In his defense lab equipment can be utilized in cooking to great effect. The most common use in modern cooking being sous vide, which is just a repurposing of immersion circulators that have been in use in the laboratory context for decades. But centrifuges, rotary evaporation, homogenizers, etc all have great culinary applications.

thus the entire field of food science and why your homemade food is never as texturally amazing as commercially processed food. It’s one of the really frustrating aspects of capitalism; those processes can really make truly amazing textures but the companies that control the (very expensive) machinery are often overly concerned with cutting costs. So something ends up with an amazingly smooth texture but tastes like butt because they cheap out on ingredients.

That said you absolutely should not use lab equipment that is used for the shit he does for culinary purposes. Equipment that has processed mercury should not be used for culinary applications, ever, no matter how much you clean it