When @reallyverycrunchy posted her first TikTok on Dec. 31, 2021, the joke was simple: some parents think plastic toys are dangerous. In the three-minute clip, the creator cheekily poked fun at the idea, giving away her kid’s plastic Christmas presents under the guise of safety.
“It’s time for us to choose which gifts we should donate to kids who are less fortunate than you,” she says, smiling into the camera. “By that, I mean whose parents don’t really care about their health and wellbeing.” The video was captioned with the hashtag #crunchymom.
On the internet, “crunchy” has become shorthand for a parent making a conscious choice to raise their kids with all-natural food, clothes, and products. Crunchy parents tend to avoid iPads, red dye 40, sugar, gluten, processed foods, and plastic toys. On TikTok, hashtags surrounding crunchy lifestyles — #crunchylife, #crunchymom, and #crunchykids — have garnered upwards of 1.4 billion views and are populated with thousands of parents sharing their routines. But the reliance on alternative medicines has created distrust of any western medicine, including, in some extreme cases, medical experts and life-saving childhood vaccines. Now, a social-media feud between @reallyverycruncy and another parenting creator has ignited a larger debate about whether parents can participate in the crunchy lifestyle without being sucked down a pipeline to extremism.
While much of the original engagement for @reallyverycrunchy was driven by speculation over whether the creator was actually a crunchy parent or just making fun of them, @reallyverycrunchy spoke to BuzzfeedNews in February and revealed herself as Kentucky mother Emily Morrow — a real-life crunchy parent. More recently, in addition to her comedy videos, her account has begun to promote other crunchy avenues, including a newsletter and an upcoming book with HarperCollins, described as both a story of how her family started in the crunchy community and a guidebook on how to “remove toxins from your life without adding them to your personality.”
But last week, when Morrow began to use her account to promote her newsletter, another popular parenting creator Laura — who goes by @iamlevelingup on TikTok — posted a video, accusing Morrow of walking a dangerous line between comedy and misinformation. Laura, a mom of two, runs a TikTok account dedicated to the inconsistencies in crunchy lifestyles — and is an avid spokesperson for how easily crunchy beliefs can turn into anti-science views. Morrow, who has never stated in any of her videos stances that could be considered anti-vaccination, posted a response to @iamlevingup — mainly drawing issue with the mom’s belief that even being “partially crunchy” exposes you to an echo chamber of misinformation.
“That kind of thinking is dangerous, and it should be a red flag when someone tells you that a certain lifestyle or the choices you make for your family is all or nothing,” Morrow said. “Being crunchy is about reducing the toxins in your life and it’s a spectrum. Everyone has a different point of balance. Only you and your family can decide what’s important to you and what isn’t.”
Morrow, who did not reply to multiple requests for comment, went on to say that her videos, which she makes with her husband Jason, are intended to be comedy and aren’t made with the intention to “lure” people into the lifestyle. But Laura says she’s not speaking against crunchy parenting because she doesn’t get it — she’s taking a stand because she used to be one.
When Laura was six months pregnant with her first child, she moved to a new state, which left her feeling “anxious and alone,” she says. But when she joined a group of health-conscious mothers, it dropped her straight into what she calls “the crunchy cult.” On her TikTok page, Laura is vocal about how her multiple academic degrees didn’t prevent her from getting sucked in, which is why she’s so confident that any rational parent can stumble with enough guidance.
“The problem that I have been having with even the term semi-crunchy lately is that you’re probably still getting exposed to these wild ideas,” Laura says. “You start looking for these accounts that have the tagline and you don’t necessarily recognize any of the dog whistles. And then it goes from cloth diapering to toxins, and before you know it, you’ve ended up at flat earth theories.”
In Morrow’s response video, she acknowledged that the crunchy community had extremes, but said extremists could be found in every online community — and Laura’s “all or nothing” condemnation of the crunchy lifestyle was moving toward the same.
“I don’t know what happened in her past to lead her to where she is,” Morrow said, referring to Laura. “Everyone has their own story. I believe life is far more nuanced than saying you have to be one way or the other. All or nothing. That is where you will find extremists.”
Laura says she still has some vestiges of her crunchy lifestyle — making sure her kids eat lots of fruits and vegetables and avoiding sugar — and wasn’t trying to insinuate that all-natural solutions are harmful. But she stands firm that following “crunchy” accounts automatically exposes parents to harmful ideas. Laura adds that social media algorithms don’t separate crunchy accounts by levels of extremes, meaning even liking or following tame accounts can automatically suggest wilder ones on Instagram and TikTok. And for parents of young children, the danger of the crunchy pipeline doesn’t just stop at them — it could do major (and permanent harm) to their families.
“I thought I was doing the right things for my kids. Now looking back, I got so lucky they didn’t contract any vaccine-preventable diseases,” Laura says. “And this is a sticking point for me because the crunchy lifestyle is so rooted in being white. If people of color did not take their kids to the doctor and didn’t vaccinate them, CPS would be there. But white people are getting away with this every single day.”
The wellness to white supremacy pipeline in the United States has been well documented by reporters and researchers. But Dr. Edith Bracho-Sanchez, a pediatrician at New York-Presbyterian and Columbia University Irving Medical Center, tells Rolling Stone the effects of popular crunchy parenting techniques aren’t just online. She sees them in her exam room.
“The health advice [online] is so interesting because it’s subtle, right? It’s not always this sort of overt thing,” Dr. Brancho-Sanchez says. “But I have seen my patients fall into this trap of ‘it’s worked well for other people and I feel like I have a connection with this [influencer] it worked for’ and then they come into my office and tell me they want to pause all vaccines.”
Morrow has pushed back several times on the idea that crunchy parenting is centered on ideals that could lead to extremism, instead framing the lifestyle around making healthier choices.
“Being against red food dye doesn’t take you down a road to extremist views. Deciding to reduce the amount of screen time for your children won’t put you in a league with the alt-right,” Morrow said. “[Laura] would have you think that making healthy choices for your family, choices that could be considered crunchy, leads you down a path that is toxic.”
Dr. Brancho-Sanchez, who is also a mom, doesn’t fault other parents for going online to seek community. But she encourages parents to think critically when engaging with popular accounts, crunchy or otherwise, and hit pause as soon as they read anything that requires the knowledge of a medical expert, even if it’s posited as a fix.
“People don’t always understand what a good source of scientific information is,” she says. “It’s unsafe, and an unfair expectation of a parent to put on themselves, to really truly go through the scientific literature and the jargon. I didn’t know what a good source of scientific information was until I went to medical school. And it speaks to just how important that is to find a pediatrician that makes you feel like you can share your concerns as a parent.”
Laura doesn’t think that her TikTok account alone will help people escape the “crunchy cult,” as she calls it. It took a close friend expressing transphobic views to wake her up to the more pervasive aspects of her friend group and their belief system. But she wants her account to raise some red flags for those who might find themselves already in the middle of the pipeline. And even if those are few and far between, she’s still desperate to be an oasis for people who have found their crunchy lifestyles in the rearview mirror but don’t know how to re-enter the world.
“It’s an extremely isolating thing to come out of a situation like this,” Laura says. “Very few people get out of this mindset, and when they do get out, even fewer people are willing to talk about this. But when I posted and said, ‘I used to be an anti-Vaxxer, and I’m embarrassed,’ so many ex-crunchy [people] came out of the woodwork. There are those of us who have somehow stumbled through that and made it out, and we feel so much better on the other side.”