Illustrations by Lucas Burtin

Sometimes I think I became a mother not in a hospital room but in a Trader Joe’s in New York City. It was May 2020. A masked but smizing employee took one look at my stomach and handed me a packet of dark-chocolate peanut-butter cups. “Happy Mother’s Day!” she said. I was pregnant, with twins, during the early months of the pandemic, and all I could think about was food—what to eat and how to acquire it. Once a week I dashed clumsily through the store’s aisles, grabbing cans of beans and bags of apples while trying not to breathe, like a contestant on a postapocalyptic episode of Supermarket Sweep.

Food then was interlaced with a sense of danger, the coronavirus potentially spreading (we worried, absurdly it turned out) even by way of reusable totes. Meanwhile, I knew from my relentless pregnancy apps that what I ate could have monumental implications for my future children’s eating habits. I was scared, and I felt powerless, and food seemed like one of the few things I could control, or at least try to.

[Read: Becoming a parent during the pandemic was the hardest thing I’ve ever done]

What I didn’t yet know was that I was tapping into a deep-rooted tradition—or that, even as I panic-shopped, it was evolving. Mothers are our first food influencers, and for most of history, they have been our primary ones. The process starts even before we’re born, we now know: The tastes we’re exposed to in utero inform the preferences we’ll have much later in life. Culture, “at least when it comes to food, is really just a fancy word for your mother,” Michael Pollan wrote in his best-selling 2008 book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Up until the mid-20th century or so, we humans ate much as our parents did, and their parents before them, and so on: food cooked at home, from fresh ingredients, made predominantly by women.

But a flurry of destabilizing changes followed the Second World War, which had accustomed Americans to mass-produced boxed meals via rations issued to the military. Technological developments on multiple fronts brought prepackaged meals, frozen food, industrialized agriculture, the microwave oven. Marketers were learning how to subliminally manipulate shoppers. Perhaps most significant of all was a shift taking place at home: Women were joining the workforce, happily ceding the task of dinner to Big Food.

[Read: Avoiding ultra-processed foods is completely unrealistic]

By the 2000s, the consequences of all these changes were becoming calamitous. In the 1960s, 13 percent of American adults and about 5 percent of children were obese; by 2005, the number had risen to 35 percent of adults and more than 15 percent of children. Food companies had long since mastered the art of engineering products to encourage mindless overconsumption with every lab-perfected crunch, crisp, and snap. They’d also figured out how to maximize their sway over U.S. food policy, donating to politicians and directly funding scientists. And they did so while decrying as intrusive any efforts to rein in the ruthless lobbying tactics laid bare by the nutritionist and advocate Marion Nestle in her 2002 book, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health.

Nestle, whom The New York Times has called “one of the most influential framers of the modern food movement,” has spent the two decades since then trying to help Americans understand the extent to which the systems that feed them are implicated in sickening them for profit. Big Food, she was among the first to highlight, often bypasses parents to target kids directly using cartoon mascots and promotional collaborations with toy companies. (One of the prized possessions in her archive is an Oreo-themed Barbie doll.) Until recently, Nestle’s war against the Pillsbury Doughboy and Tony the Tiger looked unwinnable, as she observes in her new book, What to Eat Now: The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why It Matters. An update of her 2006 field guide for supermarket shoppers, it demonstrates how lamentably little progress has been made since then.

Supermarkets and supply chains are even more consolidated than they were 20 years ago, and corporations are more empowered, as Nestle writes, “to sell food products no matter what they do to or for your health.” Nearly three-quarters of American adults are now overweight or obese. An array of new products since 2006—oat milk and gluten-free pasta, more global ingredients (gochujang, sumac), plant-based “meats,” CBD-infused everything—has added variety, but also confusion. What counts as healthy? The influx certainly hasn’t halted a rise in consumption of ultra-processed foods (those heavily reliant on industrial ingredients and methods far removed from anything you’d cook at home). They now make up more than half of the average American adult’s diet and two-thirds of what children eat. The food system in America, Nestle explains, produces twice the amount of calories we actually need, while ravaging the environment we can’t survive without. (Industrialized farming results in water and air pollution, soil degradation, deforestation, and a loss of biodiversity.)

But something perplexing has also been happening for half a decade or so now: Once again, patterns of influence over what we eat are being upended. Enabled by social media, certain mothers have been mobilizing, intent on reasserting their authority over mealtime. I wasn’t the only one obsessed with food during the pandemic; something about the confluence of fear, frustration, and way too much time online ignited an impassioned, women-led, influencer-stoked, food-centered movement. A lot of the focus on fresh, homemade meals that this missionary crew has been advocating for has felt familiar—and sensible—to parents like me, dealing with uneaten strips of bell pepper and endless requests for snacks heavy in high-fructose corn syrup. Much has also felt wholly reactionary, rooted not just in the dietary and agricultural traditions of bygone days, but also in old-style gender politics.

The past few years have seen a glut of wellness content about the dangers of seed oils and chemicals, as well as nostalgic imagery disseminated over social media by women labeled “tradwives”: freshly baked bread emerging from a weathered Dutch oven in a lovely country kitchen, cows being milked in bucolic bliss, chubby-cheeked toddlers waddling through vegetable patches. And then “Make America Healthy Again,” a slogan that began life as a winking provocation in a 2016 Sweetgreen ad, morphed into a more politicized mantra among an improbable coalition of personalities who also want milk unpasteurized, food dyes banned, vaccines eliminated—and who also seem to want women re-enshrined in their rightful place in the kitchen.

“Who isn’t a food person these days?” the chef Ruby Tandoh asks in her new essay collection, All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now, surveying a culture in which everybody seems to be “talking about almost nothing else.” What’s striking is that these days, most of us recognize that America’s diet needs an intervention that goes beyond talk—and medication: GLP-1 drugs, however remarkable their effects may be, can’t feed kids. Yet the dramatic showdown between profit-greedy Big Food and proselytizing Big Family is eclipsing a middle ground of parenting pragmatists. Contradictory nutrition advice online drowns out a basic consensus: Experts overwhelmingly agree that a healthy diet still aligns with the same boring guidelines we grew up hearing—eat your fruits and vegetables, avoid ultra-processed (formerly “junk”) foods, limit sugar. How has the discussion become so polarized? And what might it take to actually fix dinner?

We’ve seen politicized food fights before. In the mid-2000s, a harried mother in Chicago, navigating a fast-track, dual-career schedule with her partner, began to rely on quick fixes when feeding her kids: takeout, ready meals, prepackaged snacks. One day, at a routine doctor appointment, she learned that both of her daughters were on the path to becoming overweight, a warning that spurred her to overhaul the way her family was eating. “I was grateful for the time and the effort that I saved with these kinds of products,” Michelle Obama told a gathering of food-business executives in 2010, after she became first lady of the United States. “But I was also completely unaware that all that extra convenience sometimes made it just a little too easy for me to eat too much, for my kids to eat too much, and to eat too often.” She was unprepared, too, for the partisan ruckus that was about to begin.

The chef, advocate, and policy adviser Sam Kass recounts this story in his wide-ranging and pragmatic new book about America’s food failings, The Last Supper: How to Overcome the Coming Food Crisis. Kass was just a few years out of college when he was hired by Obama in 2007 to help improve what and how her family ate at home. He then moved to Washington to work with the first lady on expanding her healthy-eating revolution from a personal goal into a political project. At the time, Kass notes, he’d been radicalized by Pollan and Nestle, who were giving shape to an intellectual, leftish, Berkeley-centric movement advocating for sustainable food production and more health-oriented food policies: “I shopped at farmers markets. I ate organic. My beef was grass fed. I thought that everyone should eat that way.” He arrived in the capital, he writes, “ready to decisively take on Big Ag—until reality reared its ugly head.”

In February 2010, Obama announced her first major initiative as first lady: Let’s Move, a public-health campaign aimed at lowering childhood-obesity rates in the U.S. Improving the nutritional quality of school meals nationwide was a centerpiece; for children living in poverty, those breakfasts and lunches could be their main source of sustenance. Conservatives instantly caught the scent of a culture war. Figures such as Sarah Palin and Fox News’s Glenn Beck regularly fulminated against nanny statism and accused the Obamas of trying to overrule the sacred rights of American parents.

Some of the backlash was bipartisan. When Kass tried to eliminate a policy that offered White House employees free Coke—after all, the administration was trying to get the nation to drink less of it—Michelle Obama’s deputy chief of staff responded, “Over my dead body.” And when Kass and the first lady spearheaded a national campaign to get people to drink more water, they were criticized by some of their public-health allies—Nestle among them—for not considering the environmental impact of plastic bottles.

The uproar, in retrospect, is illuminating. Food is deeply personal. Our natural response to being told what to eat is defensive: We tend to be attached to the foods we associate with family, comfort, and care. Obama had presumed that the straightforward changes that had worked for her family might benefit the wider public—and to her credit, she aimed to provide healthier meals for all American children, through broad institutional reform. Kass cites a study showing that the odds of poor children developing obesity would have been about 50 percent higher without the school-meal interventions. Crucially, though, childhood obesity was soon rising again. And Let’s Move, rather than surging in popularity, was cast as elitist coercion, and Obama as the mean mommy forcing America to finish its vegetables.

[Read: RFK Jr. is repeating Michelle Obama’s mistakes]

In hindsight, Kass concludes, almost nothing Let’s Move could have suggested would have pleased conservatives at the time. But he also infers that the biggest failure of Let’s Move was one of communication. If you come across as instructing people on what to eat or, especially, what not to eat, you’re more likely to prompt a raised middle finger than compliance. Slide gracefully into people’s subconscious by enlisting the power of suggestion—visually presenting healthier products in a way that elicits an emotional response, say, or evokes a sense of home or prosperity—and you can help an idea take hold. There’s a reason the MAHA movement caught fire as social-media use escalated. “Marketers will tell you this,” Kass writes: “When you are trying to shift culture, seek out the influencers.”

Illustration by Lucas Burtin

One thing that Big Food, and now MAHA moms, understands is that what we see fundamentally affects our attitudes about what we eat. In 2010, the same year that the Obamas were hustling to pass the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, two software engineers debuted a photo-sharing app that they named Instagram, unwittingly ushering in a new hyper-visual food era of “serial virality,” as Tandoh puts it. Three years later, when the French pastry chef Dominique Ansel debuted the cronut (a hybrid of French patisserie and American deep fat frying), Instagram had 100 million users, many of whom responded to photos of his concoction with ravenous abandon. “People just shared the cronut, a platonic torus of golden dough with a sugar-salt-fat ratio to please the gods,” Tandoh writes. “Instead of spreading person to person through word of mouth, it spread exponentially, like a contagion.”

The cronut wasn’t remotely healthy, but it was totemic of food trends in the 2010s, as community bonding through photo sharing took off. While the Affordable Care Act fueled attacks on Democrats as the party of Big Health Care, an alternative subculture was gaining momentum. In September 2008, the Oscar-winning actor Gwyneth Paltrow launched Goop, a newsletter of recipes and recommendations intended to foster—and eventually monetize—a more intimate relationship with her fans.

Paltrow, who had lost her father to cancer, was now the mother of two young children, and believed passionately in the connection between food and health. “I am convinced that by eating biological foods it is possible to avoid the growth of tumors,” she told an Italian newspaper, drawing fierce pushback from doctors and dieticians—but not from her audience. Paltrow seemed to intuit the mood of many women in the aftermath of the Great Recession: their concerns, their exhaustion, their eagerness for an escape from their own cramped kitchens offered by images of delightfully wholesome domesticity. Goop gave an air of both glamour and accessibility to the kind of alternative lifestyle that had previously existed only on the crunchy fringes.

[Read: The baffling rise of Goop]

Since Goop’s debut, the wellness market has ballooned and is now worth more than $6 trillion, with the U.S. making up about a third of that figure. Paltrow’s association of food with health helped instill in people’s minds a connection between what they ate and how they felt. “I would rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a can,” she told an interviewer in 2011. And mothers were especially vulnerable to this messaging. We worry endlessly; we (traditionally) manage doctor appointments and household budgets, to the tune of an estimated $2 trillion a year in America.

Over the course of the 2010s, even as the Alice Waters–inspired farm-to-table cause of the 1980s was enjoying a boost from Pollan and company, a different cottage industry of food and wellness advocates gained influence online. It tapped into valid concerns about health in America, while also hyping fearful ideas about a contaminated state of modernity (ridden with parasites, carcinogens, and GMOs, as well as vaccines and prescription drugs). Zen Honeycutt, a pro-organic-farming and anti-vaccine activist—now one of many mom acolytes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—founded the pressure group Moms Across America in 2012. “We, the mothers who buy 85% of the food and we women who make 90% of household purchasing decisions, have the power to shift the marketplace and protect our people and the planet,” the group’s website proclaims.

In 2020, amid the anxiety and embattled politics of the pandemic, the 21st century’s wellness fads, paranoid tendencies, and regressive gender dynamics consolidated. The horseshoe gap between leftist naturopaths and libertarian farmsteaders began to close, enabled by health influencers, podcasters, and the cheap thrill of algorithmic engagement. Today, the people most likely to be advocating online for slow food are homesteaders and tradwives, canny content creators who post reels of themselves churning butter and pulling dirt-dusted produce out of the soil.

Yet you don’t have to be a homesteader to be anxious about the food systems and environments that your children grow up in. Many of us parents have been buying organic and baking from scratch and trying to get creamed spinach off upholstery since our kids were born. We give them whisks and make cooking time part of family time, and do our best to serve them fresh, colorful meals. Though we may rarely live up to Waters’s edict about lovely food preparation and presentation—“Beauty is a language of care,” as she writes in her new book, A School Lunch Revolution—there’s always the joy of messy participation.

What few of us have is the tradwife’s luxury of retreating to the Instagrammed home, of opting out of an external reality where food conglomerates go unchecked and food deserts unchanged. “Don’t overcomplicate it,” the homesteader known online as Greenview Farms posted this summer, in text overlaying a video of a sunset. “Just marry your best friend, have his babies, spend your days on the land, plant a garden, get a few chickens and a cow, and live a simple life.” (This surfaced in my feed, shared approvingly by a distant relative, a woman who—for the record—works in finance.)

[Read: The wellness women are on the march]

If you overlook the very real public-health ramifications of vaccine hesitancy and raw milk, the rise of the MAHA movement might offer some promise. Trump “sounds just like me when he talks!” Marion Nestle exclaimed back in February, laughing at the absurdity of a hard-core McDonald’s eater railing against “the industrial food complex.” RFK Jr. and his merry band of mothers have, if nothing else, made the importance of good food in encouraging good health more prominent in our culture, and more bipartisan.

But unlike, say, Michelle Obama, MAHA proselytizers simply want moms to take on more responsibility, turning what should be a multifaceted effort into an atomized, individualistic one. The onus isn’t on the administration to regulate food companies or restrict marketing to children. It is on mothers to obsess over what their families are eating.

[Olga Khazan: Doomed to be a tradwife]

The irony is that plenty of parents who don’t dream of returning to the land are already on board for back-to-basics meals, made as manageable as possible. The Instagram account for Feeding Littles, which gives guidance on how to raise “adventurous, intuitive eaters,” has 1.9 million followers. The most popular Substack newsletter under the category of food and drink is titled “What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking”; it dishes out quick, practical recipes oriented toward exhausted parents and has more than half a million subscribers. We care not just because we’re fixated on health, or on our own homes. We’re also reminding ourselves, and showing our kids, that eating is more than a solo need; it’s a communal enterprise, one that thrives on dealing as carefully and fairly with food resources as we can. “You eat. Willingly or not you participate in the environment of food choice,” Nestle writes toward the end of her new book. “The choices you make about food are as much about the kind of world you want to live in as they are about what to have for lunch.”

This article appears in the January 2026 print edition with the headline “What’s for Dinner, Mom?”

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed