There’s a Philip Larkin poem I really like that begins, “They fuck you up, your mum and pa. They could not imply to, however they do. They fill you with the faults they’d / And add some further, only for you.” These traces have performed on a loop in my head ever since I used to be clued in to the existence of the almond mother, a mother or father who lives to disclaim her progeny entry to genuinely good meals, as an alternative advising that they “simply snack on a number of almonds till your starvation goes away!”

As a fats individual, I’m used to coping with bizarre appears to be like each time I summon the audacity to eat a bagel in public, and whereas I’m all too pleased to Web-rage in regards to the type of people that randomly care what strangers eat (get a life!), and tackle any fatphobic physician who crosses my path, I’ve to confess that the TikTok-born almond-mom discourse is a little bit tougher for me to get on board with. I can’t assist feeling like moms are getting a little bit of a uncooked deal—as they so usually do, even in 2024.

The #almondmom hashtag has accrued hundreds of thousands of TikTok views, and on its floor, the backlash makes whole sense. “‘Almond mothers’ set their kids as much as be obsessive about meals and their our bodies in methods which might be poisonous and intensely dangerous,” an eating-disorder specialist advised Teen Vogue final 12 months. Youngsters have each proper to push again towards the insidious, diet-culture-derived messaging they’re fed on-line (or elsewhere)—particularly when the individual doing the feeding is their literal mother or father. 

However I can’t assist questioning: What number of moms (or, certainly, how many individuals) in our society have truly been capable of internalize that meals doesn’t signify a risk, and that being fats is simply one other factor you will be—an identification that doesn’t have to return laced with disgrace? And if our moms weren’t on condition that message, can we actually blame them for not passing it all the way down to us?

I didn’t have an almond mother, per se, however I did have its cultural antecedent, the “Snackwells mother.” My very own mom could have succumbed to the diet-snack-food craze of the early aughts, however she understood fairly early on that I wasn’t significantly involved in discussing meals or physique dimension together with her. As such, over time she’s principally left me alone about my weight and what I eat (one thing that I’m insanely grateful for when, say, I see a superbly manicured girl at Starbucks hissing at her elementary-school-aged little one that the new chocolate she’s begging for “has too many energy”). Nonetheless, it most likely wasn’t life like to anticipate my mother to protect me from the world’s obsession with thinness, particularly when she wasn’t resistant to it herself.