If You Give a Mom a Mandate

Commentary

I have a dear friend, Ann Bennett, from Oklahoma. She is married to a pecan farmer at Great Buffalo Pecan Farm, a regenerative pecan operation that also raises cattle, hogs, and a whole host of other farm creatures.

Ann is also a health coach and a well-known social media influencer who goes by the name Simply Unconventional. Recently, she made an Instagram post that touched my heart.

Anyone who reads my writing regularly knows I harbor significant resentment toward the COVID-19 mandates. I lost my home. I lost my business. I lost years of my life’s work. I watched neighbors turn on neighbors and common sense disappear overnight. So when Ann posted a playful little video called “Give a Mom a Mandate,” I wasn’t expecting it to soften something in me. But it did.

In the video, she says that if you give a mother a mandate that makes no sense, she is going to investigate. That investigation is going to lead her to notice that none of the experts actually agree. That will lead her to question more than just masks, vaccines, and social distancing. Maybe she starts to question food additives. Then she starts reading labels. Then she buys a quarter cow from a neighbor. Then she finds a local dairy for raw milk. Then she plants a garden. Then she gets a few chickens. Before long, she is baking sourdough bread, making elderberry syrup, and realizing that she doesn’t reach for Tylenol anymore. She notices that her kids are vibrant. Colds don’t linger like they used to. The brain fog lifts. Life feels clearer.

At the end of the video, Ann imagines this same mom five years later, sitting at her kitchen table, drinking organic coffee with raw cream, watching her healthy children play, thinking back to the moment she first questioned the mandate. I love this framing.

Every day, I meet people who tell me some version of this story. Oh, I didn’t really care about food before COVID-19. Oh, I was living in California, and now I’m in Texas. Oh, I used to trust everything the government said, but now I question it all. The COVID-19 pandemic changed the world for the worse in many ways. But it also woke a lot of people up.

The mandates were a step too far. And because they were a step too far, they cracked something open. They forced millions of ordinary people to stop and ask: “Wait a minute. Does this make sense?” Once you ask that question about masks, it is very hard not to ask it about school lunches, pharmaceutical commercials, industrial agriculture, and the entire modern food system.

I often talk about the ripple effect of everything we do. What if the ripple effect of those mandates was millions of mothers waking up? Mothers shifting the way they feed their families. Mothers deciding not to blindly trust every over-the-counter drug. Mothers learning to cook again. Mothers finding local farmers. Mothers remembering how to nourish instead of medicate.

It isn’t a hypothetical. I see it every single day. In our restaurant, I meet people newly awakened to the dangers of seed oils. Newly awakened to cooking with tallow and butter. Newly awakened to reading ingredient lists and saying no to sugar. Newly awakened to sourdough bread and real food.

So what if, in some strange way, a mask mandate and a vaccine mandate became a blessing? It is hard for me to even type those words. The resentment in me is still real for what was taken from my family and so many others. But holding onto anger does not heal me. Seeing the bigger picture does.

Maybe the mandates created a trophic cascade that we never expected, a chain reaction that pushed millions of people back toward soil and kitchens and farms and self-reliance. Maybe the overreach of government did what no public health campaign ever could. Maybe it reminded mothers of their instinct to put their hands in the soil, to cook for their children, to question authority, and to trust their gut.

We have always come from the earth. And touching it again heals something deep in our nervous systems.

So this morning, I am grateful for Ann’s Instagram post. I am grateful for the reminder that even in the darkest seasons, something good can grow. And I am grateful for the millions of moms who took a mandate that made no sense and turned it into a movement back toward real food, real health, and real freedom.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.