Even as a little girl, Sabrina Venuti yearned to be a mother. When she grew up and got pregnant, her dream for her unborn child seemed so simple, so … uncontroversial.
“This was a pure baby who’s never been exposed to anything,’’ she thought. “How can I give my baby the best of the best?’’
With “purity’’ as her beacon, she downloaded an app that rated toxins in baby products and bought only the cleanest. When her son was born, she resisted “pressure’’ at the hospital to circumcise him. At the pediatrician’s office, not sure whether the vaccines or the diseases they prevent are worse, she declined shots for her infant son.
And with that last choice, Venuti, 33, of Brewster, joined a growing new movement of “crunchy moms.’’
But these are not just your grandmother’s lefty crunchy moms. Today, the term has taken on a new meaning. Yes, the crunchy moms are still organic, still love wooden toys. But now, many are right-wingers, too, and RFK Jr. — with his “Make America Healthy Again’’ campaign — is their hero. Medical freedom is their rallying cry. Food dye, pasteurized milk, big pharma, big food, and often vaccines and the entire health care system, are their villains.
And these moms, sometimes, are the health care system’s villains. “The pediatrician went full-on psycho,’’ said Venuti, who is studying to be a midwife, and now has two children, ages 6 and 4. “She told me the cemetery is full of dead babies who didn’t have vaccines.’’
Lindsey Smith Taillie, a nutrition epidemiologist at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, said the new breed of crunchy mom is more distrustful of established science and expertise. Before, she said, “there was not the same sentiment of, ‘We’re trying to escape from these experts,’ or ‘The government is misleading us.’
“That’s what I see as being different,’’ she said. “And that’s where you see this cross with the antivax movement.’’
Taillie, a PhD whose work focuses on evaluating food policy efforts in the United States and globally, finds the crunchy moms’ emphasis on “doing my own research’’ infuriating. “I spent a decade in school training to have expertise to do research,’’ she said, “and you have crunchy influencers pointing to blog posts or anecdotal evidence.’’
Crunchy mom influencers often speak with an authority that comes not necessarily from scientific rigor but rather from having big followings on Instagram and TikTok — and good hair.
They are often white, young, and telegenic — and have products to sell. And they preach to a receptive audience. Here’s a not atypical #crunchymom Instagram post from last fall, in this case from @the.holistic.mother: “I’m going to need to see a lot more convincing science to believe my daughters immune system at 2 months could handle the antigens from Diptheria, tetanus’’ and other vaccines “all at once,’’ she wrote.
“I’m all for this, unfortunately my husband has opposing views,’’ read one of many responses. “He’s saying people used to die from measles, polio etc. … I’m so conflicted and would like to come with some resources to prove my point!’’
Perhaps no one is better positioned to see the trust that some crunchy moms put in non-medical expert sources than Emily Morrow, simultaneously a crunchy mom influencer and crunchy mom satirist.
’’Lord, I pray he doesn’t get bird flu,’’ she comments, self-mockingly, on her own Instagram reel in which she is seen pressuring her husband to try unpasteurized milk.
Later, on a phone call with a reporter, Morrow had this to say: “I’m talking to you with a clove of garlic sticking out of my ear. I have an ear infection. This is how I can fix it.’’
In March, Morrow, who has 3 million followers across her social media platforms, published “Really Very Crunchy: A Beginner’s Guide to Removing Toxins from Your Life without Adding them to Your Personality,’’ and readers began turning to her for advice.
“My son has a fever of 105, what should I do?’’ one mom wrote, Morrow recalled. “I’m like, ‘go to ER, why are you messaging a comedy account in the middle of the night?’’
The new crunchy mom movement, with its strong health freedom component, gained momentum in the 2010s, as pushback over vaccine mandates gained strength, and was super charged by pandemic-era resistance to lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. Dads, of course, can be crunchy, too, but the focus is on moms because they’re often the ones driving family health decisions and doing the influencing on social media.
By now, a movement that distrusts Big Anything has itself turned big. Big Crunchy. There are crunchy influencers; anti-influencers (often people with academic or medical credentials fighting to dispel vaccine and other misinformation); books; podcasts; a tour; spinoff moms (“silky’’ moms, who follow mainstream parenting practices, and “scrunchy moms,’’ who fall somewhere in between); and, of course, merch.
There are “I don’t co-parent with the government,’’ T-shirts, “Mama for medical freedom’’ mugs, pink “F*CK the FDA’’ sweatshirts.
But not everyone feels comfortable broadcasting their beliefs.
“It’s not always easy to live outside of cultural norms,’’ said Mackensie, an executive assistant in the Boston area, who said she stopped vaccinating her children after her son fell ill with a high fever following a vaccine. But, she added, “We’ve decided this is what we are doing, and we’ll deal with the consequences from it and live as truthfully as we can.’’
Mackensie, who asked that her first name only be used to protect her children’s medical privacy, has stopped discussing her parenting style with friends and family. “For a long time I would try to justify my decisions but it ended up always being contentious,’’ she said, “so I just decided to leave it be.’’
Finding a medical practice willing to take children who aren’t vaccinated can also be a challenge. A national survey among pediatricians in 2019 showed that 51 percent of pediatricians reported that their office had a policy to dismiss families if they refused vaccines in the primary series for their children, and 37 percent of pediatricians reported that they often or always do this, an increase since 2013.
Then there are your own children to deal with — yes, the intended beneficiaries of all this effort. Venuti, who’s a co-administrator of the Crunchy Moms of Massachusetts Facebook group, said that her son and daughter know they can’t have food containing dye, but they ask for it anyway.
“No,’’ she tells them, ‘It makes you guys act crazy.’’
Sometimes they accept it, but other times, she said, “They are like, ‘We want to be crazy.’’’
Beth Teitell can be reached at beth.teitell@globe.com. Follow her @bethteitell.
