"Nourishing the Spirit, Starving for Kinship: Black Mormon Women, Food, and the Struggle for Belonging"

In 2023, #tradwife influencer Nara Smith became a viral TikTok and social media sensation, amassing over nine million followers across platforms by sharing videos of herself preparing meals for her family. One of her most viral uploads featured her making cereal from scratch after her son requested it. While some viewers admired her dedication to homemaking, many mocked the video, calling it absurd, inaccessible, and an exaggerated performance for social media. Critics argued that Smith’s content was less about practicality and more about promoting a conservative, religious agenda centered on motherhood, marriage, and Mormonism. Some cultural commentators were quick to point out that Smith is a Mormon, suggesting that her carefully curated image was designed to draw viewers subtly toward the faith. The #tradwife movement, they argued, is part of a broader effort to resist progressive social changes and reinforce traditional values around family, marriage, gender roles, purity culture, and morality. Observing the spectacle, I offer a more dynamic reading of Smith’s food practices. Though Smith indeed benefits from many privileges, including wealth, thinness, lighter skin, alignment with conventional beauty standards, and cisgenderism and heterosexuality, her Blackness fundamentally complicates her role within Mormonism. Her homemaking has to be from scratch because food is a complex and meaningful space to struggle for belonging, kinship, and personhood. Though Smith’s content can be marked in some measure as religious and conservative propaganda, especially since Mormonism thrives on free Black labor, other important dynamics are at play that have been misread and/or dismissed. I interrogate whether Nara Smith, as a Black woman in the LDS Church, even has full access to domesticity and kinship, and thus influence, in the same way that white Mormon women have. She remains peculiar within and beyond the church, raising the question of whether she can ever be an effective and authentic tool for Mormon recruitment. Her food content highlights deeper anxieties about race, gender, and religious belonging.

Black Mormons have long navigated a fraught theological and cultural space where exclusionary racial policies created a heightened sense of alienation, compounded by gender. They are often rendered socially dead, existing outside of the limits of domesticity, membership, and even humanity. I explore this complex history of antiBlackness, identity, and power within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints through Jane Manning James, the first Black Mormon female member and domestic servant to Mormon founder Joseph Smith, to the aforementioned Nara Smith. Food, as a critical site of power and meaning-making, offers a vital lens to understanding how Black Mormon women navigate, negotiate, and disrupt exclusionary policies that mark their race and gender as foreign and “Other.” In the complicated struggle over belonging, Black Mormon Women’s food practices reveal how those socially alienated live and perform faith, belief, and life otherwise.