(Meiya Rollins • The Student Life)
In a perfect world, we could all live on homesteads in rural Massachusetts, with warm sourdough on the table and cows grazing in our hundred-acre backyards. We could all become masterful homecooks, crafting fresh peanut butter, jelly and bread for our cosmically patient children.
From-scratch influencers, who have garnered a massive following over the last few years, tell us that this perfect world is already here — they are living in it, and so can we. Their home-grown messaging has seeped into our social media algorithms. On YouTube Shorts, viral influencer Bob Dickinson invites us into his rustic cottage, where he cooks exclusively with ingredients from his own garden. To Dickinson, store-bought items are a bleak byproduct of global consumerism, denying us the satisfaction of hand-picking rhubarb and fermenting sauerkraut. Like many other influencers, he laments the fact that home cooking is no longer prioritized in modern society. If we all just made time to bake fresh bread a few times a week, everyone in the world would be a whole lot happier.
This priority shift attitude does not exist in a vacuum online. As part of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) program instituted by secretary of health Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 18 states have restricted the purchase of non-nutritious food and drink for people using SNAP benefits. In practice, these restrictions include sugary beverages, candy and packaged snacks. The goal of this initiative is to encourage SNAP recipients to “prioritize healthy food,” because using government benefits to buy items with low nutritional value is an affront to American taxpayers.
By characterizing clean eating as a lifestyle adjustment rather than a condition of socio-economic status, MAHA mirrors the entitled ignorance of online from-scratch culture. Its messaging willfully ignores the money and time required to eat a perfectly healthy diet, and instead places this burden on struggling Americans to make healthy choices. The food-based elitism that permeates both social media and political platforms villainizes the poor by using wellness rhetoric to cast poverty itself as a moral failure.
The internet’s most popular from-scratch influencers have a way of making impossible cooking routines seem effortless. Model and TikTok star Nara Smith has filmed herself preparing a bounty of “quick little snacks,” including homemade buldak carbonara, Thai mango rice pudding and artisanal Dr. Pepper. She claims to make these “snacks” for her incredibly low-maintenance toddlers, who are apparently content with five-hour PB&Js. Hannah Neeleman of @ballerinafarms markets herself as a mother of nine who happily harvests all her food from her family-owned farm. She promotes a stay-at-home existence free from the shackles of capitalism, while ironically co-running a multi-million dollar business. When I come across their videos, Nara and Hannah briefly make me feel like I, too, could dip my homemade French fries in homemade ketchup. Then I remember that I’m a college student.
From-scratch influencers and MAHA proponents believe that they are letting us in on a secret. They perpetuate the idea that healthy, unprocessed food is a lifestyle choice, not a privilege, and anyone can attain it with enough dedication.
Many from-scratch influencers portray themselves as modest homesteaders living off the land. They are strong proponents of family values and view their departures from mainstream consumption as simple and righteous. I’ve spent hours scrolling through their videos, and have never found a single mention of the privilege required to dedicate such exorbitant amounts of time to cooking.
Hannah Neeleman says that while her husband’s father is the billionaire founder of JetBlue, “he has never supported [the family] financially,” and that they attained their lifestyle through a love of work and creation. Nara Smith captions almost every one of the complex cooking videos she films in her giant modern kitchen, “#easyrecipe,” a meager attempt at accessibility that feels far too ignorant and ironic to be genuine.
These influencers believe, or at least pretend to believe, that they are enlightening people to a new way of life, which anyone can reach if they put in the effort. The Make America Healthy Again campaign rests on a similar conclusion: People on SNAP are intentionally making poor lifestyle choices, so limiting food options will encourage them to change their eating habits and live healthily.
Outside of promoting the brutally unrealistic MAHA program, Republican lawmakers have also expressed significant hostility toward Americans receiving food stamps. Louisiana representative Clay Higgins tweeted that people on SNAP should “stop smoking crack.” He then instructed citizens to “wrap [their] heads around how many pantries you can stock with $4200 [per year] of properly shopped groceries.” In reality, the average family of four spends around $900 per month on groceries, which adds up to $10,800 per year.
Former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz voiced frustration that hard-working Americans were funding social services for “people who could make a broader contribution and instead are couch potatoes.” Alabama senator and millionaire Tommy Tuberville said that young men on food stamps “should be working” instead. These comments reflect the bootstraps attitude that has shaped the Republican Party’s vague and crucifying stance on government aid: Americans on public assistance are simply not trying hard enough.
This way of thinking contains an incredible leap of logic. Curating a nutritious diet is more expensive at the average grocery store, so a practical initiative would involve expanding SNAP benefits so people can actually afford it. Instead, the Trump administration’s Big Beautiful Bill aims to cut benefits by $186 million over the next ten years. Thus, Americans on SNAP are somehow supposed to eat healthier than ever on a budget more limited than ever. Right-wing politicians expect the impossible, and still have the audacity to frame the eating habits of Americans — some living in poverty — as a lifestyle choice. People are busy, people are poor, and changing what you eat is therefore not as simple as being told to just, well, do it.
From-scratch influencers and right-wing politicians are, of course, not the same people. They operate on entirely different playing fields, yet both groups perpetuate an oversimplified notion of what it takes to eat in ways they deem acceptable and necessary. Reversing these attitudes will take active resistance.
Calling out food-based elitism both on social media and in political rhetoric is not a solution, but it is an important step toward creating food standards that are grounded in the complexities of everyday life. When we see these videos on our pages, we must not allow ourselves to fall into the trap of unrealistic expectations. To “Make America Healthy Again,” we need to expand SNAP rather than gut its vital programs and blame average Americans for their struggles. In doing so, we can make nutritious eating a possibility in the first place.
Zara Seldon PO ’29 wonders what Nara Smith plans to name her next child.
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