“The White Lies of Craft Culture”

Jess Brooks
On Race — isms
2 min readSep 15, 2018

“Craft culture tells mostly white stories for mostly white consumers, and they nearly always sound the same: It begins somewhere remote-sounding like the mountains of Cottonwood, Idaho, or someplace quirky like a basement in Fort Collins, Colorado, or a loft in Brooklyn, where a (white) artisan, who has a vision of back in the day, when the food was real and the labor that produced it neither alienated nor obscured — and discovers a long-forgotten technique, plucked from an ur-knowledge as old as thought and a truth as pure as the soul…

The rural is as much a domain of black life, and moonshining was a part of it. “I lived in a totally black world,” the artist Jonathan Green said in a recent conversation with the poet Kevin Young about his family’s moonshine production… But now that moonshine is a part of craft culture, what’s ultimately left to do is “package the story, feed the legend, make some money,” as Bondurant writes. Only white stories seem to have made it into the package…

In 2015, the BBC reported that black pitmasters are being left out of the U.S.’s current “barbecue boom.” This is partly a matter of who has access to capital — Daryle Brantley, the owner of C&K Barbecue in St. Louis County, told the BBC that he could not get a loan to support his barbecue empire because of “structured racism” (the number of Small Business Administration loans that went to black-owned businesses dropped significantly and disproportionately between 2008 and 2014) — and partly a matter of representation. “The national press would have you believe barbecue is dominated by white hipster males,” the food writer Robb Walsh has noted, pointing to coverage that leaves out or diminishes the work and visibility of black pitmasters…

craft coffee readily displays the black and brown bodies of the people who farm it only because it doesn’t have much of a story to sell without them. While many artisanal products derive a portion of their premium from the perception that they are ethically produced — the heritage hog that gave its life for this pork shoulder died happy; the heirloom grains in this beer weren’t sprayed with planet-killing pesticide; the butcher’s apprentice is fairly compensated — it is the core value proposition for craft coffee, which cannot be produced locally. The sociologist Nicki Lisa Cole has found, as a result, that the movement towards a socially conscious cup of coffee is heavily invested in making “interaction with racialized bodies safe for white consumers.””

Related: “The Way Forward for Hipster Food”; “The Cost of Kale: How Foodie Trends Can Hurt Low-Income Families”; “How it feels when white people shame your culture’s food — then make it trendy”; “How Snobbery Helped Take The Spice Out Of European Cooking

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Jess Brooks
On Race — isms

A collection blog of all the things I am reading and thinking about; OR, my attempt to answer my internal FAQs.