Trad Wife Influencers: Helpful or Harmful? A Registered Dietitian's Review

Medically reviewed by Abbey Sharp, Registered Dietitian (RD), BASc.

Is the rise of trad wife influencers inspiring for women, or perpetuating dangerous diet culture? I share my thoughts on traditional homemaking and the trad wife ideals.

Trad wife influencer holding sourdough bread.

Recently, I’ve been opening my feed to see moms and homemakers who some might call trad wife influencers. You know, the ones that make cinnamon toast crunch from scratch, fresh mozzarella from their kid’s grilled cheese, and sew all their own clothes. As a mom who praises the invention of grocery delivery and frozen pizzas, I’m pretty impressed. But the more you fall down the trad wife influencer rabbit hole, the more questionable ideas start coming out.

Today I’m going to be sharing my honest opinions on the food trends and takes on feminism I’ve seen from trad wife influencers. Before we begin, we should probably discuss what a trad wife actually is.

What is a Trad Wife?

It’s hard to find a legitimate definition, but there are a lot of recurring themes and criteria online. Generally, the trad wife is a woman who espouses and upholds the more traditional roles of being a wife and mother. According to Mariel Cooksey, a religion, politics and conflict MA grad, tradwifery “encourages women to embrace the supposedly feminine characteristics of chastity and submissiveness to their husbands, and to trade feminist empowerment for a patriarchal vision of gender norms. And accepting that women shouldnt work, should shouldn’t have the right to vote, and should fully submit to their husbands and their faith to live a happy life of homemaking.”

From the images we see on social media, the trad wife of the 21st century is often associated with the 1950s stay at home wife, a homestead lifestyle, and anti-feminist beliefs. I’ve even seen some proclaiming that “real women support the patriarchy”. Interesting take, for one.

Now I do want to make a very clear distinction that I am not downplaying the important roles of being a mother and a wife. I take a lot of pride my career, but my job as a mom is far more important than anything else I’ll do in my life. So I want to make it very clear that there is nothing wrong with having more traditional gender roles in your home if that is an arrangement that brings you joy and fulfillment. It’s not anti-feminist to be a stay at home mom. But while any given relationship’s division of household labour might not be equal, the power dynamic should be.

Now that we’ve established what a trad wife is, let’s look at some of the problematic themes emerging.

Demonization of Processed Foods

Flatlay of pink pop tarts and strawberries.

The typical aesthetic of the trad wife is largely built around being a homestead homemaker. You know, the “golden days” when women weren’t involved in the hustle culture and we therefore didn’t need all of the modern conveniences like packaged snacks or “junk food”. So obviously, if your kids want a pop tart or cinnamon toast crunch, you make it yourself. That’s what made trad wife influencer Nara Smith go viral.

I’m not knocking Nara because she has said she really does love to experiment in the kitchen. She also doesn’t demonize the foods she’s recreating, which I appreciate. But what Nara avoids saying out loud in her content, others in the trad wife influencers say loud and clear.

“My kids don’t eat processed food.” “We only eat pop tarts made from scratch.”

Anyway, consuming a commercially processed food once in a blue moon isn’t going to suddenly make you deathly sick. Yes, they contain some ingredients that I do recommend we limit that you could easily avoid in a homemade version. But at the end of the day, a pop tart is a frosted sugar-loaded pastry. Whether it comes from a box or your kitchen, it’s not a daily breakfast and it should be seen as something to be enjoyed in moderation. The former is not toxic and the latter is not suddenly a health food.

Orthorexia

Colourful grain bowl with avocado and vegetables.

This public obsession with avoiding any and all processed foods, feels like a slippery slope to orthorexia. Intention is really important when it comes to restrictive food choices.

Orthorexia is often described as clean eating taken to an extreme. Some of the hallmark features include fixating on curing or preventing disease by eating “clean”, avoiding food from restaurants, and spending hours a day preparing and planning healthy meals.

The problem with this particular flavor of orthorexic mentality is that its reserved strictly for the rich and elite. Because if you don’t have the financial flexibility and leisure time to make your own pop tarts or from scratch, then your list of safe foods will get whittled down real quick. People who become so afraid of “processed foods”, largely thanks to aspirational content they see online, find themselves in a real bind. Either they make the cereal from scratch with all natural organic ingredients, or they never eat cereal again.

Raw Milk

Glass jar of milk beside a vase of flowers.

There’s also an interesting intersection between trad wife influencers and the raw milk movement.

I wrote about raw milk in this post, but in short, there seems to be this general distrust of modern social norms within the trad wife movement. That often means that any government intervention in our food system is met with suspicion.

That really is misinformed, because milk pasteurization is one of the greatest public health initiatives of our generation. Raw milk only has a slight nutritional edge in vitamins B1, B2, B12, C and folate. It’s not better on your gut, it’s not safe for lactose intolerance, and it doesn’t have better protein availability. There is literally no real benefits to be had.

In contrast, its very risky for foodborne illness. While raw milk products account for only 1% of dairy production in the U.S., raw milk dairies were linked to 60% of those dairy-related outbreaks and 85% of all dairy hospitalizations. So no, do not drink raw milk.

Body Aesthetic

Not surprisingly, if you look at the most “successful” trad wife influencers on social media, they are undeniably beautiful, thin and well dressed. Most noteably, Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm and her controversial participation at the Mrs. World pageant, merely two weeks after giving birth.

Now obviously, I commend her for having a goal and going for it if this is what brings her joy. But this is not the real life experience of 99.99% of women who make the decision to maintain traditional values in the home. And it most certainly does not represent the bodies of women, especially women who are moms.

There is a reason why the body positivity movement is so deeply intertwined with feminism. That is because women have a long history of their bodies being policed by men and the patriarchal society at large. Like diet culture, this belief system has a lot of buy in from women on the inside too. It becomes extra dangerous when there is this overt encouragement of submissiveness and subordination.

Now, I’m not suggesting that tradwifery is a cult. But any movement that encourages complete submissiveness, whether to a leader, or your own husband, is cult-like. Eating disorders often come part and parcel with the cult agenda. Survivors of NXIVM all recount being restricted to no more than 800 calories a day and losing extreme amounts of weight. But one of the unique hallmarks of a cult is control. And you know what the easiest way to control a woman is? Make her as small, starved and weak as possible.

Food, or withholding food, is one of the most rudimentary forms of control. So there is a reason why we see a thin body idolized so often in movements like this.

Bottom Line on Trad Wife Influencers

Whether or not the trad wife influencers themselves are truly happy in with this lifestyle, that’s not for me to decide. But I do fear that the messages that are being portrayed by women to women in the movement has the potential to do much harm.

We’ve fought so hard for our dignity. Let’s not set us back decades not only for women’s rights, but for media literacy, body positivity, and anti-diet culture movements as well.