Tradwives, MAHA Moms and the impacts of “radical homemaking”

As a fly on the wall to what tradwives — modern influencers projecting a traditional vision of homemaking — serve up on social media, I appreciate the range of entertainment they provide. There’s the schadenfreude of watching Meghan Markle (@meghan) — cast as a tradwife by media critics thanks to the domestic gloss of her Netflix show — fumble canning tongs, even as she peddles preserves for purchase. Then there’s the absurdity of Nara Smith (@naraaziza) concocting homemade cough drops in a white Rodarte silk dress, and the genuinely compelling pull of Hannah Neeleman’s @BallerinaFarm — a glow-drenched homesteading feed that pairs beauty-queen polish with milking goats, tending overgrown gardens and dimpling focaccia at sunrise.

Sensing my amusement, the algorithm keeps these domestic goddesses in steady rotation. Tradwife routines echo everyone from the mid-century housewife to the radical homemaker of the 2010s, and even the ethos of today’s MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) Mom. While they often gesture toward traditional gender roles, nostalgia for pre-industrial simplicity and other conservative values, food is an equally potent portal into their worldview. The Guardian notes that this purposeful retreat into home is often cast as a response to institutional shortcomings, rooted in the belief that contemporary food regulation is too entangled with industry influence — namely Big Ag and Big Food — to keep families safe from hidden harms like preservatives and pesticide residues. What better badge of homemaking than keeping your family hale and hearty on your own terms?

Using food to signal virtue

With nearly 87,000 tradwife influencer accounts identified by ClickAnalytic in October 2024 — and more than 309 million TikTok views on the hashtag #tradwife — there is no shortage of curious onlookers ready to take a bite of their righteous-eating gospel. According to Charlotte Biltekoff, the author of “Eating Right in America” and an associate professor of food science and technology at University of California, Davis, tradwives are just the latest interpreters of a well-established American tradition that uses food to signal virtue.

“We have a long history of dietary advice and principles expressing social and moral ideals,” says Biltekoff. “When we talk about eating right, or good eaters, there’s always a dimension tied to identity and status.” These moral hierarchies span the Progressive Era’s sanitized cooking, the low-fat craze of the 1980s, and the early-2000s rise of organics as responsible consumer behavior.

But where there are standards for eating “right,” someone will always feel they’re doing it “wrong,” a familiar social media script that runs headlong into the tradwives’ ingredient-driven adventures in cooking. Neeleman, a Juilliard-trained ballerina who married into the JetBlue-founding family, runs a growing Ballerina Farm operation — including an e-commerce shop and, since June 2025, a brick-and-mortar in Midway, Utah — while turning out sheep’s-milk feta the size of a volleyball and hearty family meals like lamb stroganoff with homemade pasta. For her part, Smith is a working model and mom of four with brand partnerships (including a recent one with Algae Cooking Club), building her own business ecosystem behind the camera even as she churns butter for a steak pie “girl dinner” — either she didn’t get the memo about the viral, no-cook trend, or the joke’s on us. And viewers have already flagged a certain someone’s fruit preserving and edible-flower–sprinkled eggs as more performative than practiced. Taken together, these scenes reveal the real tension: The image of effortless domesticity rests on a foundation of exceptional resources and off-camera support, making the “right way to cook” a standard most viewers could never realistically match.

“It is a privilege to have the time, the access, the wealth,” Biltekoff notes, “and creating an ideal that requires that kind of status creates inequity.” Nowhere is that clearer than in the tradwife kitchen, where breezy videos mask time and labor most people can’t spare. Taking their homemaking reels and TikToks as anything more than entertainment risks turning the wholesome act of making dinner for yourself and your family — one study linked frequent home-cooked meals to 28 percent lower odds of being overweight — into an ideal so out of reach it snuffs the impulse to try.

“Some women try on the tradwife identity but ultimately exit, because the performance takes time away from the actual work,” says Rebecca Stotzer, a University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa social work scholar who studied tradwives for two research papers published in 2025. Influencers, of course, are the exception — their work is the performance.​​ For viewers put off by the privilege surrounding the genre’s most prominent figures, tradwives like Gretchen Adler (@gretchy) and Estee Williams (@mrsestherwilliams) offer a whole-foods lifestyle that can look more accessible — even if it’s still ambitious.

While Williams’s photos of home-cooking — borscht, chana masala, venison Swedish meatballs, wild-turkey schnitzel — lack that signature tradwife food-stylist flair, the range suggests a full-spectrum palate and a genuine appreciation for game meats and global cuisines, the kind of dietary diversity that nutrition researchers have linked to better overall health and even lower mortality risk. A stay-at-home mother married to a blue-collar worker, she folds her cooking into a broader message that’s decidedly pro-femininity and misguidedly anti-feminism. Exhibit A: Growing her platform is a version of the girl-boss entrepreneurship her corner of trad culture claims to reject — a contradiction noted by an op-ed in Vogue and many other publications observing the trad movement’s aversion to hustle culture and career ambition. And how’s this for a mic drop–worthy Exhibit B: “Tradwives don’t seem to grasp that the ability to choose the life they want is itself a feminist achievement,” says Stotzer.

Often likened to Marilyn Monroe, Williams presents her whole-foods diet as one of the ways she puts “extra effort” into her appearance since, she says, “men are visual.” Stotzer confirms, “The nostalgia of tradwives is intentional — they’re tapping into purity, femininity and traditional domestic roles, packaged in a highly aesthetic way that performs well online.” Even with a modest platform, that aesthetic becomes a delivery system — the sugar that makes the medicine go down, if you will — and blurs the line between relatable cooking content and the ideological currents swirling around it. Williams often finds her audience with hashtags like #tradwife and #cookforyourman, while Adler has tagged #maha a few times. Though neither is explicitly pushing policy, research on tradwife algorithms shows that once you’re in the slipstream, it takes roughly 22 minutes before the content turns more political.

MAHA Moms have entered the chat

Kraus, who has four kids, writes a newsletter called House Inhabit, delivering MAHA-inflected dispatches — often from the bowels of Capitol Hill — to nearly half a million Substack subscribers and 1.3 million followers of her Instagram account, @houseinhabit. She’s covered everything from the “War on Artificial Food Dyes” to one man’s skepticism of endangered-species protections: “The buffalos we vowed to protect in the ’90s are now high-priced burgers sold at Whole Foods” — a quippy illustration of MAHA’s broader distrust of the institutions that shape our food landscape, and a reminder of how easily the nuances of buffalo conservation get flattened. The mix is threaded with the deeper dives Kraus platforms, including obesity expert Dr. Jessica Duncan’s push for medical schools to teach nutrition, noting that most physicians get almost no training in the subject despite poor diet being one of the largest risk factors for chronic disease.

No matter what side of the political aisle you lean toward, if any, MAHA’s partisan thrust and influencer-level reach has propelled legitimate questions about food reform to the masses — the kind that, in earlier decades, languished mostly in crunchy-leftie circles. But that megaphone also sweeps misinformation into the mix. Take seed oils: Despite the frenzy, research shows that there’s nothing inherently harmful about the oils themselves, the real concern is the fried and ultraprocessed foods they make possible, thanks to their low cost and high smoke point. According to Reason Magazine, some health-conscious women are “accepting the ‘MAHA Moms’ label… simply because they’re concerned about things like food dyes … and don’t understand how these issues got so politically charged.” For what it’s worth, the color-saturation trickery of synthetic dyes — first mass-produced in the mid-1800s to mask inferior foods, not unlike the junk fare that MAHA wants to restrict from SNAP benefits — has drawn criticism for more than a century, long before MAHA gave the issue new life.

Lifestyle or livelihood?

Her version of homemaking is braided into the local economy through CSA shares, bartering networks and a once-a-week farm café that doubles as a community hub. “If somebody needs to find someone, they know to come to the café on Saturdays,” she says. Her food reflects that same homegrown ethos: omelets with pasture-raised eggs and local cheese, hearty soups like cream of wild turkey with butternut squash, salads pulled from farm beds, croissants that take three days to make, bacon and sausage from pigs that she and her family raise and process themselves. An honor market ensures that if someone in the community needs a frozen homemade meal outside of business hours, they can get it. No one in Hayes’s immediate vicinity will go hungry, not if she can help it.

But when I ask her what’s so wrong with making homemade bread for the camera, especially since the loaf will still nourish whoever needs it after filming wraps, she says the lens flips the intention: “If I’m baking bread, I’m doing it because I want to feed my family and have a quiet day at home, not because I want to capture a quiet day so that I can get 17,000 likes.” Put another way: The “innate intimacy,” as she calls it, that happens when people come together for a meal is replaced by the “innate competitiveness” that rises in the drive for likes and followers.

This is where the feeds of Ballerina Farm and Sap Bush Hollow diverge — Hayes’s work serves the people right in front of her, not a global audience of admirers and voyeurs. “One’s a career choice and the other’s a lifestyle choice,” says Hayes. “I don’t know what being an influencer has to do with being a member of a family or a community.”

Still, that doesn’t mean online communities are empty. Stotzer says that for many of the tradwives she studied — 60 in all, for the paper examining the allure of becoming a tradwife — social platforms were “a way to connect with other women in similar lifestyles, where the food was absolutely a way of bringing people together.” Need a cooking hack, take a cooking hack; seek a recipe, find a recipe. And even at the top of the tradwife hierarchy, there are scenes of genuine camaraderie — Neeleman and Smith have posted a couple of days at Ballerina Farm together, maybe for the simple pleasure of two friends sharing a kitchen, or maybe just some calculated brand cross-pollination for all the world to see. In an internet age that splinters attention and wedges people apart, food can still be common ground: Sustenance is universal, even if almost everything else about it is not.

But for Hayes, even that truth has its limits. She returns, as always, to the life right in front of her — which has only moved forward, as she puts it, “one wonder after the next,” by keeping her focus close to home. That way, her sense of value isn’t dictated by analytics. “The real success,” she says, “must be measured against how you feel at the end of the day and how you feel when you wake up in the morning.”

Top photo by Cavan/Adobe Stock