By Travis Pillow
I was reading an excerpt from Naomi Klein’s 10th anniversary edition of No Logo the other day. Damn was that good. It got me thinking about a lot of things, including a feud that’s been playing out in my kitchen lately.
I have a roommate who loves to give me shit for my “hipster wisdom.” He refers to an esoteric body of psuedo-knowledge bearing such dictates as Meat is bad for you; cigarettes are not – especially if the tobacco is organic. Now I don’t really identify with “hipsters” (I tend to be anything but hip) and I’d like to think I see through the hypocrisy of their tenets. But my roommate’s derision of “hipster wisdom” does bother me, and it took me a while to figure out exactly why.
He’s right about one thing: There is a kind of person who uncritically hands over extra money for all kinds of organic food, to which he or she ascribes all sorts of unsubstantiated health benefits. This kind of person is seduced by products bearing a green or eco-friendly hue, often helpfully emblazoned on the package. Related groups, like vegetarians in all their permutations, share similar motivations and are equally prone to resting their case on pseudo-science (unless they’re talking about factory farms, abstract and faraway monstrosities that, I’ve found, find their way into our dietary deliberations only rarely).
What really upsets me about my roommate’s derision of “hipster wisdom” is the trend it represents, in which our values derive identity-making, stoked by marketers looking to craft a sales pitch. Bill Hicks pretty much nailed it:
Of course the “environment dollar” is a pretty big dollar. The sustainability mavens have managed a coup, selling “green” and “organic” to hipsters and sorority girls alike – and probably their affluent parents to boot. The adherents of “hipster wisdom” tend to have privileged backgrounds and leftish politics. The former makes them the perfect target for any sales pitch, while the latter leaves them susceptible to appeals to conscience.
But behind the marketing coup is a real and growing anxiety about our mounting environmental calamity. People are driven to “organic” labels by well-founded concerns over the waste, pollution and adulteration that infect our food supply at every stage. Of course the solutions the marketers offer are mostly bogus, albeit highly profitable. A serious evaluation of our problems and the benefits of the products purported to solve them rarely fits their business model, so instead they wrap the products in emotional appeals to the customer’s as a person of conscience.
It took a while for me to figure out why I struggle to defend my purchase of organic apples (a fruit where pesticides are a considerable hazard – as opposed to, say, bananas) against attacks on my supposed identity. I’m not like them, I insist. I do the research. But Green has become a sales tactic, to which we’re either susceptible or not. So my roommate and I are at opposite sides of a divide that resembles the battle between “preps” and “skaters” in middle school. Where that social dynamic was largely orchestrated by Hurley on the one hand and Abercrombie on the other, there are huge piles of cash arrayed on both sides of the food debate. What ought to be a rational discussion of the science and economics of America’s approach to feeding itself has become a battle over the competing identities employed by marketers to sell us products – in this case, the utilitarian versus the conscientious.
So not a lot has changed since Middle School. Huge swaths of our identities – our values, our politics, and of course the superficial things like clothes – have been sold to us. It’s apparently possible to determine someone’s food preferences based on whether they identify as “liberal” or “conservative.” Support for Sarah Palin, and in many cases for Barack Obama, derives mainly from people’s emotional responses to the candidates’ brands: the long-unheard voice of the outsider who just can’t take it anymore, the transformative figure from a long-oppressed minority who will redeem our nation’s promise of freedom and equality. How can those opposing groups find a way to relate to one another – much less talk rationally about the problems we face and how we might solve them – when their beliefs are based mainly on emotions intentionally evoked and manipulated by marketers, and when they see in each other the opposite sides of a cultural divide?
Tags: media