Not to brag, but I have stellar “crunchy” bona fides. I was raised on wheat bread, limited television and camping vacations, and at 17 went off to Oberlin College, that notorious incubator of crunchy achievers. I am deeply familiar with old-school crunchy in all of its hues: the lumpy hand-knit sweaters, the unkempt hair.
In the 1980s, “crunchy” held a faintly pejorative meaning; one didn’t announce oneself as “crunchy” with pride. It felt more like a fashion (or anti-fashion) statement than a political stance, though if pressed I would have noted that crunchy often aligned with vegetarianism, which aligned with environmentalism — which was political. Leftist “green” parties and politics were attaining prominence in Europe, and at least one person I knew found an internship with the up-and-coming clean-water crusader Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy has evolved a lot since the 1980s and “crunchy” has, too. Having gone through numerous life stages (addict, activist, vaccine denier, Democrat, Independent, presidential candidate, MAGA surrogate, and vaccine denier-denier), Kennedy, at 70, is now President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to be secretary of health and human services. As Kennedy evolved, so did “crunchy,” into a “horseshoe” alliance of far left- and far right-leaning home-schoolers and homesteaders, hippies and religious believers suspicious of conventional medicine who like to grow their own food.
Now “crunchy,” and specifically “crunchy mom,” is a hashtag on social media, complete with influencers who promote electric kettles and wooden toys. On TikTok and Instagram, crunchy moms — mostly young, white mothers of small children — post passionately about the effects of medication, pesticides and food additives on their families’ health. In their rejection of junk food, ultra-processed foods and, often, pediatricians’ advice, they see themselves as a defiant band, out of the mainstream of American child-rearing. No matter their political affiliation, they almost universally love Kennedy, whom they regard as singular in his concern for their children’s health. “The assault on our children’s cells and hormones is unrelenting,” he has said. And: “They are swimming around in a toxic soup.”
In some ways, today’s crunchy moms resemble the crunchies of yore. They make home-cooked meals from organic and locally grown produce and grass-fed meat if they can afford it and strive to raise kids in a low-tech environment with plenty of outdoor play. They idealize natural childbirth and other markers of a preindustrial past, in which one might procure eggs from one neighbor and pork from another, and “spend Easter to Labor Day barefoot, outside,” as the crunchy influencer and satirist Emily Morrow put it to me. On Really Very Crunchy, Morrow’s account, she makes skits that mock her own crunchy obsessiveness: In one, she triumphantly pressures her non-crunchy husband into drinking raw milk; in another, she brings the ingredients for bone-broth hot chocolate to the movies. Morrow has 3 million followers on YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok combined.
But the values undergirding “crunchy” have shifted — a lot. The crunchies I knew held high-minded, liberal notions about food equity and clean oceans and air. They lived in group houses and expressed their idealism through hours of meetings, in which they hashed out, by consensus, how to live. Today, in contrast, “there is an individualism at the heart of the crunchy realm,” Lindsey Smith Taillie, associate professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina, told me in an interview.
Since the election of Trump, #crunchy has evolved again, overlapping with #MAHA, or Make America Healthy Again: a politically right cry of health freedom and choice. After Trump’s win with Kennedy in tow, the #crunchymoms held a virtual party, longhaired mothers in orderly kitchens swaying their hips and tossing their hair. They lip-synced “Daddy’s Home” and “Sleep Like a Baby.” Diana Atieh was one of them, posting on Instagram and TikTok her hope that Kennedy would “take down” Big Pharma and the F.D.A. She had voted for Trump before, but said, “I really, really didn’t like the guy.” His alliance with Kennedy thrilled her. “It hit the nail on the head,” she told me. “Crunchy moms finally have representation in the political sphere.”
‘You Might Be a Crunchy Mom If …’
Today’s crunchy movement originated in the mid 2010s. Kennedy had been promoting anti-vaccine rhetoric since 2005, gaining some traction in libertarian pockets and far-left bubbles, as well as among parents of children with autism who believed — wrongly — that childhood vaccination was the cause. But then opposition to vaccination got a big boost from lobbyists on the right.
After measles outbreaks in California, the state in 2014 passed a law strengthening restrictions on medical exemptions to mandated childhood vaccines. There was a backlash, and activists, especially in red states like Texas and Oklahoma, framed their opposition in terms of “health freedom.” They argued that “vaccine mandates are unacceptable to the point of being un-American, whereas vaccine choice constitutes a necessary and essential element of core American values,” as Peter Hotez, professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine, writes in his book “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science.”
That same year, Stephanie Kowalski published an online quiz on her parenting blog “Crunchy Moms.” “You might be a crunchy mom if….” it said, and the list that followed included crunchy classics such as co-sleeping, self-weaning, cloth diapers, seitan, a preference for menstrual sponges — and a refusal of childhood vaccines. Kowalski loved the diversity of the “crunchy” spaces back then. “I felt we were very different in our backgrounds, but had that common goal of wanting to do things natural.” Kowalski made her own laundry soap and promoted breast milk, applied topically, as a treatment for pink eye.
Crunchy started to evolve around then, from the communitarian ideal to a narrower, more self-centered focus. Crunchy parents began to see themselves as solo actors struggling to raise children in a poisonous world. Just as they worried about the effects of vaccines on their individual children, they began to see the childhood obesity epidemic — and rising rates of anxiety and ADHD — as threats to family well being. The culprits, they felt, were the specific ingredients in foods and household products. When Morrow, of Really Very Crunchy, gave a friend a gift of fancy hand soap, the friend said “This is actually so toxic” when she unwrapped it.
With the fluency of food technologists, mothers in crunchy online spaces started to trade information, and misinformation, about the chemicals found in grocery store items. They worried about glyphosate, butylated hydroxyanisole, phthalates. They knew that certain food dyes, outlawed in Europe, remained in use here, even though some studies have shown these dyes can trigger hyperactivity in some children. They warned one another about what they saw as the dangers of seed oils and the supposed healthful effects of raw milk — neither of which claim is proven by science.
“Parents know that our kids are unhealthier than they ever have been before, and no one is really taking action about it,” said Taillie, the U.N.C. nutritionist and epidemiologist. At the same time, “the concern is misplaced on certain toxins,” Taillie said. Regardless of any particular additives, it’s the high quantities of sugar, fat and salt in ultra-processed foods that have most likely contributed to rising rates of obesity and diabetes.
Feeling that every ordinary decision — which diapers, sunscreen, soaps, cereals, corn chips to buy— held high stakes, Morrow launched Really Very Crunchy in December 2021. She wanted to bring solidarity and humor to “crunchy.”
“It can be a really challenging lifestyle, and it can be so heavy. There’s just all this information from every side, and you’re just trying to do your best, and you feel like you’re crazy because nobody else is caring about the food dye,” she said. From the outset she avoided politics.
The pandemic heightened mothers’ simmering anxieties, and Kennedy chimed in with outlandish claims. He called the Covid-19 vaccine “the deadliest vaccine ever made,” and in 2021 was de-platformed by Instagram for spreading disinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines. (The ban was later lifted.)
When mask and vaccine mandates forced mothers to choose sides, “crunchy” took a rightward turn. “Since Covid, and the whole medical freedom movement, a lot more conservatives have entered the crunchy space,” Morrow said.
Suddenly everything was political, and fights could erupt with little or no warning. This year on TikTok, Sybil Erickson, who has an Instagram page that helps mothers make healthier choices in conventional supermarkets, posted what she considered an innocent comment against the corn-syrup solids in baby formulas. The post exploded into a hostile skirmish — one side focusing on ingredients, the other on affordability — and Erickson was called a MAGA adherent even though she is politically unaffiliated and has never voted for president. In a phone call, she described the tone among crunchy moms in that period of isolation and illness as tense. “There’s a certain extent where you’re not allowed to talk about things within the crunchy community,” she said.
No Longer Content to be Crunchy
Mothers who have long aligned with “crunchy” have felt discomfort since Trump’s win. “As a lot of people started to lean more right, I have had a hard time navigating within the crunchy space,” Becca Tanner told me. Tanner is a Virginia homesteader with chickens, ducks and geese; her page Living With Becca shows her making organic family dinner from scratch. Previously an avid Bernie Sanders supporter, she had supported Kennedy when he was running for president. When Kennedy threw his endorsement to Trump, she cried.
Tanner regards the Trump-Kennedy alliance with skepticism. She’d like to believe Kennedy’s promise that as health secretary he will clean up the food supply, but she has her doubts — given that Trump “ran on a platform of deregulation.” If he is empowered to pressure corporations to curtail the use of chemicals and pesticides in food, Tanner hopes that he will remember his liberal past, when he was an environmentalist lawyer fighting the corporate giant Monsanto. Clean food should be “attainable for all families,” Tanner told me. “It’s not just something that families with status and wealth should be able to acquire.”
Ashlyn Bristle used to be happy to identify as “crunchy,” but she isn’t so sure anymore. She learned farming at a Quaker summer camp and co-owns a small farm in southern Vermont, where she raises livestock and sells raw milk and pastured meat to the crunchy families nearby. When I spoke with her on the phone, it was early morning, and she was panting as she climbed a hill with her baby strapped to her chest. She was on her way to milk the cows.
As her crunchy cohort swings toward an increasingly rigid refusal of any technological interventions in their food — with rhetoric from Kennedy to encourage them — she is moving the other way. She has had to explain to her customers why she vaccinates her livestock, she told me. She has seen a sheep die of tetanus, “and watching something die of a preventable disease, it was one of the most horrific deaths I’ve ever seen.” It’s her responsibility to care for her animals, she said, “to give them the best lives I can. And that’s really made me pro-vaccine.” If her customers want “pharmaceutical-free” food, they can shop somewhere else.
Similarly, she and her partner are planning to produce a line of pasteurized milk. In a future Trump-Kennedy world, where farms like hers are allowed to grow bigger and more deregulated, the risk of food borne illnesses increases. “We’re worried that people aren’t taking the risk seriously enough,” she said. “And if they get sick, that’s our business. That’s our livelihood.”
Bristle started farming 15 years ago and has started to feel more alien in the world she inhabits. And she has loosened her formerly tight grip on what she and her family eat. Any strict adherence to “crunchy” has become “very boring,” she said.
She still mostly eats off her own farm. But “some of my food can come from the grocery store and it doesn’t rock my identity. I can eat bananas and not feel like I’m contributing to the end of the world.” Her life may look like a crunchy ideal. But in truth, Bristle told me with a rueful laugh, “my identity is the furthest from that than it has ever been.”
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