The Discourse Surrounding Nara Smith
Gitanjali dissects all the noise surrounding Nara Smith, a TikToker and model who rose to fame after posting videos of her making food from scratch. Thus, sparking trad-wife rumors.
Nara Smith is a name you might have heard of in the last few weeks. She is a 22-year-old German and South African model and content creator who rose to fame after posting cooking videos on TikTok and Instagram. Though her posts may seem innocent upon first watch, many accusations of promoting a trad-wife lifestyle and Mormonism come into play.
Her husband, Lucky Blue Smith, is a familiar figure to those who were avid users of Tumblr in the 2010s. The couple shares two young children – Rumble Honey and Slim Easy – and is pregnant with their third child. They met in 2019 and married six months later.
She has been a controversial figure since she started posting cooking videos in 2022. This led to her including a disclaimer at the beginning of her videos, stating that she is not expected to cook but does so out of love. Though there are many food creators online, hers differ due to how she presents herself. Always exuding glamour via her feathery gowns or cashmere lounge sets, many online questions her intentions behind these videos. Hence, the tradwife allegations.
The trad-wife lifestyle
The trad-wife (traditional wife) lifestyle content was first spotted in 2022. Laura Henshaw explains that this type of content typically involves a 20-something child-free woman who stays at home while their partner goes to work to fund her lifestyle. Using her partner’s money, they indulge in a life of glamour that involves morning walks, lots of sunshine, light housework, and cooking.
The danger of this trend is that it distances people from learning the importance of financial independence for women. Henshaw explains “By glamorising this lifestyle we are warping the importance of financial independence for many young, vulnerable women on social media.” In the article, she thoughtfully brings up the point that the For You Page on TikTok can be uncontrollable, which means inevitably, we will be confronted with content such as these. On that same wavelength is the stay-at-home-girlfriend type of content whose only difference is that their relationship is not bound in paper, which could be argued as even more dangerous for younger audiences.
Linking this back to Nara Smith, her content heavily relies on her family dynamic. Her toddlers’ and husband’s cravings are used as a way to introduce her videos: for example, “My children were craving _____”. Despite not showing her children’s faces, they end up playing an important role in her branding.
The glamorization of a traditionally feminine domestic role
As someone who follows a lot of food content creators on TikTok and Instagram, I could not pinpoint why people were angry with what she was posting. However, after she posted the video of her making cereal from scratch, the difference became clear. One might argue that that video was what brought her to the Discourse Limelight. The idea that cereal, something so readily available for purchase, was something she decided to make from scratch, became a point of frustration.
A TikTok by Professor Neil was stitched with the cereal video. In it, he expresses how the labour that is shown in content by trad-wives is “unnecessary” and relates it to the theory of conspicuous leisure. Thorstein Veblen coined this theory in his book The Theory of The Leisure Class published in 1899. Veblen explains that upper-classmen signal their wealth or power by doing things in an unnecessarily challenging way to show that they can; “The performance of labour has been accepted as a conventional evidence of inferior force; therefore it comes itself, by a mental short-cut, to be regarded as intrinsically base” (quoted from the book). Professor Neil summarizes this idea by saying “They are not better than us because they can make their children from scratch. They are better than us because they have nothing more important to worry about.”
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The TikTok garnered nearly half a million likes. There are some parts of the video that I would like to dissect, particularly because the point he was making strayed from being about the social implications of her content to a sense of entitlement. His repeated claims that her cooking is not “real labour” and is tied to her being a trophy wife seemed biased. At the beginning of the video, he mentions how her cooking is “symbolic labour” due to the absence of her showing herself removing a tough stain from an item of clothing. The assumptions that he makes bring up the idea of privacy. Based on the abstaining of showing her children’s faces in her videos (especially since she would in the past), it is evident that she has created boundaries with what she wants to share online. In a time where there is an increase in women exploiting their children on TikTok for views, this is a welcome change.
The notion that she is a trad-wife solely because of things she does not share online reminds me of a Mina Le video she posted recently titled ‘the luxury of privacy & the celebrity vs influencer paradox’. In it, she mentions how the branding that influencers must make for themselves can be “dystopian”. Emma Chamberlain scaling back on YouTube uploads to maintain her physical and mental health is an example of the dangers of parasocial relationships. Le notes that “it is honestly really hard to go from posting a lot to posting a little because people like Emma [Chamberlain] are really good at fostering these parasocial relationships with their followers.”
Comments like those Professor Neil made led to Nara making videos showcasing more of her relationship with Lucky (her husband), as a way to address the criticism. This does beg the question of the influencer’s obligations when it is evident that she enjoys focusing her content primarily on sharing recipes. This is especially in regards to how he describes these videos: “These videos are not instructional. They are maybe aspirational, but they are performative.”
Mormon propaganda?
Though they do not owe us an explanation, one of the videos she posted in response to the criticism involves her showing how she and Lucky share responsibilities. Hence, by definition, it can be deduced that she is not a trad-wife. However, one of the things that she has shared before the controversy is her Mormonism. Both she and Lucky have shared that they are Mormons.
In an article by Emily Matchar who breaks down the Mormon bloggers and why they are fascinating to read, she states: “To read Mormon lifestyle blogs is to peer into a strange and fascinating world where the most fraught issues of modern living -- marriage and child-rearing -- appear completely unproblematic.” Many readers of Natalie Holbrook, a blogger who was interviewed, were 20-something non-LDS women who were college-educated. She explains that in the Latter-Day Saints (LDS) Church, “motherhood is a very important job, and it’s treated with a lot of respect”. This explains why Mormon mothers tend to portray motherhood as easy, joyful, and full of support from their loved ones. Holbrook elaborates that as much as it is important to acknowledge the difficult parts, the positive aspects of life should also be focused on. Matchar mentions “the New Domesticity” which is the growing interest in traditionally female tasks such as sewing, crafts, and jam-making. Based on the description alone, it can be deduced that its equivalent is the “cottagecore” of the 2020s.
Nara Smith, whether or not she is intentionally producing Mormon propaganda, is producing the same response as the aforementioned bloggers of the 2010s. The church’s fall from grace would benefit from her content due to the controversy surrounding its regressive policies regarding abstinence and same-sex marriage. The general reception of Mormonism by Gen Z can be looked at in the comments section of Robert Carpenter’s TikTok videos. He is known for interviewing students at Brigham Young University (BYU) due to their Mormon-majority student body. These videos garner hundreds of thousands of views with the top comments questioning the beliefs of the students.
An article by Amber Rawlings mentions examples of ex-Mormon influencers such as Taylor Paul and Ruby Franke who were arrested for domestic violence and six counts of aggravated child abuse respectively. The need for someone like Nara is evident to reframe the public’s view of Mormonism. She states that Nara operates in a grey area which is both insidious and palatable; her achievement in carving out a space dominated by white women is noteworthy and can be “a kind of remedy to the consumption-driven lifestyles of other influencers. But it also takes a kind of wilful blindness to truly believe that.”
Connection to food through cooking from scratch
No matter your thoughts on Nara Smith, her impact is undeniable. Her influence to help others reconnect with their food could be argued to eclipse many of the controversies. This is especially true since Gen Z, the ‘foodie generation’, feels as though what they eat is a way to communicate their identity and beliefs. By making food themselves, they alleviate the stress and anxiety that comes with accidentally supporting companies that do not correspond with their political views.
A TikTok by Anna (@annathingbutanimals) responds to the discourse surrounding Nara Smith by reframing their frustration with the disconnection from food. She states that “not only is it abnormal to be disconnected from the food that you eat. [That disconnection] is uniquely American.” Further, she mentions that the idea that the labour Nara does is not respectable because her jobs, modelling and now, social media, are considered more feminine.
The disconnection with food is explained in a video created by Alexis Nikole (@blackforager on Instagram) in response to a viral TikTok by @goodluckkarly wherein she reveals that she was not aware that she could pluck fruits from the fruit tree in her backyard. Nikole’s video explains the racist and classist beginnings of what she names, The Big Food Forgetting.
What struck me in that video, in regards to this article, was the impact of grocery stores (and accessible refrigeration) which became a way to signify social differences. A paper by Benjamin Davison titled “Farm to Table: The Supermarket Industry and American Society” explains this phenomenon. People started to gain trust in the supermarket, leading it to be the largest retail sector of the American economy. This became a gateway for Americans to accept and trust new kinds of monopolies.
“The bridge connecting these spaces to the city and suburbs was the supermarket, where the physical items created on farms were transported and consumed. The supermarket not only determined the pace of economic activity but also dictated individual farmers’ decisions about which crops to plant and companies to sell to. By understanding how the supermarket worked as an engine of change for the countryside, remaking industrializing agrarian lives, the political and cultural trajectory of these communities –the embrace of right-wing populism in the early twenty-first century– can be understood as a revolt against a system of political economy that relies on depressing the value of rural labour and products.”
Botanical sexism in American cities also meant that people became detached from their food as male trees were preferable over female trees because of aesthetic reasons; female trees came with ‘tree litter’, codeword for fruits and seeds. This meant that allergies and asthma became more popular due to the increase in pollen produced by male trees.
The detachment that the U.S. have with their food leads to a collective frustration as they see someone like Nara Smith embrace a traditionally feminine task. The divide between a consumer and their food is something that is (arguably) less common in other countries. This is something Anna mentioned in her video as well. In the World Cooking Index of 2021, it was found that North America cooked an average of 6.9 meals a week. In contrast, South-Eastern Asia and the Pacific cooked an average of 7.2 meals a week. The next year, it was found that when ranked based on cooking frequency, the U.S. ranked 72.
It is also noteworthy that she has been open with her journey with eczema and how making food allows her to be more careful with what enters her body. Further, she has used food as an avenue to connect with her German roots as seen through this video where she speaks in German and makes German pancakes.
Final thoughts
From trad-wife rumours to Mormon propaganda allegations, there was a lot of ground to cover regarding the Internet’s response to Nara Smith’s videos. No matter what your thoughts are, I do want to highlight how she has influenced many to start cooking, calling it the ‘Nara Smith Effect’. In the grand scheme of things, this is a huge feat considering the systemic (and capitalistic) ploys to distance people from their food.
