It all started with a video of a woman making her own cheese.
I have no idea how, but at some point last year, my screen-swiping finger led me down one of the internet’s more fermented rabbit holes. That’s right: I got it into my head that I’d like to try to make cheese. Sour my own milk. Queso my own fresco, if you will. And suddenly, I was in my kitchen, watching a woman with a blonde ponytail making mozzarella from scratch beside a green Aga range. But what struck me more than her skills with dairy were her children. Crowds of them—with their own blond hair and subtle pastel outfits and cherubic smiles—started coming in and out of shot, tugging at her waist and playing with her measuring spoons.
I blinked. I was having the inverse of an experience my Irish Catholic friend once had while watching Delia Smith on TV in his youth. Seeing Delia, apparently alone in a big house, cooking food without any children to feed it to, he started to feel uneasy. Who was this woman? Where were her kids? Who was she baking for? Was she a witch? Only in my case, with my single child on the sofa next door reading Garfield, I started to wonder… Who was this mozzarella woman? Where had all these children come from? How was she getting them all to behave so well? Was she, in fact, a witch?
Since I watched that video, the great internet algorithm has decided that what I really care about are large, white, wealthy American families. Every time I pick up my phone, they’re lining up in their backyards or bouncing on trampolines or standing in formation in matching clothes. Which is all very lovely and interesting, but also—let’s face it—a bit strange.
With birth rates falling in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, large families are becoming increasingly rare in wealthy countries. In Britain, the average fertility rate (i.e., the number of children a woman has) is 1.56. In Ireland it’s 1.63. Which makes a family photo of six, eight, or 10 children somehow striking. When those families have big houses and matching pajamas and access to a field, Instagram casts them in an “aspirational” light.