Authenticity is a big deal. But it comes at a price, and we might finally be near the point where a backlash ensues. Perhaps. Paul Bloom outlined the evolutionary and cognitive roots of this preference in Descartes’ Baby, but perhaps more illuminating for most is David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise, which prefigured Stuff White People Like. Though a quest for authenticity is generally a feature of the cultural Left, Rod Dreher in Crunchy Cons made the case that this lifestyle is an aspiration of the urbane and intellectual more generally. To a great extent authenticity has become a consumption good, a way in which the upper middle class can expend their discretionary income.
Often it is harmless, but sometimes it is not. And sometimes it attracts opportunists. Today Quartz has a piece out, How the Mast Brothers fooled the world into paying $10 a bar for crappy hipster chocolate. The story is simple: entrepenurial “bros” grow beards and transform into “hipsters,” and create a story of artisanal chocolateering which is designed to allow them to mark up retail prices, while making recourse to mass economies of scale and modern know-how and tech to reduce their inputs. Basically, these guys are scamming the public by selling the image of authenticity, but under false of pretenses. This is a general issue, not limited to Brooklyn. The show Duck Dynasty morphed an upper middle class conservative Southern white family into rougher and more earthy “rednecks.” All the way to the bank.
But this impulse imposes costs. There have been dozens of stories like this over the past few weeks: Was Chipotle too busy avoiding the fake dangers of GMOs to focus on actual food safety? There’s a lot of schadenfreude at work here. Chipotle made a big show about avoiding GMOs, in part on grounds of safety, though there is no evidence that they’re unsafe. And yet Chipotle did make a commitment to fresh ingredients that are made by hand, and admit freely that this increases the risk of food poisoning (in short, machines don’t have to wash their hands after they go to the bathroom!). This authentic “slower” process, and fresh locally sourced non-GMO produce inputs, allowed Chipotle to mask the reality that their items are often very high in calories, with the same supposed downsides as conventional fast food. In other words, it was great capitalism. But now we’re coming up to the reality that there’s a reason that mass production, standardization, and mechanization, were adopted in the first half of the 20th century in the first place. Avoiding vaccines and antibiotics are also “authentic.”
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