I don’t know why the TikTok algorithm started feeding me Nara Smith videos.
It could be because I follow a lot of fashion accounts, and Smith is a working model often dressed in runway looks in her videos.
It could be because the two of us are culturally adjacent — she’s married to Lucky Blue Smith, a model from a large Utah family, and she’s sometimes seen reading the Book of Mormon in her videos.
But I think most likely it’s because I, like Nara Smith, love cooking, and Smith is known for her cooking content. Her videos feature Smith dressed to the nines in her pristine kitchen, speaking in dulcet tones as she makes food for her family from scratch. As in, baking the Oreos for homemade Oreo ice cream from scratch. Making butter from cream scratch. Roasting and grinding hazelnuts for her version of Nutella, while wearing head to toe Chanel, from scratch.
Her videos are absurd, hilarious, aspirational and mesmerizing, and they’ve gained her 7.2 million followers on TikTok, 3.3 million followers on Instagram, and over 38,000 Substack subscribers. I’ve watched every single video, multiple times.
But as with any internet personality who amasses such a large following, Smith has her detractors. The most common of the criticisms is that she is promoting a “tradwife” lifestyle.
A tradwife, as the term is commonly understood, is a woman on social media who promotes traditional household roles wherein the husband is the sole provider for the family while the wife cares for the children and the home. Debating whether this lifestyle is good or bad is not a conversation I want to have. But I will say that calling Nara Smith a tradwife is a complete mischaracterization.
Often, tradwives will label themselves as such and use their platform to encourage others to adopt their way of life. Nara Smith has not and does not do either of those things. So I’m confused when in think piece after think piece she’s categorized as a tradwife. She has had a career in the modeling industry since she was 14 years old, she earns an income from her sponsored posts, and it appears that Lucky Blue is actively involved in raising their three children: Rumble Honey, Slim Easy and Whimsy Lou. (Yes, those are their real names, and yes, those are names you can only give to children who are pretty much guaranteed to be gorgeous.)
So why all the fuss?
I think it might be the way Nara Smith introduces the meals she’s preparing — in the context of caring for her family — that triggers the tradwife response. She’ll often start a video by saying things like, “Lucky was on his way out the door to grab a burger, but I realized I had the ingredients to make him one at home,” then proceed to mix yeast, water and flour for the hamburger bun. In one video she says, “Today my toddlers wanted cereal for breakfast again, so I decided to make some Cinnamon Toast Crunch.” A full mixing, baking and cooling cycle later she’s seen pouring milk over the completed cinnamon squares.
I do not think Smith is making her children wait hours for a bowl of cereal. I do not believe anyone with any semblance of media literacy believes that. Nor do I think Smith is spending her entire day in the kitchen preparing meals for her family. She posts two to three cooking videos a week, interspersed with sponsored posts. She’s likely developed a content and filming schedule just like any other professional influencer.
What I do believe is that Smith wants to make food her family will eat and love, just like every other home cook, and that creating these meals entirely from scratch is a fun hobby for her, as it is for me. There’s nothing I love more than spending my weekend taking on an ambitious baking project like croissants or macaroons, or preparing an elaborate meal to share with my loved ones. Food is my love language, and preparing and sharing it is enjoyable both for me and, I hope, for the others eating it. The only reason I’m not posting about the process like Nara is because I don’t have her aesthetics. If I did, I would hope to be able to turn it into the kind of lucrative endeavor she has.
Similarly, in a video from 2023 Smith explained, “I enjoy taking care of people by cooking for them. This is not something that is expected of me or something that I have to do.”
If Smith were prescriptive about the merits of spending one’s days in the kitchen serving a husband, I think a robust debate about her content would be in order. But she’s being categorized as something she never claimed to be, just for doing something that she loves on camera.
And I also can’t help but wonder how the response would be different if it weren’t Nara Smith, but a man showing off the food he’s prepared for his family in his pristine kitchen.
My TikTok feed is mostly cooking videos, since the algorithm has learned these are the videos I like best. Many of these videos are of men in their kitchens, preparing meals from scratch, then eating the meals alone. Few are as impressive as Nara Smith’s. The only real difference is that in her videos, she’s explaining who she’s making her food for.
Nara Smith has gained a following from scratch, and it’s not because she’s telling anyone how to live their life. It’s because she’s fun to watch, her beauty is captivating, and her food looks great. She turned what she loves to do into a career, which is the exact opposite of the tradwife lifestyle that she is accused of promoting. As eager as the internet seems to be to categorize her content, she defies categorization as a woman blazing her own career path as a mom, wife and world-class cook. Here’s hoping we all get a slice of that kind of fulfillment.