Growing tired of DIY hipster Maker culture? This video is for you. It’s the latest in a set of videos pushing back against artisanal culture. Some other of our favourites include ‘Bespoke Water’:
The film features the Timmy Brothers, who peddle bespoke drinking water, like Batch #1402, which contains Mississippi River water, Lake Pontchartrain water and a dash of East River water.
When Bill Timmy (played by Mike Mergo) tells us that, “every drop of water has a story to it, it really does,” it’s tempting to believe him. And it’s a reminder of just how easily we justify spending more on a food product if its tale is crafted just right (and we have the dough to spare).
and ‘Artisanal Firewood’:
The pushback against hipster maker culture has been growing over time, particularly with regards to incidents like what happened with the Mast Brothers:
The brothers Mast, Rick and Michael, are chocolate-makers as Wes Anderson might have written them. The Masts incorporated as a chocolate company in 2007, after dabbling in beer- and coffee-making, in their Brooklyn apartment. To their chocolate bars—eccentric, expensive curios—they bring the devotion of priests. They have large ginger beards and a tendency to dress in the dour, high-collared mode of dry-goods purveyors from a century ago. Their product, too, presents austerely, nine dollars’ worth of luxurious restraint: pure cacao and sugar, gorgeously enrobed in paper fit for a powder-room wall.
Last December it was revealed that the Mast brothers were not, as they claimed, bean-to-bar makers, but had started by being re-melters, using couverture chocolate that they bought from Valrhona. To most people the drama that rose up from this can probably be summed as ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, but roped in on that was “pent-up irritation at the self-satisfaction of urban cultural élites”. Hipster culture hasn’t been all bad: learning to watch where your food comes from and your carbon footprint has been good for the world in general. But in all things, restraint.