nara smith, our Latter Days + elderberry & hibiscus juice recipe
The Mormon influencer's content was always about the end of the world — the Latter Days. The scandal of her allegedly copying content from a South African farmer made that clear.
When the scandal broke that influencer Nara Smith was allegedly stealing content from a Black South African farmer, hunter, and forager, Onezwa Mbola, I had one of those lightbulb moments. Not because I’d always suspected Nara of plagiarism because I hadn’t, but because I had noticed that Nara’s content, unlike so many tradwives on social media, spoke mostly to one singular anxiety, an anxiety that was clearly about food.
Her children, her husband, her religion, her thoughts even, were always on the backburner. The stars were items like boba tea, which she usually made from scratch, to the incredulous fascination of the internet. (Interestingly, it was this recipe, allegedly copied from Onezwa that opened the floodgates of the plagiarism accusations).
I couldn’t articulate my thoughts on this though, so I resorted to tweets doubting people’s analysis of Nara’s motivations. I did not, and still do not, believe it was about marriage or childrearing or religion. Nara is a Mormon, which she rarely speaks about and doesn’t seem super committed to.
Then I saw Onezwa’s content, where she slaughtered chickens, swam out into the ocean to make her own sea salt, gathered almost all her vegetables and fruits from her own garden and foraged the rest. It wasn’t as aesthetic or glamourous as Nara’s content, but the underlying philosophy was the same, besides the blatant copying of ideas. Onezwa’s farm and foraging life made me realized that we never were interested in Nara Smith because she was a tradwife, but because she was telling an incomplete story of something we’re all anxious about, whether we’re conscious of it or not.
How will I feed myself now that the world is ending?
If you don’t know Nara Smith, that surprises me. Her content is everywhere, and so are the parodies of it. She’s known for making things most assume can only be store bought – like mozzarella cheese and chewing gum — from scratch, in a whispery ASMR voice, gorgeous outfits, and a perfect bob. She’s biracial, Black South African and German, married to a famous model named Lucky Blue Smith who likes to dress like Elvis or a senator who advocated for Jim Crow, depending on the day. She’s 22 and has three children, and she’s Mormon.
For months before her alleged idea-stealing was revealed, so many on my timeline insisted that Nara’s content was all part of a Mormon plot to turn us into submissive wives, that Nara herself was bought by the Mormon church, who had sent her to convert us. I was never sure.
From where I stood, Nara didn’t look like a traditional Mormon in any way except her family planning. She was a strange working woman with a strange husband, who was somehow, inexplicably, making a lot of things from scratch and getting paid a lot of money to do it.
And I wasn’t sure that people were drawn to her content because they wanted to be tradwives. Nara’s work absolutely exists on the further end of the tradwife spectrum, to be sure. But the videos were always hyper focused on her ability — no matter what it was — to create something from scratch. The tension arose when we saw that her homemade bread still relied upon store-bought butter, or the boba tea still needed sugar from a bag, or people realized all the herbs were store-bought and not grown. These inconsistencies were always pointed out as sneering sarcasm, “Wow, so you didn’t grow your own lemon tree and slaughter a chicken for this? USELESS,” but I saw the anxiety in them. People weren’t going to Nara because they wanted to be tradwives. They were flocking to her page — in hate or in awe — because they wanted to survive.
But she never gave us the full story of survival, a story that Onweza told clearly just by portraying the actual cost and labor of sustainability and self-suffiency. Nara just served contextless content that nodded towards social and financial collapse, a world in which we are going to have to make things ourselves, but insisted that there is still glamour in that world. You will still be able to get your Whole Foods delivery in a world where you have to make your own bread — a ludicrous idea.
So people screamed at Nara precisely because she was, in an attempt to be apolitical and contextless, agitating their anxiety and giving voice to the political context that haunted us. It was easy to accuse her of religious brainwashing, of trying to revert gender and race back to the 1950s (and maybe she does, the recent GQ pictures are quite damning.)
But people did, I thought, actually want to see her grow the lemon tree and slaughter the chicken. Because so many of us are wondering what we will do when we can no longer buy these things. And Mormons are all about the end of the world (have you read about their food storage traditions?) so her content being about surviving that end isn’t a stretch.
In fact, if the promotion of Mormonism is anywhere in Nara’s content, it’s here, in the food she makes and the way she makes it. Ironically, if she is trying to turn you all Mormon, she’s not really using her babies or her husband or fear of hell to do it. She’s using your fear of starvation, of collapse, of need, of struggle. You just couldn’t admit it because admitting that we live at the end of things causes its own anxiety.
When I say my Substack is about the end of the world, I think people assume I mean preparing for it, that these recipes are about teaching you what do when the time comes. But that’s actually a very tiny part of what I’m interested in writing about. Mostly, I write about the endings – and new beginnings — that are already here. We are already living in collapse. I know you feel it.
And yet, we can’t fully admit it. We keep joking about the end as we are actively looking like frogs in a boiling — not simmering — pot. We can’t admit it because we’ve been taught that to make something from scratch means everything’s gone to utter shit, that we’re living in a war zone, or the zombie apocalypse, a dystopian future in a barren land, or something else fantastical. But t as inflation gets worse and wages lower and layoffs are abundant, think of how many compromises you already make at the grocery store that you didn’t before. If you could replace whatever you’ve cut out or scaled back on with something you caught or foraged or made yourself, wouldn’t you?
I know for myself, my herb garden, my learning how to make buttermilk, and my desire to have a chicken coop are completely economic. Paying$ 1.50-4 for a pack of herbs that would go bad within a few days started to become economic foolishness, so I’ve turned an entire room in my house into a garden of mostly herbs. I didn’t want to make a separate trip for buttermilk and pay for both transport and a milk I wouldn’t use much, so I googled how to make my own. And a long time ago, I stopped buying the high-quality eggs I wanted, the ones with the deep marigold yolk, and started buying cheaper ones when the expensive ones shot up to $11 for a dozen. I can’t even remember the last time I had a marigold yolk at home, and I miss them. The pale yellow ones I have now are such sad substitutes.
And these are still, just the choices of privileged Americans in the imperial core. But as we make more and more cuts from our grocery list, as our staple items rise in price while our wages remain stagnant, as shifting norms around partnership (and yes, this is the anxiety all tradwive influencers, including Nara, address with their perfect husbands) mean that people are struggling more financially, then yes we are, whether we want to admit it or not, wondering if we can make things from scratch.
I saw something else in why we reached for Nara. People want to know that they’ll be ok. They want you to promise it. And she never could, because her entire brand was a concept she had stolen from someone who actually did know how to raise animals, make her own sea salt from the ocean, grow her own vegetables, slaughter her own chicken, forage for her own food. Nara knew how to give us a ghimmery imitation of what we actually wanted — no, needed — to see, but it always left her viewers hungry and frustrated, because the unspoken thing here is that her content wouldn’t help us survive. Her content was always about the rich cosplaying survival.
I also do believe that content creators like Onweza have a harder path. Most people desire the contextless, apolitical content Nara provides. They ignore their anxiety at not getting the whole story of how to survive in favor of aesthetics and ease, or lash out that frustration at the content creator themselves (the verbal abuse Nara was subjected to was fascinating to watch.)
Most aren’t really interested in the lifestyle of survival, but they want to believe they know how. They want to believe survival is just a click away. The anxiety comes when Nara pulls out a bag of lemons from Whole Foods, and people realize that at the end of the day, they’re still at the mercy of companies.
Even I, who made this juice from berries I foraged myself, am still at the mercy of the grocery store. I didn’t have time to dry the hibiscus flowers we found on our plant walk, so those needed to be bought. I didn’t have sugar from my sugar cane, or my own water filtration system, or a lemon tree. All that work and still, the only things for this recipe that came from myself were the berries and the mint. And that doesn’t terrify me — not yet — but it does make me anxious. What will I do when lemons are $3-4 each instead of $1-2 like they are now? What will I do when sugar is $10 for a small bag? What will I do when the water goes the way of Flint and so many other American cities?
We live in the end of things, but telling you this is something that isn’t marketable. So influencers like Nara allude to it, with ASMR voices and nice outfits and perfect countertops, to assuage your subconscious. But if we learn anything from Nara and Onezwa, it should be that the subconscious will not be fully comforted by half-truths. So, awaken to the reality of your — of our — situation, and learn how to forage your own berries, or plant a lemon tree.
Foraged Elderberry and Hibiscus Juice Recipe
Foraging Instructions: You will find elderberries near waterways. Ask local foragers if they know good spots for them, or just go to the most undisturbed parks you have access to and look around until you find them. Elderberries and their stems are toxic, so don’t eat them without boiling them for at least 30 minutes. It is easier to remove the berries from the stems when you freeze them first.
Ingredients
½ pound foraged elderberries, removed from stems
½ pound dried hibiscus (sorrel) flowers (you can forage these too, I just didn’t)
Water
2 cups of sugar or honey
Mint (start an herb garden today to save money, I beg you)
Lemon (grow that tree)
Instructions
Place elderberries, hibiscus flowers, and sugar/honey in a large pot. Cover them completely with water.
Boil your elderberries, hibiscus flowers, and sugar/honey on med-low for at least 30 minutes.
Using a sieve or cheesecloth, strain your elderberries and hibiscus flowers. Press down on them to release all that extra flavor.
Add water if the mixture is too sweet. If it’s too bitter, you can add more sweetener or more water.
Cool.
Serve with a slice of lemon and fresh mint.