Don't Trad On Me

Fantasy or aspiration?

I recently read this interesting piece in The Baffler, a boutique magazine that describes itself as “America’s leading voice of interesting and unexpected left-wing political criticism, cultural analysis, short stories, poems, and art.” At least one of those descriptors is accurate.

This is a piece about Hannah Neeleman, the housewife of Ballerina Farm, who exists—though she apparently doesn’t use the term herself—within the “tradwife” universe. She’s a Mormon and lives on a ranch in Utah, used to be a beauty queen, and married a wealthy businessman, which is part of why she can afford to be a homemaker on a ranch.

The piece describes one of her videos:

The woman dices onions, garlic. She pours breadcrumbs into another jar, stirs in fresh cream. She sautés the onions in butter, puts a mound of ground beef in a bowl, pours the soggy breadcrumbs over it, and cracks in two eggs with yolks so golden they’re almost orange. She chops fresh basil, then grinds in some pepper and mixes it all together with a wooden whisk. She opens another glass jar—this one full of tomato sauce, almost certainly homemade—and empties its contents into a cast-iron pan. The woman shapes the beef into seventeen fist-sized balls and plops them into the sauce one by one, sprinkling Parmesan on top. She puts the pan into a rustic green oven.

That’s just one of several steps, and this is just lunch. The final product of this intense cooking session is what we call in New Jersey a meatball hero. That’s a lot of work for a meatball hero, although I suppose there aren’t many places in remote Utah to order one.

Just like its preparation, the consumption of the meatball sub was a family effort. The couple in this video, Hannah and Daniel Neeleman, live on a 328-acre ranch in Kamas, Utah, with their seven children. The milk used to make the mozzarella came from one of their dairy cows, the ground beef from their herd of Angus cattle, the eggs from their chicken coop, and the basil from their garden. Hannah milks the cows, and Daniel raises the animals, while their sons and daughters help out with farm chores and collect the eggs every morning. Daniel butchers the meat, and Hannah cooks it. The family always eats together.

The funny thing about this tradwife stuff—women who become online influencers or online celebrities by leaning into traditional housewifery—is how much it’s a function of social media and the internet. There’s an irreducible element of attention-seeking in it, despite the fact that you’d think a genuine housewife would have no time to produce or promote online content. You can swap in a lot of other things for “genuine housewife” in that sentence, by the way.

I get and to some extent share the critiques of this little cottage industry. Yet it’s kind of uncanny to read these lefty articles where people snicker at making every meal from scratch or baking your own bread while your children watch. That’s how I grew up. I can just remember sitting near, or maybe on, the kitchen counter while my mother measured flour and water. (She’d let me pour it sometimes, but I had a propensity to pour it from as high up as possible and produce a mushroom cloud of flour.) I probably learned my enthusiasm for cooking from that childhood.

We mostly ate home-cooked food, and I can barely recall a single evening when we didn’t all sit down and share the same meal. It’s so weird to me to see “The family always eats together” subtly mocked, listed alongside making homemade mozzarella, as if it were rarified or exotic or even somehow slightly suspicious. Maybe, statistically, it is not common. But I’ve got to think, or hope, that if a family sitting down to dinner every night is a little odd to you, your world is very small.

My wife and I do the same thing as I did growing up, and we’ll pass that on to our kids one day. Her father made dinner from scratch most nights. Junk food and packaged food, or shortcut meals like peanut butter and jelly, barely exist in her view of food. That has much more to do with the food culture she inherited growing up in China than it does with snobbery. “Problematizing” this—making smoke while claiming there’s no particular fire—is intellectually cheap, the empty calories of discourse.

Just about every night, I make a fresh vegetable—chop, rinse, fry with olive oil, salt, and fresh garlic. Then what’s now called a “protein.” A chicken-and-pasta dish? Slice the chicken breast, coat it with flour, fry it, add the sauce, boil the pasta, finish the pasta in the sauce. Stir fry? Prepping and marinating meat (soak in baking soda, rinse, velvet, pre-fry before finishing in the wok, making sauce, pulling out the cast-iron wok).

There are things that make all this easier: a rice cooker, a stove with a convection oven and quick-boil burner (it came with the house, but it’s great), a very good set of knives that costs a lot but which you buy once forever (my wife bought them for me). But it is a lot of work, and I’m aware of how much time I spend on food and associated tasks compared to most other people. Add the seven kids the Neelemans have? For most people, fuhgeddaboudit.

But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think we lost a lot when we started sneering at homemaking and home economics. These are actually life skills—like paying taxes, setting budgets, knowing some basic home maintenance—whatever socio-political gloss you or someone else overlays on them. I guess I’d say something like homemaking is too important to leave to the tradwives.

Maybe I was a tradwife before it was cool.

This online caricature, whether drawn by critics or influencers, is sort of real life through a funhouse mirror—not lies, so much as myth, or aspiration. I see wistfulness and yearning more than deception or sleight of hand. Who hasn’t imagined some kind of family feast out by a farmhouse, like the first Thanksgiving? Who doesn’t dream of having the time to make bread or broth from scratch, from ingredients from a local farm? Of being, in some way, forced to be content? Of imbuing the dreariness of housework with something like metaphysical significance? Maybe fewer people than I think.

The Baffler piece dubs it “pioneer burlesque” and based on “lies of omission,” mostly to do with the family’s wealth. Then again, pick up any food or wine magazine and you’ll see photos and stories that reflect the lives of very few everyday Americans. It’s hard not to conclude that it’s not so much the class privilege as it is the faith and social conservatism embodied in the “tradwife” which bothers many critics.

Unlike her foremothers, Hannah does this all by choice. For the Neelemans, living off the land is a point of pride, not a requirement for survival.

This wasn’t the case for the “farm wives of yesteryear,” whose lives were often miserable.

Well, yes. Everyone’s lives were often miserable before refrigeration and air conditioning and supermarkets and modern medicine and maybe even the automobile. And yes, women got the short end of the stick. But this is that problematizing. There’s no actual argument here, just the notion that…what? We shouldn’t choose to do what our forebears couldn’t choose not to do? I don’t really know what this critique amounts to.

These types of progressives almost reminds me of the modernist Catholics who defended ugly church architecture by saying things like, well, the Crucifixion was ugly. A little bit of mythology never hurt anybody. A little bit of aspiration is a good thing.

It also makes me think of a shirt I saw once: “I’m a feminist because I choose to be in the kitchen.”

You got a problem with that?

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Related Reading:

It’s Only New Once

Kitchen Contentment

The Restaurant Vs. The Supermarket

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