A few weeks ago on X, a picture of a mother with her child, maybe five or six years old, in a baby carrier on her back, broke containment from a Facebook group for “crunchy” moms. When asked why such a grown child would be in a baby carrier, the mother clarified, for lack of a better word, that “he's not special needs[,] he just likes being carried because it's ‘sentimental and nostalgic.’” For anyone with any familiarity about how these groups can operate, the image was unsurprising.

For the uninitiated: the term “crunchy” has been used to refer to people who prefer naturalistic lifestyle choices (cuisine, hygiene) since about the nineties, a riff on the popularity of granola at the time. Women especially, from Erewhon MAHA mommies to genderqueer anarchocommunist doulas, are attracted to the Crunch. Crunchy mamas claim babywearing, cosleeping, breastfeeding, home/free birthing, and abstaining from vaccinations and most medications. When it comes to education and formation, they tend to subscribe to deconstructed forms, the most radical iteration being “unschooling.”

To inhabit the crunchy identity to the fullest is to advocate for a return to what is presented as a more primitive and therefore more true, good, and honest way of living, where only instinct is needed to guide decision making. Crunchy logic dictates that most social, political, and psychological problems in society come down to the artificial interventions of formal civilization, which stifle the human spirit by disrupting instinct and attachment. It is taken for granted that most modern institutions emerged not out of necessity but of a cynical conspiracy to enslave. The set of claims is made plausible by the entrenched and frequently abusive practices of these pillars of our modern society, the institutional fronts of our modern oligarchy: medicine, finance, education, technology, and agriculture.

It’s always been a meme, as a cultural artifact passed from one person to the next by imitation, but over the past few years, like so many things, “crunchy” has been pressed through the internet's meatgrinder. What was once a more vague orientation or aesthetic has become a veritable ideological program and sociopolitical identity, a package deal of priors, complete with its own internally self-policing communities, including, of course, “crunchy mama” Facebook groups.

It’s a spectrum, one where I still find myself. I like raw milk, and I believe it’s done wonders for my skin. I am skeptical about the relationship between Big Ag and our food companies. RFK makes good points about atrazine. But I am beginning to sense a similar irony in the crunchy mama identity as I see in the “trad” movement generally, which has become a theme in my recent essays: the pretense of radical diversion from the “norm,” especially in the context of the internet, often conceals the very same spirit against which it purports to rebel.

Christians, out of the desire to be antimodern warrior-crusaders, become internet-addicted, ledger-keeping legalists. Tradwives, out of the desire to countersignal careerism, nurture robust careers in social media. Freebirth advocates, out of the desire to trade medical paternalism for naturalism, forget the true meaning of “nature” and indulge a special condescension of their own toward women who give birth in hospitals.

The apotheosis of a “crunchy mama,” in the desire to liberate herself and her children from the impositions and expectations of modern civilization, has shackled herself to the vicissitudes of something worse: sentimentalism, as well as the consuming desire for control over one’s life.

Ask me how I know.

I became a first-time mother in 2020, when obstetrics in the hospital system was truly a dystopian nightmare. I remember the stickers on the floor of the waiting rooms reminding patients to stay a “healthy” six feet apart. The stickers were unnecessary; there were no other patients, only me and the ambient noise of medical machinery. My husband wasn’t allowed in the building. The nurses preempted their greetings by pointing a distance thermometer at my forehead, execution-style.