Recipes” she cooked AI-generated recipes to demonstrate their failures, and noted, as Kotaku reported, that platforms are not merely failing to address the problem but actively encouraging it — Facebook itself has developed “inverse cooking” AI that invents a recipe from a photograph.

Her core argument predates the AI boom and transfers to it exactly: engagement-driven platforms reward plausible-looking fabrication, and AI has made fabrication effectively free. She has warned for years about children being misled by fake how-tos — telling MIT Technology Review about kids who concluded “I thought that I couldn’t cook” after failing at recipes that were never real — and AI-generated content multiplies that harm at industrial scale. Her fight parallels Kurzgesagt’s stand against AI slop in science content.