Some Sympathy for the So Called ‘Almond Mom,’ Please

There’s a 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 , 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 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 , 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 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 —an identity that doesn’t have to come laced with shame? And if our mothers 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. I wish self compassion and body positivity (or, at least, ) were virtues that American culture encouraged women to foster in themselves throughout their lives, and not just in deodorant commercials.

But the reality is, many—if not most—people just aren’t 100% there yet by the time they have kids. It makes sense that being responsible for the care and feeding of a young person would bring up a swarm of unresolved body issues, and while I desperately wish that Starbucks Lady and all the other parents taking their fucked up food and body size values out on their kids would run directly into a qualified therapist’s office without passing Go, I also know that nonjudgmental, easily accessible treatment around disordered eating and body dysmorphia can be extremely difficult to access in the US—especially for It’s easy to place all the blame on moms and their pesky almonds, but nearly four years into a pandemic that has saddled mothers around the world with , maybe it’s also worth admitting that we simply don’t have the societal infrastructure necessary to provide people (parents or otherwise) with the resources they need to model true self acceptance for their kids.

Our almond moms might be filling us with the faults their own parents instilled in them, to paraphrase Larkin, but before they were almond moms, weren’t they daughters too? Daughters who may not have even known how desperately they needed the adults in their own lives to accept them, regardless of their appetite or body size? It’s a parent’s job to take care of their child, but what do we owe those same parents as adults? And is there a world in which we and our almond moms can enjoy food together joyfully (or at least peacefully) without panicking about “working it off later”? I truly hope so..