Cult of the Mama Bear: I Was A Crunchy, Woo Mom and RFK, Jr. Probably Would Have Gotten Me, Too
“The last thing standing between a child and an industry full of corruption is a mom.” - attributed to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
If this were 2002, you’d probably find me cloth diapering, making baby food from scratch, putting assorted homemade products on my tender, nursing breasts and fermenting grains and cabbages in various stages on my kitchen counter. Instead, it’s 2025, so as luck would have it, you’ll find me trying to understand how people like the ones I once associated in my nature mama stage with could be staunch devotees of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man with such a permeable moral code that he’s willing to sell the inheritance of his surname to the highest bidder just to give himself the visibility and feeling of gravitas his ego needs. It turns out, it’s not that complicated how this happened. And I’m still fermenting things.
I am not and have never been conservative in the modern use of the word but reading this New York Times piece (a gift article) confirmed that I was a vegan version of today’s Kennedy-stan as a crunchy-woo-ish mom in the early 2000s.
Anti-vax? Well, I wouldn’t have called myself that, and you will notice that nor do most of them. I was, as my midwife said approvingly, vaccine cautious. This seemed reasonable, and, to be honest, still does. It’s not a bad thing to be cautious. It is, though, when you are not realizing you’re conflating uninformed fears with skepticism.
I’d only wanted one child, so my son was my chance to really indulge my inner-Laura Ingalls Wilder character in a patchwork skirt. During this time, which I look back on fondly, I genuinely loved hanging our clothes to dry on a line and cloth-diapering my baby. I was that mom who got on the list for a local chicken pox party to spare him the shot, which kind of backfired when it was successful and my husband realized he’d never had the pox and had to get quickly vaccinated before a big trip. Fresh off protesting GMOs and corporate entities like Monsanto in the 1990s, I made most of what my family ate from scratch with simple ingredients. I gardened as best I could in our little urban backyard, pickled, juiced and canned like a fiend; I made my own personal care and cleaning products, and, again, all these years later, I still love much of that. (If I never try to make deodorant with coconut oil, though, I am good with that.)
You’d best believe I had a La Leche League meeting on my weekly calendar and more meetings as back up that I could crash if I needed my fix. Did I start up casual conversations with pregnant women at the grocery store and tell them that they MUST just try this kooky thing called breastfeeding? Okay, I am not admitting to anything but I didn’t not do that. (The first rule of the Crunchy Mamas Club: You tell everybody about it.) Co-sleeping? Yep, until my son was about half my height. (Okay, I’m not tall but still.) I biked all around town with my son in his trailer, and then, when he outgrew it, I used the trailer for hauling groceries home, until the whole thing got stolen one sad day. I was your average ’70s kid, ’80s goth, ’90s WTO-protestor turned millennium-era attachment parent and I am not going to pretend it was all silly, naive or wrongheaded, though some was, let’s be honest here.
It turns out that I am really into some of that crunchy stuff. As I said, I actually do still quite love many aspects of DIY and homestead-adjacent culture, not just for the personal satisfaction and autonomy but for limiting packaging waste, withholding a chunk of our income from corporate interests that I may not love and shrinking our household’s footprint. These are all still very good things, in my opinion. In fact, it can be kind of addictive to try to shave more and more off that ol’ footprint in a competition against last week’s you. The bread crumbs that were left behind by our forebears were not a “movement” or a here-today-gone-tomorrow TikTok fad that sticks the suffix “-core” on what people have always been doing. The original DIY wasn’t an ethos but a necessity for most and thriftiness was an attribute, not a pejorative or a more diplomatic way to say “cheap.”
Today, yes, I have vegetable scraps in the freezer for a future broth; I’ve got dried and powdered former vegetable scraps to use as a tasty bouillon; I just poured the orange-lemon peel infused vinegar into my repurposed spray bottles for cleaning and it smells like heaven. I’ve got calendula oil from last summer’s garden bounty in my bathroom vanity and it is liquid gold. I am still that geek. I’ve got real bona fides in this semi-crunchy lifestyle, in the past and the present, so when people imply that if someone is anything less than a Bobby-stan, that they are corporate bought and sold, that they are injecting their bodies and spraying their food with all manner of “toxic chemicals,” I know from personal experience that this is not true.
Some of us just know a grifter exploiting fears when we see one.
I know this lifestyle, through and through. I treated diaper rash with a little sunshine. I believed that there was no ill that a little oil of oregano couldn’t fix. I was obsessed with Ina May Gaskin and William Sears. I get it. I understand the RFK Jr. fanclub of today, speaking in fawning tones about their hero with the deer-in-the-headlights expression juxtaposed with that famous Kennedy jawline, the fresh-from-Hyannis Port beachy waves to his hair that makes you forget that curiously Trumpian skin tone, because if it was 2002, I may well have been in one myself. Back then, as I was highlighting my natural parenting books and memorizing articles in Mothering magazine, if Junior had been talking about vaccines and Big Food, he would have spoken my language. He would have dialed right into that so-called mama bear thing, as he does today, asserting in so many words that mothers are the last ones standing between innocent, pure cubs and the greedy interests of Big Pharma and corporate America. No wonder they gush so hard over him. He is not only reinforcing that most primal protective instinct, he is telling us, grave-faced and solemn, bright blue eyes flashing, what good people we are: We are such courageous people. We are not duped. We are sort of hippies, but not the tacky kind, the rugged individualist kind. We are the rebels. We are the truth-seekers and truth-tellers. Who wouldn’t want to receive that message, from a Kennedy and all the charisma he inherited by virtue of that, no less?
For years, I’ve been thinking about how and why I left the fold, especially since the pandemic and the rise of Bobby. The fact is, there were many factors and I don’t think there was one inflection point but many little shifts away. Fortunately, I was never fully invested because, as a vegan then and today, the Weston Price Foundation is big in the so-called natural parenting movement, recommending liver as the perfect first food for babies and branding vegans as Public Enemy #1. So I’d always had this “one foot in, one foot out” attitude given how many who were huge in the nature revival lifestyle looked down their noses on people like me. (Man, you should have seen those forum throw-downs on Mothering.com back in the day!)
That wasn’t just it, though. There was also a snobbery I was uncomfortable with that pervaded crunchy culture, not a snobbism based on labels (though some of that was there, too, especially around food) but more wrapped up in notions about purity. I was also starting to notice an attitude about disease and illness that was definitely shaming and bordered on eugenics, as if the ones who are sick brought it on themselves with their impure choices, a kind of unexamined Calvinist belief that those who are healthy have been rewarded by God for their cleanliness, and those who are not are being punished for their indulgent, gluttonous ways.
There was the treating of other cultures, especially indigenous ones, as a grab bag for the crunchified to loot for their natural healing methodologies and recipes, without crediting. There were the scammers who began cropping up and saw cancer and disease everywhere they looked, like gophers popping out of holes; the message was that only they (and their books, programs, etc.) could protect you. These folks were the precursors to today’s scammy coaches and influencers. There was also just the unhinged, free-floating conspiracism that die-hards batted between each other for fun like balloons. As a Jewish person, the moment people start riffing on conspiracy theories, I start to feel anxious because it always seems to land on the Jews, spoken or disguised with words like “the cabal” or “globalists”. As a writer and researcher, too, I also just got better at media literacy.
Today, I am just happily on my own here, living this semi-crunchy lifestyle, grateful beyond description that my family could be vaccinated and boosted against Covid and that my immuno-compromised husband didn’t get it, happy to wear a mask indoors to help reduce the spread of illness and also tending to my own immune system with nutritious foods, crafting herbal magic in my kitchen and more. The pharmaceutical industry deserves scrutiny and reformation for its greed, for its carelessness, for its historic wrongs. The bad reputation didn’t emerge out of thin air. I believe the food industry is similar so I opt out of supporting the ones that don’t align with my values, and I don’t think there’s something especially woo or wacky about that.
If one’s dogmatic beliefs and insistence on personal purity get polio or the measles reactivated, though, and once-dormant diseases spread again or other ones cannot be contained because of this mash-up of libertarianism and self-important beliefs about what is natural, and then this mainly harms the poorest people and you are indifferent to this, well, guess what? Your classism and privilege are showing and that is what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his followers with their “vibes,” their “healthy glows” and their “grow your own” exhortations want you to never, ever notice.
This is why I left the cult of the mama bear and could never shill for Kennedy. They are insufferable snobs and they are hurting people.
Marla Rose is cofounding partner of VeganStreet.com.
