Nowadays, families are lucky to be able to craft their own meal with store bought pasta, tomatoes, basil, lemon, garlic, and pasta sauce, and consider it “home-made”. However, the Nara Smith’s of the world live life a little bit more luxuriously. Recently, the creator Nara Smith has gained attention on TikTok for her rather traditional lifestyle. Her videos include her soft spoken voiceover, explaining how, for example, her toddler woke her up asking for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. While most people would assume that she was going to pull out some regular whole wheat bread and grab her peanut butter and jelly from the refrigerator, Nara takes it to a whole new level. She begins making her own sourdough bread from scratch, then allowing it to rise while she crushes up berries and heats them to make jam, followed by her roasting peanuts in the oven and grounding them up until a paste forms. While to most people, this is more work than they would care for on a typical morning, clearly it is something Smith enjoys.
Smith has started to inspire many other people to take her healthier, home-made approach to cooking, which by no means is a new form of cooking, it has just been made less common due to easy access to already made goods. Even though the majority of her content revolves around simply cooking for her family because it is what she loves to do, it did not take long before the media got wind of this and began essentially making fun of her for it. People make TikToks exaggerating her lifestyle and mocking her cooking videos.
While I’d like to believe this is just harmless teasing, the hate is actually seeming to come from a place of jealousy. I can understand finding it a bit ridiculous to make every meal home-made, but Smith makes it a point to acknowledge that she does what she does because she enjoys it, and she too eats take-out and processed food. What I find so interesting is that people have such a problem with her choices. If she isn’t harming anyone, why does anyone else care? Social media has truly skewed our way of thinking, and I do believe that hatred sometimes stems from jealousy. People have even gone far enough to create conspiracy theories on if she is lying about her age. While she has gained some negativity, she still has fans, as Isabella Colin (12) states, “
I guess what I am getting at is, how have we gone from watching an entertaining video about a woman home making meals for her family, to people critizing her so heavily and speculating about her own age. So, if you are one of those people who is bothered by other peoples own happiness, maybe take some time to touch grass.
