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You Do Not Want to F*ck With the Joy of Cooking

Doing Irma Rombauer proud. Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

A few months ago, the field of food science got upended by news that Brian Wansink’s renowned Cornell Food and Brand Lab essentially has, for years, been duping journalists and the public with shoddy science about consumers’ dietary behaviors. Though Wansink proclaims his innocence, the contours of the charade sharpened again this week when BuzzFeed published an exposé showing that the professor’s team discussed how they could hack low-quality data into clickbait-y studies that’d “go virally big time,” most of them on the topic of weight loss.

Enter America’s cheerful cookbook for the masses, the Joy of Cooking, which was one of the many victims of Wansink’s shoddy science. “The Joy of Cooking Too Much” was a 2009 study he authored in Annals of Internal Medicine alleging that the book’s recipes had grown 44 percent more caloric since its 1931 edition, leading to a bunch of next-day newspaper headlines (like “‘Joy of Cooking’ or ‘Joy of Obesity’?” in the L.A. Times).

Given these new revelations, the Joy team knew it was time to take to Twitter, and it’s clear that this group has been frustrated for a while. Luckily, there’s no need for any familiarity with the Cornell scandal either — the Joy of Cooking’s knack for accessibility bled right into its Food Lab takedown.

Just feast on their epic rant thread:

Clearly, the people behind the Easiest Lemon Curd and this lovely-looking Chocolate Chess Pie are not to be trifled with because when the time comes, they will cut you deep — and their knife skills are clearly quite advanced.

Reminder: Do Not Mess With the Joy of Cooking