I know that everyone is entitled to their own opinion on what food tastes great and what doesn’t, but here’s the thing: I truly don’t understand how anyone out there can like ranch dressing. And not just like, but love. There are people in this world who enjoy eating ranch dressing so much that they put it on everything, and this just isn’t something I’ll ever be able to get behind, or pretend not to be disgusted by. Here’s the truth: Ranch dressing is not good, and it never will be good. Is this my opinion? Yes. Is it also rooted in a truth that everyone wants to ignore? Probably also yes.
It wasn’t until a few years ago that ranch dressing became an official *thing* that people were apparently obsessed with. Before that, my life was easier. I avoided using the stuff on salads because it immediately destroyed them, and I simply didn’t dip my vegetables into it when I went to parties. But at some point during the last few years, ranch started to take over and become a much bigger nightmare. For some reason, it now appears on menus in restaurants all over, and Hidden Valley even sells a keg of the stuff. Just thinking about that much ranch makes me gag.
I’m not even the only person who feels this way. In 2016, The Washington Post published an op-ed titled “Ranch dressing is what’s wrong with America” — and it perfectly explained how this lowbrow, fatty condiment is only one example of how our country is obsessed with gross, unhealthy food. But that doesn’t begin to explain why I dislike this food item so much.
It is literally made of half-rotten milk.
Ranch dressing is generally made of a few simple ingredients: buttermilk, salt, garlic, onion, and herbs and spices — although, of course, the jars of it in the store are filled with processed ingredients so that it can sit on a shelf, unrefrigerated, for months (which is a whole other story). Buttermilk is literally slightly sour milk. It smells bad, it tastes bad, and it completely weirds me out (maybe this is the exact reason I don’t like ranch?). Anyway, please think about that for a minute: you are eating something that is made of half-rotten milk. How is this in any way appetizing?
It truly makes a terrible dip.
I’ve never understood why, exactly, so many people enjoy putting out crudités with little bowls of ranch to dip them in. Dip a carrot stick into ranch dressing and watch what happens. Do it! The stuff is runny and thin. It doesn’t grab onto your carrot like, say, hummus does. It drips down so that you’re left with a little bit of ranch flavor and probably a stain on your shirt as well. It shouldn’t be a dip! It’s essentially a milky liquid!
It ruins pizza, which is really, really hard to do.
There are very few things you can add to pizza that make it bad. It is the perfect vessel for so many different types of food that one has to wonder how it can be so perfect. But drizzle ranch dressing over pizza and well, you’ve destroyed it. Why would you put a buttermilk dressing on top of melted mozzarella and tomato sauce? It doesn’t make sense!
It drowns your salad.
I guess putting ranch on a salad is about the least offensive thing you could do with it, but that’s not saying much. Ranch dressing on iceberg lettuce makes me slowly die inside. It offers only a slightly tangy, weird flavor, and there’s usually so much of it that it drowns everything in that salad and takes away any potential it once had. And then when it mixes with water from the lettuce at the bottom? Gag.
It overpowers anything you’re eating it with.
One of the worst things about ranch dressing is that it takes over all other foods. If you manage to dip a vegetable in ranch dressing, it only tastes like ranch. If you drizzle it over French fries, they just taste like… ranch. Tasting Table says it best: “The problem is a bottle of ranch is a little too good at what it does. Pour the viscous horror over any food, and ranch massacres the flavor like Freddy Krueger.” Find the lie.
It’s wildly unhealthy.
I’m not the healthiest person in the world, but I try. I don’t eat meat, I stay away from most processed foods, I don’t eat fast food at all, and I try to eat as clean as possible. While there are plenty of unhealthy things I indulge in, ranch will never be one of them. That’s because it’s so bad for you, and it doesn’t even taste great enough to justify that. Buttermilk is full of saturated fats and tons of salt, and the bottled ranch dressing that almost everyone eats is full of chemicals I can’t pronounce or spell. It also includes titanium dioxide, a chemical used in sunscreen that has been linked to cancer. Delicious!
In the end, this tweet speaks to my soul:
As does this one:
Ranch Dressing is a blight upon humanity.
— Matt McClellan (@Mattmcclellan1R) October 14, 2018
I mean, you’re entitled to your own opinion, so if you want to keep ingesting ranch dressing… I guess go for it. But just know this: there are a lot of better options out there, and your life doesn’t have to be this way.
