There’s a Philip Larkin poem I love that begins, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.” Those lines have played on a loop in my head ever since I was clued in to the existence of the almond mom, a parent who lives to deny her progeny access to genuinely good food, instead advising that they “just snack on a few almonds until your hunger goes away!”
As a fat person, I’m used to dealing with weird looks every time I summon the audacity to eat a bagel in public, and while I’m all too happy to internet-rage about the kind of people who randomly care what strangers eat (get a life!), and take on any fatphobic doctor who crosses my path, I have to admit that the TikTok-born almond-mom discourse is a little harder for me to get on board with. I can’t help feeling like mothers are getting a bit of a raw deal—as they so often do, even in 2024.
The #almondmom hashtag has accrued millions of TikTok views, and on its surface, the backlash makes total sense. “‘Almond moms’ set their children up to be obsessed with food and their bodies in ways that are toxic and extremely harmful,” an eating-disorder specialist told Teen Vogue last year. Kids have every right to push back against the insidious, diet-culture-derived messaging they’re fed online (or elsewhere)—especially when the person doing the feeding is their literal parent.
But I can’t help wondering: How many mothers (or, indeed, how many people) in our society have actually been able to internalize that food doesn’t represent a threat, and that being fat is just another thing you can be—an identity that doesn’t have to come laced with shame? And if our mothers weren’t given that message, can we really blame them for not passing it down to us?
I didn’t have an almond mom, per se, but I did have its cultural antecedent, the “Snackwells mom.” My own mother may have succumbed to the diet-snack-food craze of the early aughts, but she understood pretty early on that I wasn’t particularly interested in discussing food or body size with her. As such, over the years she’s mostly left me alone about my weight and what I eat (something that I’m insanely grateful for when, say, I see a perfectly manicured woman at Starbucks hissing at her elementary-school-aged child that the hot chocolate she’s begging for “has too many calories”). Still, it probably wasn’t realistic to expect my mom to shield me from the world’s obsession with thinness, especially when she wasn’t immune to it herself.