I Was Raised on Trad Wife Food

I want to say to these young women as I said to myself at eighteen: I am my own shepherd. I shall not want. I will walk out of the valley of the shadow of death. I will find the light.

During the course of the recent election, we heard about trad wives, women who believe in gendered family roles. I’d seen these women cooking and grinding flour on TikTok. 

If you look at the average trad wife’s TikTok, what you see is a return to ancient foods. If we had the time and money, why wouldn’t we want to return to Blue Zone cooking, especially when we are raising children? Mormon mothers often do a similar thing, avoiding soda and coffee, grinding flour, using honey instead of sugar, eating oatmeal for breakfast.

As a child, we raised all our own food at the Farm. I was raised in an intentional community/cult, like the one Elon Musk is planning to start, only bigger. The guy who ran it, George, looked a bit like Elon, but he was from England, not South Africa. He also liked younger women, but one thing at a time. We raised our own food, drank goats’ milk, ground our own flour, and, as the trad wives say, we did not get sick much. We weren’t allergic to anything but bee stings. 

When I grew up eating trad food, we also had many children, not because of the great replacement theory—George hadn’t heard of it—but because we had no TV and long winters, and the adults had nothing to do.  

As an adult, I don’t eat fast food at all. I’ve never eaten at In-N-Out or Tommy’s.  When I’m traveling, I make sure I have my Trader Joe’s snacks with me in the car.  The habits stayed with me.  

I have chickens, raise fresh eggs, make attempts at California gardening that mostly go to herbs, and raised my kids on home-cooked meals.  We never had fast food or frozen food for dinner.  But I had a career, and I gave my daughter and son the example of a woman who runs a company alongside a fulfilling life. 

My daughter has her own garden, her own chickens, and she eats healthy.  They avoid sugar, and I can see them making their own flour. But I don’t think any trad wives will try to woo her and her wife. The trad wife movement doesn’t embrace queers.  

Some of us like working; some don’t. Even if my husband had made a lot of money, I would have worked. I wanted a life outside my house. This is America; we get to have choices.  

The trad wives have husbands who make enough money that they can stay at home, and they are encouraged to stay home by their communities. Who doesn’t applaud kids having a mother’s presence and a healthy meal? 

However, the Trad Wife Rules are not simply that one stays home and cooks healthy meals and makes sure the children are cared for and do their schoolwork.

Once you have decided to be a trad mom, you re-enter the early days of white Christian patriarchy. 

A stay-at-home mom is often temporary, and they are often just focused on getting through the day. A trad wife is a life investment. A stay-at-home mom could decide to, say, get a part-time job or be a fractional COO, while still being a stay-at-home mom. A trad wife cannot.

The man is the head of the household and has the final word on all things professional and anything concerning his family’s lifestyle. The woman is not allowed to have friendships with other men. If he says they are having sex, they are having sex. If he says they are moving, they are moving. He controls the money. She does not.

Many Internet-famous trad wives start wearing fifties clothing, complete with floral dresses and those little cardigans you can get from your grandma’s closet. I am not sure how they explain the income from being an influencer, but I am sure their husbands control that as well. 

One of the rules of the trad wife is that submitting to the husband is paramount.  

In the trad wife movement, men are allowed to discipline their wives by beating, caning them, making them do standards, or sit in a corner. In my soon-to-be-completed memoir, Sailing the Milky Way, I write a lot about doing standards at the Farm. It was a preferred form of discipline.

In the rest of the world, you get to call the police if your husband hits you. It’s called domestic violence. Off they go to jail.

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The trad wife movement is a response to fourth-wave feminism which, let’s face it, achieved progress almost exclusively for the women at the top, and those were mostly white women. But oddly, this trad wife movement is mostly enacted by Christian white women.  

In “The Housewives of White Supremacy,” Annie Kelly explains that the unspoken purpose of the trad wife movement is to make more white children to balance out the number of children of color. Six seems to be the preferred number of kids. 

On dating websites, there are ten men looking for a trad wife for every trad wife that exists. That’s because the men who stormed Charlottesville and the Capitol aren’t the men these cozy trad wives are looking for. They’re looking for the luxurious lifestyle that has been shared online by trad wife influencers. Hannah Neeleman, the trad wife who runs the Ballerina Farm account, married the son of the owner of Jet Blue. Those who aspire for her lifestyle imagine a rich man taking care of them in a fancy home. But Neeleman is the one doing the caring, and even she still wishes she could dance. 

A couple of weeks ago, I sat at the kitchen table voting, trying to figure out California’s long list of propositions and judges.  I did my research, but the list went on and on.  My husband was making tea; he had voted a week earlier. I said to myself, “Not for all the tea in China am I asking his advice. I’m a grown woman. I got this.”

What we have learned in this last election is that there are a lot of women in this country who are expected to vote like their husbands. The problem with women, and you know this from the Bible, is that Eve went out on her own.

“Don’t eat the fruit.”  Let’s face it. It wasn’t an apple. Not in the Middle East. Whatever the fruit, she did what she wanted. We like to think for ourselves. 

The trad wife movement is dangerous not because women want to stay home, cook healthy, cosplay the ‘50s, and make their own flour. It’s dangerous to set an example for your children that your husband can beat you. It’s dangerous to live a life where you are beaten because you could be beaten to death. It’s dangerous to think that “white is right” because we live in a country where Native Americans were slaughtered to make room for White people. We live on the land of Native people.  That’s why we do land acknowledgments, to remind ourselves of what we took. The “we” who now live here represent over 1500 race groups, and White is only one of them, and it is not the best of them, and it never was. If you think that, you are living in a past century in a tiny minority. By 2045, the US will be a minority-white country, and better for it. The six children are not going to make a difference.

Here’s to healthy eating. And to the trad wives who are now claiming their bodies, their children, and their lives. I want to say to these young women as I said to myself at eighteen: I am my own shepherd. I shall not want. I will walk out of the valley of the shadow of death. I will find the light. I don’t have to be beaten. I am going to live a life of adventure on my own terms. I am not waiting for the knight to rescue me. I am going to be my own prince and rescue myself.