Tradwives are the New Food Porn

We can't understand tradwives without understanding diet culture

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An impeccably made-up, impossibly beautiful woman wearing a glamorous feather robe tells us that her toddler requested a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She proceeds to make raspberry jam from scratch, roast and grind the peanuts, and bake a loaf of sandwich bread—before slicing off the crusts, naturally. She tilts her head slightly and narrates the video in an ASMR whisper.

This is peak tradwife content. Welcome to the rabbit hole.

Image: Nara Smith

For the last several years, women like the aforementioned Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman—of Ballerina Farm—have inspired adoration and rage, in various proportions, on social media. They are extremely thin, have multiple children, and appear to be in traditional patriarchal marriages (although how much of that is real, and how much is exaggerated, or for show, remains an open question).

But that’s not what jumped out at me when I began to look at their content systematically last year. It’s that so much of what they do is classic food pornography, marketed to a specific—and predictably hungry—demographic.