Herculodge

The Hipster Eating Code

 

My trusty hipster guide Zevon made me home-made falafels slathered with babaganoush and Umeboshi paste, and presented me with his artisan cheese platter featuring Zamorano, Epoisse, Fontina val d’Aosta, Adriatic figs, and guava chutney while explaining that while he appreciated my desire to lose weight I would have to do so by adhering to the Hipster Eating Code of which there are twelve principles.

 

Principle #1: Hipsters Don’t Go on Diets. Zevon made it clear that I could not under any circumstances go on a diet, for dieting is anti-hipster and, owing to the Herd who take marching orders from Low-Carb Fascist Dr. Atkins, Beverly Hills Diet maven Judy Mazel and other dietary charlatans,  going on a diet is downright gauche.

There is another important reason hipsters do not go on diets and that is that diets promote self-denial and going on a self-punishing diet is a sign of capitulating to the media’s tyrannical notions of what constitutes a pleasing body image. Zevon made it clear that dieting is anti-hipster because hipsters are what Zevon calls “educated hedonists,” meaning they indulge their voluptuary and sensualist appetites with temperance. A hedonist eats expensive high-grade dark chocolate, for example, but savors it meticulously, caressing each subtle flavor more like a professional food critic than someone in desperate need of a chocolate fix. In other words, eating rich, indulgent foods is a hipster imperative, but equally important is the attitude the hipster adopts while eating. “Eating,” according to Zevon, “is an exotic adventure. It is never the base act of feeding at the trough like an animal.” I then explained that eating like an animal, hoarding food, and being driven by a voracious, unforgiving appetite pretty much defined my entire existence upon which Zevon shook his head and said I had much to learn. 

 

Principle #2: Hipsters Don’t Get Bloated. The trick to being a hipster is to be slender and to eat lavishly but in small quantities. This principle is both embraced by the French and the Japanese who wisely adhere to the saying, “Hara hachi bu,” which means eat until you’re 80% full.  The Anti-Bloat Principle, not surprisingly, prohibits a hipster from eating at all-you-can buffets or any eatery where large portions are emphasized over quality. 

Principle #3: Thanksgiving Must Be Anti-Bloat and Anti-Traditional. For hipsters, Thanksgiving is a necessary evil—an obsolete tradition rooted in revisionist history and one that asks us to indulge in backward eating habits. Piling an incoherent amalgam of food slop on a plate and eating until one is debilitated is definitely anti-hipster. But Thanksgiving is also a time for hipsters to gather and enjoy a sense of “shared experience,” a favorite term for hipsters. To make Thanksgiving cool, hipsters avoid turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie and other ingredients that constitute the “eating clichés of the Herd” and demonstrate that one is shackled to close-minded provincialism. A more open-minded, cosmopolitan hipster Thanksgiving feast might feature home-made sushi, Okinawan purple sweet potatoes, miso collard greens and Ichigo Daifuku sweet cakes. Faring international food at one’s Thanksgiving table is conclusive evidence that one is enlightened enough to see the folly of the traditional Thanksgiving, but warm-hearted and magnanimous enough to seize any opportunity to embrace a time when family and friends bond and get together. 

Principle #4: Hipsters Don’t Get Punk-Fed by the Man. Zevon made it clear: Hipsters are the most educated eaters on the planet. And their modern-day Food Sage is author Michael Pollan who proselytizes over and over in his books, In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, that the human race should shun the processed foods made by the Evil Food Industrial Complex and eat only real food. By processed foods, Pollan is referring to the chemical-laden “foodstuffs” like Pringles, Doritos, Twinkies, frozen pizzas, all of which can be identified by ingredients with polysyllabic chemical names so long and confusing as to defy correct pronunciation even from the most erudite microbiologist. On the other hand, real foods aren’t meddled with. How much can you do to an orange, or an egg, or an almond, or piece of salmon? It is food in its unmolested form that constitutes the badge of being “real” and is therefore hipster. The highly processed foods, on the other hand, are made by the Evil Industrial Machine, AKA, the Man, and hipsters never, ever let the Man punk-feed them. 

Principle #5: Hipsters Only Eat Foods That Are Part of a Grand Pastoral Narrative. As food writer extraordinaire Michael Pollan expounds in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, there is a certain kind of shopper who frequents Whole Foods because many of the foods are attached to pamphlets or have some kind of literature that attests to the Edenic setting from which truffles, coffee beans, Mission figs, artisan yogurt, and “free-range” chickens are cultivated by benevolent, rosy-cheeked farmers and make it to the Whole Foods market without leaving too large of a carbon footprint. The hipster is eager to share the fact that his dark chocolate was founded by a visionary, socially responsible explorer who adopts orphans in remote regions of Latin America, pays them generous wages for their labors of picking cocoa beans and establishes scholarships for all of them so that eventually they become neurosurgeons, college professors, and activist lawyers, and Pulitzer-Prize winning authors. 

Principle #6: Hipsters Only Eat While Conversing Or Reading. As a general rule, hipsters go against the grain of mainstream America. For example, Americans eat the largest food portions in the world and have made eating the equivalent of “feeding the beast.” By this I mean too many Americans eat with a shameless rapacity which renders their brains completely empty. The American penchant for consuming slop until one is moribund and incapacitated is astutely explained by Laurence Shames in The Hunger for More, where he posits that the America’s frontier, fueled by the myth of Manifest Destiny, created an appetite for conquering vast lands. In the absence of virgin forestry, we, as Americans, still have the hunger to conquer and exploit, but now we’ve circumvented that rapacity into consumer excess and in the process, I would add, we’ve regressed into our troglodyte ancestors. To be sure, this troglodyte-style eating is an anti-social act. For example, I’ve heard there is a steakhouse in Houston where each partitioned table has its own color TV. Hunched over like ravenous carnivores, customers squint at the TVs, just inches from their face, while cutting into their oversized rare steaks, blood and meat bits splattering against the television screens. Every now and then a busboy rushes to the TVs and wipes blood juices off the screens with a sponge. He works around the patrons who, transfixed by their program, will not budge from their spot. I imagine that as the busboy places his hands dangerously close to the chomping mouths, he sometimes gets a finger or two bitten off. His digits, sticking out of the patrons’ mouths like chicken bones, are probably inhaled during the feeding frenzy.

The feeding orgy I have just described is quintessentially anti-hipster. For a hipster, eating is a communal, almost sacred, act rich with ebullient repartee with like-minded hipsters. Hipsters like to talk about the foods they are eating with the same artistic rigor they might apply to an analysis of a Renoir painting. The point is that for hipsters the food is not of value by itself, but is only provides an opportunity for bonding and luxuriating in a bath of ideas. If no one is available for conversation, then a book is needed, featuring such standard hipster reading material as the notebooks of Albert Camus, the philosophical musings of E.M. Cioran, or the latest manifesto from Jeremy Rifkin. 

Principle #7: Hipsters Know Their Sushi. Going into a sushi restaurant and being completely lost with the menu and not knowing the sushi protocols, such as the correct technique for using chopsticks, is definitely anti-hipster. Perhaps because sushi is so diminutive in its portion size and so artistically presented, it represents the antithesis of troglodyte eating and is therefore prized highly by American hipsters who navigate insouciantly in a sushi restaurant, fluently ordering agari (green tea) and hamachi (yellowtail tuna). However, Zevon warned me that bringing a sushi guide into the restaurant would result in the loss of “Hipster Points,” as would ordering the ever loathsome California rolls. 

Principle #8: Hipsters Grind Their Own Coffee Beans and Use a French Press. Zevon made it clear that hipsters were at their fascist worst when it comes to coffee preparation. A list of infractions that can never be forgiven are using percolators, instant coffee, and sub-grade coffee beans. Equally egregious is tarting up one’s coffee with flavored creamers and artificial sweeteners. Not only must hipsters grind their own beans, they must use a burr grinder because the cheaper blade grinders make inconsistently sized crystals, which compromise flavor. Anyone who does not know the distinction between a blade and a burr grinder, Zevon emphasized, cannot be a hipster. 

Principle #9: When It Comes to Setting the Table, Hipsters Favor Japanese or Swank. Hipsters sniff at conventional tableware and prefer Japanese earthen bowls or sushi sets or in the absence of a distinctly Japanese aesthetic, they go swank, which means setting the table with retro tableware from the early 1960s, including magnetic orange juice glasses on checker or chess boards and billiard ball shot glasses. Zevon made it clear that going retro is not about nostalgia. It’s all about cultivating irony and showing off that one watches the consummate hipster television show, set in the early 1960s, Mad Men. 

Principle #10: Making Gourmet Comfort Food Is Ironic and Therefore Cool. Sometimes patting themselves on the back for knowing the meaning of “oxymoron,” hipsters love to make comfort food—something from the archived recipe books of our frumpy mothers—and reinventing it as the contradictory “gourmet comfort food” by adding some fancy touches and thereby making the dish ironic. For example, macaroni and cheese might be made with brie, camembert, roasted garlic, truffles, and Mission figs. Or cornbread might be made with blue cornmeal, chipotles, sun-dried tomatoes, and Havarti cheese. Hipsters are fond of calling these comfort food variations “deconstructions” to show that all the time and money spent on grad school did not completely go to waste. 

Principle #11: Hipsters Never, Ever Buy Store-Bought Salad Dressing. One of the hipster’s most rigid codes is the dictate that “thou shalt make thine own salad dressing from scratch.” The reason behind this fierce rule is considered by some to born of urban legend, but as someone who witnessed the circumstances that are responsible for this strict decree, I wish to explain, first-hand, why store-bought salad dressing is strictly forbidden. Back in 1984 when I was working my way through college by stocking wine and beer at a hipster liquor store in Berkeley, I witnessed an aspiring hipster suffer the humiliation of being admonished by one of my co-workers, Skyler Oliphant, for bringing a bottle of pre-made salad dressing to the cash register. Skyler was the classic hipster snob over-educated for his position as a wine clerk. He often discussed literature with the customers, explaining, for example, how reading Flaubert’s Madam Bovary in the original French better captures the nuances of provincial France. Or as he bagged the brie, smoked salmon, and Sauvignon Blanc, he often explicated the finer points of Don DeLillo’s White Noise while defending the novel’s lack of plot and narrative arc. He spoke three languages. He always lets the customers know through his conversations that he had a life outside his job that was far more meaningful and exciting than what he did for an actual living.  Skyler in fact was an expert in Japanese landscaping. He also built futons with his bare hands and sold hand-crafted Japanese mattresses and pillows, Sobagaras, that he stuffed with buckwheat hulls.

Skyler was fond of admonishing customers if they shopped for products in the store that reflected mediocrity, convenience over quality, or the greatest plague of the upper class—philistinism. Skyler was eager to save people from these plagues, so that whenever customer sets pink Chablis, onion-flavored processed cheese and frozen microwave lasagna on the counter, Skyler sighed, rolled his eyes and proclaimed that he adamantly refused to sell these products. “Those are for the troglodytes,” he would say, “the out-of-towners who came out of their caves for a quick bite.”

On one notorious afternoon, a young couple—soon to be married—entered the store and said they were in a rush to go to a dinner party of which they were responsible for bringing a salad. The man, dressed in a preppy light blue sweater with the shirt collars folded over the sweater as was in vogue during that time, brought a bottle of poppy seed dressing to the counter, at which point Skyler nearly had a fit. “Why are you buying this overpriced salad dressing when you could make it yourself?” Skyler asked him holding the bottle and scouring the ingredients. “Not to mention that this stuff is crap.”

“Just sell it to me. We’ve got to be at a dinner party.”

“Nonsense.  Bringing store-bought dressing is an insult to your hosts. It won’t take more than a few minutes to whip up a good dressing.” Ignoring the man’s repeated concerns that he was rushed for time, Skyler recited a list of ingredients for a home-made dressing—mustard, cider vinegar, olive oil, onions, sugar, and poppy seeds. While the man became annoyed that Skyler was making him and his fiancé late, the woman was thankful and said it would be okay to be a few minutes late if it meant bringing a high-quality dressing to the dinner party. The man and woman bickered back and forth and as the man gesticulated while holding the salad dressing bottle, he inadvertently whacked the bottle into a sharp corner of the candy bar rack, causing shards of glass and dressing to splatter all over his fiancé’s body and face. He then stormed out of the store while Skyler applied first-aid to the attractive young woman.

To make a long story short, the couple’s wedding was called off and Skyler soon after starting dating the woman, whom he eventually married.

Word quickly spread throughout Berkeley and San Francisco as to the cause of this couple’s breakup and ever since that fateful day buying store-bought dressing has become emblematic of being backward, provincial, and downright anti-hipster. 

Principle #12: Hipsters Are Eating Contrarians. Zevon made it clear that hipsters are too diverse a group to all be vegetarians or vegans. He explained that vegetarianism is just one way to be a food contrarian, going against the cultural mainstream. “It doesn’t matter what contrarian eating position the hipster takes, Zevon said. “Whether it’s gluten-free, anti-diary, pro-dairy, detox, all-raw, anti-oxidant, pro-soy, anti-soy, the point is that hipsters have to be prepared to argue their eating position to the death. In other words, it’s not the diet that matters so much as the level of expertise. Hipsters research their diet with the rigor of a specialist and use their contrarian eating habit as a springboard for showing off their fluent knowledge of chemistry, anthropology, history, and bio-medicine. Zevon admitted that it’s common for hipsters to go from one food fad to the next, which is lame, but at least they arm themselves with a profound knowledge of their subject so that they can vigorously rationalize their position.

 

Over the ensuing month, I did my best to adhere to the Hipster Eating Code, reading Nietzsche and Pascal as I ate my morning oatmeal and exploring new ways to add golden beets to my radicchio salads. But while obeying Zevon’s dictate to never count my calories, I gained five pounds. It turns out that my genetic DNA and metabolic rate are definitely anti-hipster.

So as our new President adroitly heads the Executive Office looking svelte and presidential, I must resign myself to looking less like Barack Obama and more like Larry Csonka.

If You Want to be Hipster, Then Eat Like a Hipster: Know the Hipster Eating Code

My trusty hipster guide Zevon made me home-made falafels slathered with babaganoush and Umeboshi paste, and presented me with his artisan cheese platter featuringZamorano, Epoisse, Fontina val d’Aosta, Adriatic figs, and guava chutney while explaining that while he appreciated my desire to lose weight I would have to do so by adhering to the Hipster Eating Code of which there are twelve principles.

 

Principle #1: Hipsters Don’t Go on Diets. Zevon made it clear that I could not under any circumstances go on a diet, for dieting is anti-hipster and, owing to the Herd who take marching orders from Low-Carb Fascist Dr. Atkins, Beverly Hills Diet maven Judy Mazel and other dietary charlatans, going on a diet is downright gauche.

There is another important reason hipsters do not go on diets and that is that diets promote self-denial and going on a self-punishing diet is a sign of capitulating to the media’s tyrannical notions of what constitutes a pleasing body image. Zevon made it clear that dieting is anti-hipster because hipsters are what Zevon calls “educated hedonists,” meaning they indulge their voluptuary and sensualist appetites with temperance. A hedonist eats expensive high-grade dark chocolate, for example, but savors it meticulously, caressing each subtle flavor more like a professional food critic than someone in desperate need of a chocolate fix. In other words, eating rich, indulgent foods is a hipster imperative, but equally important is the attitude the hipster adopts while eating. “Eating,” according to Zevon, “is an exotic adventure. It is never the base act of feeding at the trough like an animal.” I then explained that eating like an animal, hoarding food, and being driven by a voracious, unforgiving appetite pretty much defined my entire existence upon which Zevon shook his head and said I had much to learn. 

 

Principle #2: Hipsters Don’t Get Bloated. The trick to being a hipster is to be slender and to eat lavishly but in small quantities. This principle is both embraced by the French and the Japanese who wisely adhere to the saying, “Hara hachi bu,” which means eat until you’re 80% full.  The Anti-Bloat Principle, not surprisingly, prohibits a hipster from eating at all-you-can buffets or any eatery where large portions are emphasized over quality. 

Principle #3: Thanksgiving Must Be Anti-Bloat and Anti-Traditional. For hipsters, Thanksgiving is a necessary evil—an obsolete tradition rooted in revisionist history and one that asks us to indulge in backward eating habits. Piling an incoherent amalgam of food slop on a plate and eating until one is debilitated is definitely anti-hipster. But Thanksgiving is also a time for hipsters to gather and enjoy a sense of “shared experience,” a favorite term for hipsters. To make Thanksgiving cool, hipsters avoid turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie and other ingredients that constitute the “eating clichés of the Herd” and demonstrate that one is shackled to close-minded provincialism. A more open-minded, cosmopolitan hipster Thanksgiving feast might feature home-made sushi, Okinawan purple sweet potatoes, miso collard greens and Ichigo Daifukusweet cakes. Faring international food at one’s Thanksgiving table is conclusive evidence that one is enlightened enough to see the folly of the traditional Thanksgiving, but warm-hearted and magnanimous enough to seize any opportunity to embrace a time when family and friends bond and get together. 

Principle #4: Hipsters Don’t Get Punk-Fed by the Man.Zevon made it clear: Hipsters are the most educated eaters on the planet. And their modern-day Food Sage is author Michael Pollan who proselytizes over and over in his books, In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, that the human race should shun the processed foods made by the Evil Food Industrial Complex and eat only real food. By processed foods, Pollan is referring to the chemical-laden “foodstuffs” like Pringles, Doritos, Twinkies, frozen pizzas, all of which can be identified by ingredients with polysyllabic chemical names so long and confusing as to defy correct pronunciation even from the most erudite microbiologist. On the other hand, real foods aren’t meddled with. How much can you do to an orange, or an egg, or an almond, or piece of salmon? It is food in its unmolested form that constitutes the badge of being “real” and is therefore hipster. The highly processed foods, on the other hand, are made by the Evil Industrial Machine, AKA, the Man, and hipsters never, ever let the Man punk-feed them. 

Principle #5: Hipsters Only Eat Foods That Are Part of a Grand Pastoral Narrative. As food writer extraordinaire Michael Pollan expounds in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, there is a certain kind of shopper who frequents Whole Foods because many of the foods are attached to pamphlets or have some kind of literature that attests to the Edenic setting from which truffles, coffee beans, Mission figs, artisan yogurt, and “free-range” chickens are cultivated by benevolent, rosy-cheeked farmers and make it to the Whole Foods market without leaving too large of a carbon footprint. The hipster is eager to share the fact that his dark chocolate was founded by a visionary, socially responsible explorer who adopts orphans in remote regions of Latin America, pays them generous wages for their labors of picking cocoa beans and establishes scholarships for all of them so that eventually they become neurosurgeons, college professors, and activist lawyers, and Pulitzer-Prize winning authors. 

Principle #6: Hipsters Only Eat While Conversing Or Reading. As a general rule, hipsters go against the grain of mainstream America. For example, Americans eat the largest food portions in the world and have made eating the equivalent of “feeding the beast.” By this I mean too many Americans eat with a shameless rapacity which renders their brains completely empty. The American penchant for consuming slop until one is moribund and incapacitated is astutely explained by Laurence Shames in The Hunger for More, where he posits that the America’s frontier, fueled by the myth of Manifest Destiny, created an appetite for conquering vast lands. In the absence of virgin forestry, we, as Americans, still have the hunger to conquer and exploit, but now we’ve circumvented that rapacity into consumer excess and in the process, I would add, we’ve regressed into our troglodyte ancestors. To be sure, this troglodyte-style eating is an anti-social act. For example, I’ve heard there is a steakhouse in Houston where each partitioned table has its own color TV. Hunched over like ravenous carnivores, customers squint at the TVs, just inches from their face, while cutting into their oversized rare steaks, blood and meat bits splattering against the television screens. Every now and then a busboy rushes to the TVs and wipes blood juices off the screens with a sponge. He works around the patrons who, transfixed by their program, will not budge from their spot. I imagine that as the busboy places his hands dangerously close to the chomping mouths, he sometimes gets a finger or two bitten off. His digits, sticking out of the patrons’ mouths like chicken bones, are probably inhaled during the feeding frenzy.

The feeding orgy I have just described is quintessentially anti-hipster. For a hipster, eating is a communal, almost sacred, act rich with ebullient repartee with like-minded hipsters. Hipsters like to talk about the foods they are eating with the same artistic rigor they might apply to an analysis of a Renoir painting. The point is that for hipsters the food is not of value by itself, but is only provides an opportunity for bonding and luxuriating in a bath of ideas. If no one is available for conversation, then a book is needed, featuring such standard hipster reading material as the notebooks of Albert Camus, the philosophical musings of E.M. Cioran, or the latest manifesto from Jeremy Rifkin. 

Principle #7: Hipsters Know Their Sushi. Going into a sushi restaurant and being completely lost with the menu and not knowing the sushi protocols, such as the correct technique for using chopsticks, is definitely anti-hipster. Perhaps because sushi is so diminutive in its portion size and so artistically presented, it represents the antithesis of troglodyte eating and is therefore prized highly by American hipsters who navigate insouciantly in a sushi restaurant, fluently ordering agari(green tea) and hamachi (yellowtail tuna). However, Zevon warned me that bringing a sushi guide into the restaurant would result in the loss of “Hipster Points,” as would ordering the ever loathsome California rolls. 

Principle #8: Hipsters Grind Their Own Coffee Beans and Use a French Press. Zevon made it clear that hipsters were at their fascist worst when it comes to coffee preparation. A list of infractions that can never be forgiven are using percolators, instant coffee, and sub-grade coffee beans. Equally egregious is tarting up one’s coffee with flavored creamers and artificial sweeteners. Not only must hipsters grind their own beans, they must use a burr grinder because the cheaper blade grinders make inconsistently sized crystals, which compromise flavor. Anyone who does not know the distinction between a blade and a burr grinder, Zevon emphasized, cannot be a hipster. 

Principle #9: When It Comes to Setting the Table, Hipsters Favor Japanese or Swank. Hipsters sniff at conventional tableware and prefer Japanese earthen bowls or sushi sets or in the absence of a distinctly Japanese aesthetic, they go swank, which means setting the table with retro tableware from the early 1960s, including magnetic orange juice glasses on checker or chess boards and billiard ball shot glasses. Zevon made it clear that going retro is not about nostalgia. It’s all about cultivating irony and showing off that one watches the consummate hipster television show, set in the early 1960s,Mad Men. 

Principle #10: Making Gourmet Comfort Food Is Ironic and Therefore Cool. Sometimes patting themselves on the back for knowing the meaning of “oxymoron,” hipsters love to make comfort food—something from the archived recipe books of our frumpy mothers—and reinventing it as the contradictory “gourmet comfort food” by adding some fancy touches and thereby making the dish ironic. For example, macaroni and cheese might be made with brie, camembert, roasted garlic, truffles, and Mission figs. Or cornbread might be made with blue cornmeal, chipotles, sun-dried tomatoes, and Havarti cheese. Hipsters are fond of calling these comfort food variations “deconstructions” to show that all the time and money spent on grad school did not completely go to waste. 

Principle #11: Hipsters Never, Ever Buy Store-Bought Salad Dressing. One of the hipster’s most rigid codes is the dictate that “thou shalt make thine own salad dressing from scratch.” The reason behind this fierce rule is considered by some to born of urban legend, but as someone who witnessed the circumstances that are responsible for this strict decree, I wish to explain, first-hand, why store-bought salad dressing is strictly forbidden. Back in 1984 when I was working my way through college by stocking wine and beer at a hipster liquor store in Berkeley, I witnessed an aspiring hipster suffer the humiliation of being admonished by one of my co-workers, Skyler Oliphant, for bringing a bottle of pre-made salad dressing to the cash register. Skyler was the classic hipster snob over-educated for his position as a wine clerk. He often discussed literature with the customers, explaining, for example, how reading Flaubert’s Madam Bovary in the original French better captures the nuances of provincial France. Or as he bagged the brie, smoked salmon, and Sauvignon Blanc, he often explicated the finer points of Don DeLillo’s White Noisewhile defending the novel’s lack of plot and narrative arc. He spoke three languages. He always lets the customers know through his conversations that he had a life outside his job that was far more meaningful and exciting than what he did for an actual living.  Skyler in fact was an expert in Japanese landscaping. He also built futons with his bare hands and sold hand-crafted Japanese mattresses and pillows, Sobagaras, that he stuffed with buckwheat hulls.

Skyler was fond of admonishing customers if they shopped for products in the store that reflected mediocrity, convenience over quality, or the greatest plague of the upper class—philistinism. Skyler was eager to save people from these plagues, so that whenever customer sets pink Chablis, onion-flavored processed cheese and frozen microwave lasagna on the counter, Skyler sighed, rolled his eyes and proclaimed that he adamantly refused to sell these products. “Those are for the troglodytes,” he would say, “the out-of-towners who came out of their caves for a quick bite.”

On one notorious afternoon, a young couple—soon to be married—entered the store and said they were in a rush to go to a dinner party of which they were responsible for bringing a salad. The man, dressed in a preppy light blue sweater with the shirt collars folded over the sweater as was in vogue during that time, brought a bottle of poppy seed dressing to the counter, at which point Skyler nearly had a fit. “Why are you buying this overpriced salad dressing when you could make it yourself?” Skyler asked him holding the bottle and scouring the ingredients. “Not to mention that this stuff is crap.”

“Just sell it to me. We’ve got to be at a dinner party.”

“Nonsense.  Bringing store-bought dressing is an insult to your hosts. It won’t take more than a few minutes to whip up a good dressing.” Ignoring the man’s repeated concerns that he was rushed for time, Skyler recited a list of ingredients for a home-made dressing—mustard, cider vinegar, olive oil, onions, sugar, and poppy seeds. While the man became annoyed that Skyler was making him and his fiancé late, the woman was thankful and said it would be okay to be a few minutes late if it meant bringing a high-quality dressing to the dinner party. The man and woman bickered back and forth and as the man gesticulated while holding the salad dressing bottle, he inadvertently whacked the bottle into a sharp corner of the candy bar rack, causing shards of glass and dressing to splatter all over his fiancé’s body and face. He then stormed out of the store while Skyler applied first-aid to the attractive young woman.

To make a long story short, the couple’s wedding was called off and Skyler soon after starting dating the woman, whom he eventually married.

Word quickly spread throughout Berkeley and San Francisco as to the cause of this couple’s breakup and ever since that fateful day buying store-bought dressing has become emblematic of being backward, provincial, and downright anti-hipster. 

Principle #12: Hipsters Are Eating Contrarians. Zevon made it clear that hipsters are too diverse a group to all be vegetarians or vegans. He explained that vegetarianism is just one way to be a food contrarian, going against the cultural mainstream. “It doesn’t matter what contrarian eating position the hipster takes, Zevon said. “Whether it’s gluten-free, anti-diary, pro-dairy, detox, all-raw, anti-oxidant, pro-soy, anti-soy, the point is that hipsters have to be prepared to argue their eating position to the death. In other words, it’s not the diet that matters so much as the level of expertise. Hipsters research their diet with the rigor of a specialist and use their contrarian eating habit as a springboard for showing off their fluent knowledge of chemistry, anthropology, history, and bio-medicine. Zevon admitted that it’s common for hipsters to go from one food fad to the next, which is lame, but at least they arm themselves with a profound knowledge of their subject so that they can vigorously rationalize their position.

 

Over the ensuing month, I did my best to adhere to the Hipster Eating Code, reading Nietzsche and Pascal as I ate my morning oatmeal and exploring new ways to add golden beets to my radicchio salads. But while obeying Zevon’s dictate to never count my calories, I gained five pounds. It turns out that my genetic DNA and metabolic rate are definitely anti-hipster.

The Essential Guide to Hipster Irony

 

Zevon could tell I was discouraged at the progress I was making toward my Hipster Quest to the point of being bereft. I had no hipster title, no hipster place in the world of cutting edge professions, and no “slim fit” in hipster jeans. The fact of the matter was I lived in a cave in the suburbs. I was middle-aged, my life narrative was already clearly defined. My life’s sense of finality was heavy and unforgiving. To underscore this latter point, I explained to Zevon that my two-year-old 2007 Nissan Maxima only had 26K miles on the odometer and that I only drove 5,000 miles a year. Probably, I wouldn’t buy another car for ten years or so, which would put me in my mid to late fifties at my next car purchase. And that car would be my last. The next car I bought would be the car I drove into the grave.

“What’s your point?” Zevon asked me.

“Don’t you see?” I said. “My Maxima is the only buffer between me and the Death Car. My life is over.”

“Hipster’s don’t fret about aging,” Zevon said. “They keep their brains alive through wit, wisdom, and the most important mental elixir of all—irony.”

“Have I not impressed you with my keen sense of irony over the years?”

Zevon scrutinized me through his oversized dark-rimmed glasses. “Frankly, you could use a heavy dose of irony. I think a healthy injection of irony would make you more buoyant, psychologically and spiritually, and definitely make you more hipster.”

Zevon then want on to explain that if the world could be divided into two perennially-conflicting tribes, it would not be theists vs. atheists; it would not be conservatives vs. liberals; it would not be home-owners vs. renters; no, the world could be divided between Irony Lovers and Irony Haters and hipsters of course belonged to the former camp.

“Is not my love of irony evident?” I said. “Am I not clearly an Irony Lover and therefore safely nestled within the Hipster Camp?”

Zevon shook his head and looking at me with a doubtful expression said I was in dire need of a crash course in the finer points of irony. “We will make you an Irony Lover yet,” Zevon said.

“But I already am.”

“You will be. But before this can happen, you have to stop insisting that you love irony so much and listen to me.”

Admonished, I remained quiet and did my best to absorb Zevon’s lesson. My mentor then went on to say that there were certain ironies that even a sheltered suburbanite like myself knew. There was of course sarcastic irony, saying one thing but meaning another, and plot irony in which there is always a reversal of expectations. But these ironies were too remedial for us to be concerned with. As Zevon said: “Everyone’s junior high school teacher tells him about this irony and then uses the example of the driver who never uses a seatbelt for several years without incident and then the day he feels compelled to wear his seatbelt is the day he gets into a car crash.”

This type of irony was a cliché and thus was anti-hipster. Zevon had to elevate my understanding of this essential hipster knowledge. “Once you truly understand irony, you will savor it the way a sommelier drinks fine wines.” He then laid out the Essential Hipster Ironies:

 

#1: Serendipitous Irony. Zevon recalled a high school party at Joe Lasconi’s house in which he got in a shoving match with Eric Silva over the use of the bathroom. Silva shoved Zevon toward the toilet. Falling backward, Zevon extended his hand and broke his fall as his hand fell into the toilet bowl. Having your hand in a toilet bowl is a disconcerting thought, Zevon explained, but to my mentor’s surprise his fingers tickled something cold and solid at the bottom of the bowl. He perceived the item to be a large coin. He grasped the coin, erected himself, and held into the air a shiny silver dollar as beads of cold toilet water rolled down his hairy forearm.

Hipsters did not get depressed, as I often did, Zevon observed, because their sense of irony consoles them with the fact that good fortune is often born from the most woeful circumstances.

“I’d like to think that if my hand fell into a toilet bowl, it wouldn’t be worth my while unless I landed at least a hundred dollars.”

Zevon rolled his eyes, then said, “Your greed has blinded you from my major point. We hipsters have a saying. A crisis is an opportunity. You would be well served to let that soak in for a while.”

 

#2: Pathological Irony. Zevon explained when it comes to human nature, the hipster is essentially a “compassionate pessimist” who has a keen sense of irony when it comes to human folly and self-destructiveness. One form of pathological irony was our tendency to overreact to a problem so that the cure was worse than the affliction. “A man has a wart on his big toe and he cuts off his foot,” Zevon said.

“Man, that’s stupid,” I said. “He should have just cut off his big toe.”

Zevon sighed. “This is no time for jokes,” he said. “Do you want to learn about irony or don’t you?”

“Must I pursue it so seriously? Should I not learn this lesson with a certain ironic detachment?”

“Except that you confuse ironic detachment with being fatuous and flippant. That’s a problem of yours that you need to work on.”

“So a hipster can’t be glib or flippant?”

Zevon shook his head. “Of course not. Glibness is for superficial fops.”

“And a hipster is never a fop.”

Zevon nodded. Then he said, “Another kind of pathological irony is the man whose life is relatively perfect—perfect job, perfect health, perfect relationship. The problem is that he thrives on a challenge and without any hurdles to jump over he becomes bored, so he creates problems out of nothing. He starts a fight with his girlfriend or his wife or he starts an unnecessary conflict at work. The point is all of his problems are self-induced.”

“All of them? Like in one hundred percent?”

“More like ninety percent. Must you interpret everything I say so literally?”

He seemed annoyed by my small, anti-hipster mind and I decided to encourage him to continue to the next type of pathological irony, which is Jungian irony. Zevon explained that the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, whose works are well known by hipsters, had conceived the idea of the Shadow, a person’s alter ego or opposite self, which was a reaction to an extreme type of behavior. “A man becomes a prude,” Zevon said, “and then he inexplicably develops a compulsion to walk around his house naked with his windows open. Or a woman admonishes others for their unhealthy eating habits and then develops a compulsion for secretly bingeing on gallons of ice cream.”

“So,” I said, “the man who dedicates his life to becoming a hipster at the same time develops a compulsion for shamrock green sweaters with cat designs and listens to Anita Bryant music without trying to be campy or ironic.”

“Exactly,” Zevon said.

“I think it’s been happening to me,” I said. “Ever since I embarked on this Hipster Quest I’ve developed this urge to go to Las Vegas and see Captain & Tennille.”

“You’re being flippant again. It’s the pose of the guy who thinks he’s hipster but he’s really not.” 

I didn’t understand why we had to pursue the subject of irony in such an earnest, unironic manner, but I held my tongue lest I suffer more scolding from my hipster mentor. 

Zevon had one more irony lesson to give me under the pathological category and this one he called narcissistic irony. As he explained: “The poor lost soul who tries to find himself, either through some misguided form of psychoanalysis, therapy, Buddhism, or some other Self Quest finds himself actually getting further and further from his real self. In other words, his naval-gazing becomes the source of his very demise.”

“It reminds me of interview I heard on Terry Gross’Fresh Air with Werner Herzog who said he distrusted therapy immensely and compared it to going into the funny house hall of mirrors in which one gets lost in several distorted images of oneself.”

Zevon nodded approvingly, then said, “Quoting a Terry Gross interview is very hipster.”

 

#3: Deceptive Irony. The hipster is keenly aware that nothing is what it seems. For example, if sees people who think they are rising in life, soaring in success and stature, he understands that they are unaware that they are actually falling because they cannot see that they are blinded by vanity and a sense of invincibility that their success creates. “Success is a drug or a Trickster,” Zevon explained to me.  “And the inverse is true as well. Failure, which makes us think we are falling, is actually the time in our life we are rising. The humility and modest means and temperance we are forced to muster during our lean years hone our best character traits so that often failure accompanies the best time of our lives. Therefore, the wise hipster is always a bit unsettled by success and finds himself looking over his shoulder, wondering how his balloon will be soon punctured.”

“So the hipster is paranoid,” I said, “and can never enjoy his success.”

Zevon shook his head. “That’s not what I said. The hipster never takes him or his success seriously. Thus the hipster is never pompous. The pompous man is a square.”

“But,” I said, “being so anti-pompous is a form of pomposity.” I referred him to the hipster’s required television viewing, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and explained that I had seen too many hipsters so self-congratulatory in their ability to understand the show’s often ironic attack of pretension, pomposity, and fakery, that these hipster viewers had become, ironically, somewhat pompous and pretentious in their own right.”

Zevon beamed a smile of approval, then said: “That brings us to our next and final form of irony.”

 

#4: Hipster Irony. A hipster can be so emphatically, conspicuously hipster that he becomes a predictable caricature or stereotype so that he becomes, unwittingly, anti-hipster. Having all the hipster trappings of kitsch and swank and fashion rebellion, as laid out in Robert Lanham’s The Hipster Handbook, transforms the aspiring hipster into a cliché, which is definitely anti-hipster. 

“So the irony is that a hipster can be too hipster.”

“Wrong again. The irony is that the aspiring hipster who plugs into some preconceived notion of hipster is a walking affectation and a fake.”

“But there are notions, codes, and rules of hipsterdome. That’s why you’re helping me.”

“There are good notions and there are bad, or rather, misguided ones.”

“But those who take it upon themselves to claim—rather arrogantly I might add—that they have the right definition of being a hipster and that those whose hipster lives don’t agree with theirs are somehow misguided is rather pompous and therefore anti-hipster.”

“That’s the smartest thing you’ve said all day. Very ironic and very hipster.”

 

 

Zevon could tell I was discouraged at the progress I was making toward my Hipster Quest to the point of being bereft. I had no hipster title, no hipster place in the world of cutting edge professions, and no “slim fit” in hipster jeans. The fact of the matter was I lived in a cave in the suburbs. I was middle-aged, my life narrative was already clearly defined. My life’s sense of finality was heavy and unforgiving. To underscore this latter point, I explained to Zevon that my two-year-old 2007 Nissan Maxima only had 26K miles on the odometer and that I only drove 5,000 miles a year. Probably, I wouldn’t buy another car for ten years or so, which would put me in my mid to late fifties at my next car purchase. And that car would be my last. The next car I bought would be the car I drove into the grave.

“What’s your point?” Zevon asked me.

“Don’t you see?” I said. “My Maxima is the only buffer between me and the Death Car. My life is over.”

“Hipster’s don’t fret about aging,” Zevon said. “They keep their brains alive through wit, wisdom, and the most important mental elixir of all—irony.”

“Have I not impressed you with my keen sense of irony over the years?”

Zevon scrutinized me through his oversized dark-rimmed glasses. “Frankly, you could use a heavy dose of irony. I think a healthy injection of irony would make you more buoyant, psychologically and spiritually, and definitely make you more hipster.”

Zevon then want on to explain that if the world could be divided into two perennially-conflicting tribes, it would not be theists vs. atheists; it would not be conservatives vs. liberals; it would not be home-owners vs. renters; no, the world could be divided between Irony Lovers and Irony Haters and hipsters of course belonged to the former camp.

“Is not my love of irony evident?” I said. “Am I not clearly an Irony Lover and therefore safely nestled within the Hipster Camp?”

Zevon shook his head and looking at me with a doubtful expression said I was in dire need of a crash course in the finer points of irony. “We will make you an Irony Lover yet,” Zevon said.

“But I already am.”

“You will be. But before this can happen, you have to stop insisting that you love irony so much and listen to me.”

Admonished, I remained quiet and did my best to absorb Zevon’s lesson. My mentor then went on to say that there were certain ironies that even a sheltered suburbanite like myself knew. There was of course sarcastic irony, saying one thing but meaning another, and plot irony in which there is always a reversal of expectations. But these ironies were too remedial for us to be concerned with. As Zevon said: “Everyone’s junior high school teacher tells him about this irony and then uses the example of the driver who never uses a seatbelt for several years without incident and then the day he feels compelled to wear his seatbelt is the day he gets into a car crash.”

This type of irony was a cliché and thus was anti-hipster. Zevon had to elevate my understanding of this essential hipster knowledge. “Once you truly understand irony, you will savor it the way a sommelier drinks fine wines.” He then laid out the Essential Hipster Ironies:

 

#1: Serendipitous Irony. Zevon recalled a high school party at Joe Lasconi’s house in which he got in a shoving match with Eric Silva over the use of the bathroom. Silva shoved Zevon toward the toilet. Falling backward, Zevon extended his hand and broke his fall as his hand fell into the toilet bowl. Having your hand in a toilet bowl is a disconcerting thought, Zevon explained, but to my mentor’s surprise his fingers tickled something cold and solid at the bottom of the bowl. He perceived the item to be a large coin. He grasped the coin, erected himself, and held into the air a shiny silver dollar as beads of cold toilet water rolled down his hairy forearm.

Hipsters did not get depressed, as I often did, Zevon observed, because their sense of irony consoles them with the fact that good fortune is often born from the most woeful circumstances.

“I’d like to think that if my hand fell into a toilet bowl, it wouldn’t be worth my while unless I landed at least a hundred dollars.”

Zevon rolled his eyes, then said, “Your greed has blinded you from my major point. We hipsters have a saying. A crisis is an opportunity. You would be well served to let that soak in for a while.”

 

#2: Pathological Irony. Zevon explained when it comes to human nature, the hipster is essentially a “compassionate pessimist” who has a keen sense of irony when it comes to human folly and self-destructiveness. One form of pathological irony was our tendency to overreact to a problem so that the cure was worse than the affliction. “A man has a wart on his big toe and he cuts off his foot,” Zevon said.

“Man, that’s stupid,” I said. “He should have just cut off his big toe.”

Zevon sighed. “This is no time for jokes,” he said. “Do you want to learn about irony or don’t you?”

“Must I pursue it so seriously? Should I not learn this lesson with a certain ironic detachment?”

“Except that you confuse ironic detachment with being fatuous and flippant. That’s a problem of yours that you need to work on.”

“So a hipster can’t be glib or flippant?”

Zevon shook his head. “Of course not. Glibness is for superficial fops.”

“And a hipster is never a fop.”

Zevon nodded. Then he said, “Another kind of pathological irony is the man whose life is relatively perfect—perfect job, perfect health, perfect relationship. The problem is that he thrives on a challenge and without any hurdles to jump over he becomes bored, so he creates problems out of nothing. He starts a fight with his girlfriend or his wife or he starts an unnecessary conflict at work. The point is all of his problems are self-induced.”

“All of them? Like in one hundred percent?”

“More like ninety percent. Must you interpret everything I say so literally?”

He seemed annoyed by my small, anti-hipster mind and I decided to encourage him to continue to the next type of pathological irony, which is Jungian irony. Zevon explained that the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, whose works are well known by hipsters, had conceived the idea of the Shadow, a person’s alter ego or opposite self, which was a reaction to an extreme type of behavior. “A man becomes a prude,” Zevon said, “and then he inexplicably develops a compulsion to walk around his house naked with his windows open. Or a woman admonishes others for their unhealthy eating habits and then develops a compulsion for secretly bingeing on gallons of ice cream.”

“So,” I said, “the man who dedicates his life to becoming a hipster at the same time develops a compulsion for shamrock green sweaters with cat designs and listens to Anita Bryant music without trying to be campy or ironic.”

“Exactly,” Zevon said.

“I think it’s been happening to me,” I said. “Ever since I embarked on this Hipster Quest I’ve developed this urge to go to Las Vegas and see Captain & Tennille.”

“You’re being flippant again. It’s the pose of the guy who thinks he’s hipster but he’s really not.” 

I didn’t understand why we had to pursue the subject of irony in such an earnest, unironic manner, but I held my tongue lest I suffer more scolding from my hipster mentor. 

Zevon had one more irony lesson to give me under the pathological category and this one he called narcissistic irony. As he explained: “The poor lost soul who tries to find himself, either through some misguided form of psychoanalysis, therapy, Buddhism, or some other Self Quest finds himself actually getting further and further from his real self. In other words, his naval-gazing becomes the source of his very demise.”

“It reminds me of interview I heard on Terry Gross’Fresh Air with Werner Herzog who said he distrusted therapy immensely and compared it to going into the funny house hall of mirrors in which one gets lost in several distorted images of oneself.”

Zevon nodded approvingly, then said, “Quoting a Terry Gross interview is very hipster.”

 

#3: Deceptive Irony. The hipster is keenly aware that nothing is what it seems. For example, if sees people who think they are rising in life, soaring in success and stature, he understands that they are unaware that they are actually falling because they cannot see that they are blinded by vanity and a sense of invincibility that their success creates. “Success is a drug or a Trickster,” Zevon explained to me.  “And the inverse is true as well. Failure, which makes us think we are falling, is actually the time in our life we are rising. The humility and modest means and temperance we are forced to muster during our lean years hone our best character traits so that often failure accompanies the best time of our lives. Therefore, the wise hipster is always a bit unsettled by success and finds himself looking over his shoulder, wondering how his balloon will be soon punctured.”

“So the hipster is paranoid,” I said, “and can never enjoy his success.”

Zevon shook his head. “That’s not what I said. The hipster never takes him or his success seriously. Thus the hipster is never pompous. The pompous man is a square.”

“But,” I said, “being so anti-pompous is a form of pomposity.” I referred him to the hipster’s required television viewing, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and explained that I had seen too many hipsters so self-congratulatory in their ability to understand the show’s often ironic attack of pretension, pomposity, and fakery, that these hipster viewers had become, ironically, somewhat pompous and pretentious in their own right.”

Zevon beamed a smile of approval, then said: “That brings us to our next and final form of irony.”

 

#4: Hipster Irony. A hipster can be so emphatically, conspicuously hipster that he becomes a predictable caricature or stereotype so that he becomes, unwittingly, anti-hipster. Having all the hipster trappings of kitsch and swank and fashion rebellion, as laid out in Robert Lanham’s The Hipster Handbook, transforms the aspiring hipster into a cliché, which is definitely anti-hipster. 

“So the irony is that a hipster can be too hipster.”

“Wrong again. The irony is that the aspiring hipster who plugs into some preconceived notion of hipster is a walking affectation and a fake.”

“But there are notions, codes, and rules of hipsterdome. That’s why you’re helping me.”

“There are good notions and there are bad, or rather, misguided ones.”

“But those who take it upon themselves to claim—rather arrogantly I might add—that they have the right definition of being a hipster and that those whose hipster lives don’t agree with theirs are somehow misguided is rather pompous and therefore anti-hipster.”

“That’s the smartest thing you’ve said all day. Very ironic and very hipster.”

 

Can You Spend $500 on Jeans and Still Have a Social Conscience?

As was prescribed by my hipster consultant Zevon, I lay in a bathtub of freezing water for two hours wearing a brand new pair of $200 “Ralf Dry Selvage” Nudie jeans. This baptism was essential, Zevon said, to show that I was serious about making sure my Nudie jeans contoured my thighs and buttocks optimally. Lying in the cold bath and listening to NPR reports about the persecution of educated women in Tehran and starving children in the Sudan, my conscience painfully pricked me because all this time I was spending “personalizing” my Nudie jeans, I was questioning Zevon’s expertise: He prescribed the cold bath method, but I had read on a Nudie message board that an overnight soak in hot water was actually better.

As I contemplated the hipster subculture sitting in front of their Apple computers and scouring the Nudie jeans message boards, I recognized a painful hipster paradox: To be cool requires vanity, self-absorption, and a ferocious attention to fashion detail on one hand. On the other hand, the hipster must show a superior social conscience by leaving a small carbon footprint, by patronizing local organic produce sellers, by boycotting companies on the hipster hit list and by making an annual pilgrimage to an impoverished locale where he and other hearty souls build houses for the homeless. The gulf between customizing a pair of $200 jeans and writing a $500 check to my local animal rescue was a huge one and I felt that the attempt to reconcile these opposite hipster impulses to be a feeble one. From the freezing tub, I called Zevon and described to him my dilemma.

“There is no dilemma or conflict between style and social conscience,” Zevon explained to me over his iPhone. “They exist in a happy marriage. And if you doubt me, may I refer you to hipster extraordinaire, Bernard-Henri Levi.” This French spokesman, activist, humanitarian, contrarian, and best-selling author was the consummate hipster. Well dressed, articulate, mediatique,  he had through his writings and speeches exposed the evils of the world while his sartorial insouciance was an implicit admonishment of the barbarian hordes.

“Don’t you see?” Zevon continued. “Bernard-Henri Levi and our new President both have a lot in common. Exquisite in fashion and using their social conscience to call upon our higher angels.”

I told Zevon I had to get off the phone. My thighs were beginning to chafe and the cold bath seemed to have given me a case of the sniffles or something worse. All this time in an ice cold bathtub had rendered my “higher angels” comatose inside some deep freeze. I needed to thaw.

 

The Hipster Eating Code

 

My trusty hipster guide Zevon made me home-made falafels slathered with babaganoush and Umeboshi paste, and presented me with his artisan cheese platter featuringZamorano, Epoisse, Fontina val d’Aosta, Adriatic figs, and guava chutney while explaining that while he appreciated my desire to lose weight I would have to do so by adhering to the Hipster Eating Code of which there are twelve principles.

 

Principle #1: Hipsters Don’t Go on Diets. Zevon made it clear that I could not under any circumstances go on a diet, for dieting is anti-hipster and, owing to the Herd who take marching orders from Low-Carb Fascist Dr. Atkins, Beverly Hills Diet maven Judy Mazel and other dietary charlatans, going on a diet is downright gauche.

There is another important reason hipsters do not go on diets and that is that diets promote self-denial and going on a self-punishing diet is a sign of capitulating to the media’s tyrannical notions of what constitutes a pleasing body image. Zevon made it clear that dieting is anti-hipster because hipsters are what Zevon calls “educated hedonists,” meaning they indulge their voluptuary and sensualist appetites with temperance. A hedonist eats expensive high-grade dark chocolate, for example, but savors it meticulously, caressing each subtle flavor more like a professional food critic than someone in desperate need of a chocolate fix. In other words, eating rich, indulgent foods is a hipster imperative, but equally important is the attitude the hipster adopts while eating. “Eating,” according to Zevon, “is an exotic adventure. It is never the base act of feeding at the trough like an animal.” I then explained that eating like an animal, hoarding food, and being driven by a voracious, unforgiving appetite pretty much defined my entire existence upon which Zevon shook his head and said I had much to learn. 

 

Principle #2: Hipsters Don’t Get Bloated. The trick to being a hipster is to be slender and to eat lavishly but in small quantities. This principle is both embraced by the French and the Japanese who wisely adhere to the saying, “Hara hachi bu,” which means eat until you’re 80% full.  The Anti-Bloat Principle, not surprisingly, prohibits a hipster from eating at all-you-can buffets or any eatery where large portions are emphasized over quality. 

Principle #3: Thanksgiving Must Be Anti-Bloat and Anti-Traditional. For hipsters, Thanksgiving is a necessary evil—an obsolete tradition rooted in revisionist history and one that asks us to indulge in backward eating habits. Piling an incoherent amalgam of food slop on a plate and eating until one is debilitated is definitely anti-hipster. But Thanksgiving is also a time for hipsters to gather and enjoy a sense of “shared experience,” a favorite term for hipsters. To make Thanksgiving cool, hipsters avoid turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie and other ingredients that constitute the “eating clichés of the Herd” and demonstrate that one is shackled to close-minded provincialism. A more open-minded, cosmopolitan hipster Thanksgiving feast might feature home-made sushi, Okinawan purple sweet potatoes, miso collard greens and Ichigo Daifukusweet cakes. Faring international food at one’s Thanksgiving table is conclusive evidence that one is enlightened enough to see the folly of the traditional Thanksgiving, but warm-hearted and magnanimous enough to seize any opportunity to embrace a time when family and friends bond and get together. 

Principle #4: Hipsters Don’t Get Punk-Fed by the Man.Zevon made it clear: Hipsters are the most educated eaters on the planet. And their modern-day Food Sage is author Michael Pollan who proselytizes over and over in his books, In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, that the human race should shun the processed foods made by the Evil Food Industrial Complex and eat only real food. By processed foods, Pollan is referring to the chemical-laden “foodstuffs” like Pringles, Doritos, Twinkies, frozen pizzas, all of which can be identified by ingredients with polysyllabic chemical names so long and confusing as to defy correct pronunciation even from the most erudite microbiologist. On the other hand, real foods aren’t meddled with. How much can you do to an orange, or an egg, or an almond, or piece of salmon? It is food in its unmolested form that constitutes the badge of being “real” and is therefore hipster. The highly processed foods, on the other hand, are made by the Evil Industrial Machine, AKA, the Man, and hipsters never, ever let the Man punk-feed them. 

Principle #5: Hipsters Only Eat Foods That Are Part of a Grand Pastoral Narrative. As food writer extraordinaire Michael Pollan expounds in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, there is a certain kind of shopper who frequents Whole Foods because many of the foods are attached to pamphlets or have some kind of literature that attests to the Edenic setting from which truffles, coffee beans, Mission figs, artisan yogurt, and “free-range” chickens are cultivated by benevolent, rosy-cheeked farmers and make it to the Whole Foods market without leaving too large of a carbon footprint. The hipster is eager to share the fact that his dark chocolate was founded by a visionary, socially responsible explorer who adopts orphans in remote regions of Latin America, pays them generous wages for their labors of picking cocoa beans and establishes scholarships for all of them so that eventually they become neurosurgeons, college professors, and activist lawyers, and Pulitzer-Prize winning authors. 

Principle #6: Hipsters Only Eat While Conversing Or Reading. As a general rule, hipsters go against the grain of mainstream America. For example, Americans eat the largest food portions in the world and have made eating the equivalent of “feeding the beast.” By this I mean too many Americans eat with a shameless rapacity which renders their brains completely empty. The American penchant for consuming slop until one is moribund and incapacitated is astutely explained by Laurence Shames in The Hunger for More, where he posits that the America’s frontier, fueled by the myth of Manifest Destiny, created an appetite for conquering vast lands. In the absence of virgin forestry, we, as Americans, still have the hunger to conquer and exploit, but now we’ve circumvented that rapacity into consumer excess and in the process, I would add, we’ve regressed into our troglodyte ancestors. To be sure, this troglodyte-style eating is an anti-social act. For example, I’ve heard there is a steakhouse in Houston where each partitioned table has its own color TV. Hunched over like ravenous carnivores, customers squint at the TVs, just inches from their face, while cutting into their oversized rare steaks, blood and meat bits splattering against the television screens. Every now and then a busboy rushes to the TVs and wipes blood juices off the screens with a sponge. He works around the patrons who, transfixed by their program, will not budge from their spot. I imagine that as the busboy places his hands dangerously close to the chomping mouths, he sometimes gets a finger or two bitten off. His digits, sticking out of the patrons’ mouths like chicken bones, are probably inhaled during the feeding frenzy.

The feeding orgy I have just described is quintessentially anti-hipster. For a hipster, eating is a communal, almost sacred, act rich with ebullient repartee with like-minded hipsters. Hipsters like to talk about the foods they are eating with the same artistic rigor they might apply to an analysis of a Renoir painting. The point is that for hipsters the food is not of value by itself, but is only provides an opportunity for bonding and luxuriating in a bath of ideas. If no one is available for conversation, then a book is needed, featuring such standard hipster reading material as the notebooks of Albert Camus, the philosophical musings of E.M. Cioran, or the latest manifesto from Jeremy Rifkin. 

Principle #7: Hipsters Know Their Sushi. Going into a sushi restaurant and being completely lost with the menu and not knowing the sushi protocols, such as the correct technique for using chopsticks, is definitely anti-hipster. Perhaps because sushi is so diminutive in its portion size and so artistically presented, it represents the antithesis of troglodyte eating and is therefore prized highly by American hipsters who navigate insouciantly in a sushi restaurant, fluently ordering agari(green tea) and hamachi (yellowtail tuna). However, Zevon warned me that bringing a sushi guide into the restaurant would result in the loss of “Hipster Points,” as would ordering the ever loathsome California rolls. 

Principle #8: Hipsters Grind Their Own Coffee Beans and Use a French Press. Zevon made it clear that hipsters were at their fascist worst when it comes to coffee preparation. A list of infractions that can never be forgiven are using percolators, instant coffee, and sub-grade coffee beans. Equally egregious is tarting up one’s coffee with flavored creamers and artificial sweeteners. Not only must hipsters grind their own beans, they must use a burr grinder because the cheaper blade grinders make inconsistently sized crystals, which compromise flavor. Anyone who does not know the distinction between a blade and a burr grinder, Zevon emphasized, cannot be a hipster. 

Principle #9: When It Comes to Setting the Table, Hipsters Favor Japanese or Swank. Hipsters sniff at conventional tableware and prefer Japanese earthen bowls or sushi sets or in the absence of a distinctly Japanese aesthetic, they go swank, which means setting the table with retro tableware from the early 1960s, including magnetic orange juice glasses on checker or chess boards and billiard ball shot glasses. Zevon made it clear that going retro is not about nostalgia. It’s all about cultivating irony and showing off that one watches the consummate hipster television show, set in the early 1960s,Mad Men. 

Principle #10: Making Gourmet Comfort Food Is Ironic and Therefore Cool. Sometimes patting themselves on the back for knowing the meaning of “oxymoron,” hipsters love to make comfort food—something from the archived recipe books of our frumpy mothers—and reinventing it as the contradictory “gourmet comfort food” by adding some fancy touches and thereby making the dish ironic. For example, macaroni and cheese might be made with brie, camembert, roasted garlic, truffles, and Mission figs. Or cornbread might be made with blue cornmeal, chipotles, sun-dried tomatoes, and Havarti cheese. Hipsters are fond of calling these comfort food variations “deconstructions” to show that all the time and money spent on grad school did not completely go to waste. 

Principle #11: Hipsters Never, Ever Buy Store-Bought Salad Dressing. One of the hipster’s most rigid codes is the dictate that “thou shalt make thine own salad dressing from scratch.” The reason behind this fierce rule is considered by some to born of urban legend, but as someone who witnessed the circumstances that are responsible for this strict decree, I wish to explain, first-hand, why store-bought salad dressing is strictly forbidden. Back in 1984 when I was working my way through college by stocking wine and beer at a hipster liquor store in Berkeley, I witnessed an aspiring hipster suffer the humiliation of being admonished by one of my co-workers, Skyler Oliphant, for bringing a bottle of pre-made salad dressing to the cash register. Skyler was the classic hipster snob over-educated for his position as a wine clerk. He often discussed literature with the customers, explaining, for example, how reading Flaubert’s Madam Bovary in the original French better captures the nuances of provincial France. Or as he bagged the brie, smoked salmon, and Sauvignon Blanc, he often explicated the finer points of Don DeLillo’s White Noisewhile defending the novel’s lack of plot and narrative arc. He spoke three languages. He always lets the customers know through his conversations that he had a life outside his job that was far more meaningful and exciting than what he did for an actual living.  Skyler in fact was an expert in Japanese landscaping. He also built futons with his bare hands and sold hand-crafted Japanese mattresses and pillows, Sobagaras, that he stuffed with buckwheat hulls.

Skyler was fond of admonishing customers if they shopped for products in the store that reflected mediocrity, convenience over quality, or the greatest plague of the upper class—philistinism. Skyler was eager to save people from these plagues, so that whenever customer sets pink Chablis, onion-flavored processed cheese and frozen microwave lasagna on the counter, Skyler sighed, rolled his eyes and proclaimed that he adamantly refused to sell these products. “Those are for the troglodytes,” he would say, “the out-of-towners who came out of their caves for a quick bite.”

On one notorious afternoon, a young couple—soon to be married—entered the store and said they were in a rush to go to a dinner party of which they were responsible for bringing a salad. The man, dressed in a preppy light blue sweater with the shirt collars folded over the sweater as was in vogue during that time, brought a bottle of poppy seed dressing to the counter, at which point Skyler nearly had a fit. “Why are you buying this overpriced salad dressing when you could make it yourself?” Skyler asked him holding the bottle and scouring the ingredients. “Not to mention that this stuff is crap.”

“Just sell it to me. We’ve got to be at a dinner party.”

“Nonsense.  Bringing store-bought dressing is an insult to your hosts. It won’t take more than a few minutes to whip up a good dressing.” Ignoring the man’s repeated concerns that he was rushed for time, Skyler recited a list of ingredients for a home-made dressing—mustard, cider vinegar, olive oil, onions, sugar, and poppy seeds. While the man became annoyed that Skyler was making him and his fiancé late, the woman was thankful and said it would be okay to be a few minutes late if it meant bringing a high-quality dressing to the dinner party. The man and woman bickered back and forth and as the man gesticulated while holding the salad dressing bottle, he inadvertently whacked the bottle into a sharp corner of the candy bar rack, causing shards of glass and dressing to splatter all over his fiancé’s body and face. He then stormed out of the store while Skyler applied first-aid to the attractive young woman.

To make a long story short, the couple’s wedding was called off and Skyler soon after starting dating the woman, whom he eventually married.

Word quickly spread throughout Berkeley and San Francisco as to the cause of this couple’s breakup and ever since that fateful day buying store-bought dressing has become emblematic of being backward, provincial, and downright anti-hipster. 

Principle #12: Hipsters Are Eating Contrarians. Zevon made it clear that hipsters are too diverse a group to all be vegetarians or vegans. He explained that vegetarianism is just one way to be a food contrarian, going against the cultural mainstream. “It doesn’t matter what contrarian eating position the hipster takes, Zevon said. “Whether it’s gluten-free, anti-diary, pro-dairy, detox, all-raw, anti-oxidant, pro-soy, anti-soy, the point is that hipsters have to be prepared to argue their eating position to the death. In other words, it’s not the diet that matters so much as the level of expertise. Hipsters research their diet with the rigor of a specialist and use their contrarian eating habit as a springboard for showing off their fluent knowledge of chemistry, anthropology, history, and bio-medicine. Zevon admitted that it’s common for hipsters to go from one food fad to the next, which is lame, but at least they arm themselves with a profound knowledge of their subject so that they can vigorously rationalize their position.

 

Over the ensuing month, I did my best to adhere to the Hipster Eating Code, reading Nietzsche and Pascal as I ate my morning oatmeal and exploring new ways to add golden beets to my radicchio salads. But while obeying Zevon’s dictate to never count my calories, I gained five pounds. It turns out that my genetic DNA and metabolic rate are definitely anti-hipster.

So as our new President adroitly heads the Executive Office looking svelte and presidential, I must resign myself to looking less like Barack Obama and more like Larry Csonka. 

 

My trusty hipster guide Zevon made me home-made falafels slathered with babaganoush and Umeboshi paste, and presented me with his artisan cheese platter featuringZamorano, Epoisse, Fontina val d’Aosta, Adriatic figs, and guava chutney while explaining that while he appreciated my desire to lose weight I would have to do so by adhering to the Hipster Eating Code of which there are twelve principles.

 

Principle #1: Hipsters Don’t Go on Diets. Zevon made it clear that I could not under any circumstances go on a diet, for dieting is anti-hipster and, owing to the Herd who take marching orders from Low-Carb Fascist Dr. Atkins, Beverly Hills Diet maven Judy Mazel and other dietary charlatans, going on a diet is downright gauche.

There is another important reason hipsters do not go on diets and that is that diets promote self-denial and going on a self-punishing diet is a sign of capitulating to the media’s tyrannical notions of what constitutes a pleasing body image. Zevon made it clear that dieting is anti-hipster because hipsters are what Zevon calls “educated hedonists,” meaning they indulge their voluptuary and sensualist appetites with temperance. A hedonist eats expensive high-grade dark chocolate, for example, but savors it meticulously, caressing each subtle flavor more like a professional food critic than someone in desperate need of a chocolate fix. In other words, eating rich, indulgent foods is a hipster imperative, but equally important is the attitude the hipster adopts while eating. “Eating,” according to Zevon, “is an exotic adventure. It is never the base act of feeding at the trough like an animal.” I then explained that eating like an animal, hoarding food, and being driven by a voracious, unforgiving appetite pretty much defined my entire existence upon which Zevon shook his head and said I had much to learn. 

 

Principle #2: Hipsters Don’t Get Bloated. The trick to being a hipster is to be slender and to eat lavishly but in small quantities. This principle is both embraced by the French and the Japanese who wisely adhere to the saying, “Hara hachi bu,” which means eat until you’re 80% full.  The Anti-Bloat Principle, not surprisingly, prohibits a hipster from eating at all-you-can buffets or any eatery where large portions are emphasized over quality. 

Principle #3: Thanksgiving Must Be Anti-Bloat and Anti-Traditional. For hipsters, Thanksgiving is a necessary evil—an obsolete tradition rooted in revisionist history and one that asks us to indulge in backward eating habits. Piling an incoherent amalgam of food slop on a plate and eating until one is debilitated is definitely anti-hipster. But Thanksgiving is also a time for hipsters to gather and enjoy a sense of “shared experience,” a favorite term for hipsters. To make Thanksgiving cool, hipsters avoid turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie and other ingredients that constitute the “eating clichés of the Herd” and demonstrate that one is shackled to close-minded provincialism. A more open-minded, cosmopolitan hipster Thanksgiving feast might feature home-made sushi, Okinawan purple sweet potatoes, miso collard greens and Ichigo Daifukusweet cakes. Faring international food at one’s Thanksgiving table is conclusive evidence that one is enlightened enough to see the folly of the traditional Thanksgiving, but warm-hearted and magnanimous enough to seize any opportunity to embrace a time when family and friends bond and get together. 

Principle #4: Hipsters Don’t Get Punk-Fed by the Man.Zevon made it clear: Hipsters are the most educated eaters on the planet. And their modern-day Food Sage is author Michael Pollan who proselytizes over and over in his books, In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, that the human race should shun the processed foods made by the Evil Food Industrial Complex and eat only real food. By processed foods, Pollan is referring to the chemical-laden “foodstuffs” like Pringles, Doritos, Twinkies, frozen pizzas, all of which can be identified by ingredients with polysyllabic chemical names so long and confusing as to defy correct pronunciation even from the most erudite microbiologist. On the other hand, real foods aren’t meddled with. How much can you do to an orange, or an egg, or an almond, or piece of salmon? It is food in its unmolested form that constitutes the badge of being “real” and is therefore hipster. The highly processed foods, on the other hand, are made by the Evil Industrial Machine, AKA, the Man, and hipsters never, ever let the Man punk-feed them. 

Principle #5: Hipsters Only Eat Foods That Are Part of a Grand Pastoral Narrative. As food writer extraordinaire Michael Pollan expounds in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, there is a certain kind of shopper who frequents Whole Foods because many of the foods are attached to pamphlets or have some kind of literature that attests to the Edenic setting from which truffles, coffee beans, Mission figs, artisan yogurt, and “free-range” chickens are cultivated by benevolent, rosy-cheeked farmers and make it to the Whole Foods market without leaving too large of a carbon footprint. The hipster is eager to share the fact that his dark chocolate was founded by a visionary, socially responsible explorer who adopts orphans in remote regions of Latin America, pays them generous wages for their labors of picking cocoa beans and establishes scholarships for all of them so that eventually they become neurosurgeons, college professors, and activist lawyers, and Pulitzer-Prize winning authors. 

Principle #6: Hipsters Only Eat While Conversing Or Reading. As a general rule, hipsters go against the grain of mainstream America. For example, Americans eat the largest food portions in the world and have made eating the equivalent of “feeding the beast.” By this I mean too many Americans eat with a shameless rapacity which renders their brains completely empty. The American penchant for consuming slop until one is moribund and incapacitated is astutely explained by Laurence Shames in The Hunger for More, where he posits that the America’s frontier, fueled by the myth of Manifest Destiny, created an appetite for conquering vast lands. In the absence of virgin forestry, we, as Americans, still have the hunger to conquer and exploit, but now we’ve circumvented that rapacity into consumer excess and in the process, I would add, we’ve regressed into our troglodyte ancestors. To be sure, this troglodyte-style eating is an anti-social act. For example, I’ve heard there is a steakhouse in Houston where each partitioned table has its own color TV. Hunched over like ravenous carnivores, customers squint at the TVs, just inches from their face, while cutting into their oversized rare steaks, blood and meat bits splattering against the television screens. Every now and then a busboy rushes to the TVs and wipes blood juices off the screens with a sponge. He works around the patrons who, transfixed by their program, will not budge from their spot. I imagine that as the busboy places his hands dangerously close to the chomping mouths, he sometimes gets a finger or two bitten off. His digits, sticking out of the patrons’ mouths like chicken bones, are probably inhaled during the feeding frenzy.

The feeding orgy I have just described is quintessentially anti-hipster. For a hipster, eating is a communal, almost sacred, act rich with ebullient repartee with like-minded hipsters. Hipsters like to talk about the foods they are eating with the same artistic rigor they might apply to an analysis of a Renoir painting. The point is that for hipsters the food is not of value by itself, but is only provides an opportunity for bonding and luxuriating in a bath of ideas. If no one is available for conversation, then a book is needed, featuring such standard hipster reading material as the notebooks of Albert Camus, the philosophical musings of E.M. Cioran, or the latest manifesto from Jeremy Rifkin. 

Principle #7: Hipsters Know Their Sushi. Going into a sushi restaurant and being completely lost with the menu and not knowing the sushi protocols, such as the correct technique for using chopsticks, is definitely anti-hipster. Perhaps because sushi is so diminutive in its portion size and so artistically presented, it represents the antithesis of troglodyte eating and is therefore prized highly by American hipsters who navigate insouciantly in a sushi restaurant, fluently ordering agari(green tea) and hamachi (yellowtail tuna). However, Zevon warned me that bringing a sushi guide into the restaurant would result in the loss of “Hipster Points,” as would ordering the ever loathsome California rolls. 

Principle #8: Hipsters Grind Their Own Coffee Beans and Use a French Press. Zevon made it clear that hipsters were at their fascist worst when it comes to coffee preparation. A list of infractions that can never be forgiven are using percolators, instant coffee, and sub-grade coffee beans. Equally egregious is tarting up one’s coffee with flavored creamers and artificial sweeteners. Not only must hipsters grind their own beans, they must use a burr grinder because the cheaper blade grinders make inconsistently sized crystals, which compromise flavor. Anyone who does not know the distinction between a blade and a burr grinder, Zevon emphasized, cannot be a hipster. 

Principle #9: When It Comes to Setting the Table, Hipsters Favor Japanese or Swank. Hipsters sniff at conventional tableware and prefer Japanese earthen bowls or sushi sets or in the absence of a distinctly Japanese aesthetic, they go swank, which means setting the table with retro tableware from the early 1960s, including magnetic orange juice glasses on checker or chess boards and billiard ball shot glasses. Zevon made it clear that going retro is not about nostalgia. It’s all about cultivating irony and showing off that one watches the consummate hipster television show, set in the early 1960s,Mad Men. 

Principle #10: Making Gourmet Comfort Food Is Ironic and Therefore Cool. Sometimes patting themselves on the back for knowing the meaning of “oxymoron,” hipsters love to make comfort food—something from the archived recipe books of our frumpy mothers—and reinventing it as the contradictory “gourmet comfort food” by adding some fancy touches and thereby making the dish ironic. For example, macaroni and cheese might be made with brie, camembert, roasted garlic, truffles, and Mission figs. Or cornbread might be made with blue cornmeal, chipotles, sun-dried tomatoes, and Havarti cheese. Hipsters are fond of calling these comfort food variations “deconstructions” to show that all the time and money spent on grad school did not completely go to waste. 

Principle #11: Hipsters Never, Ever Buy Store-Bought Salad Dressing. One of the hipster’s most rigid codes is the dictate that “thou shalt make thine own salad dressing from scratch.” The reason behind this fierce rule is considered by some to born of urban legend, but as someone who witnessed the circumstances that are responsible for this strict decree, I wish to explain, first-hand, why store-bought salad dressing is strictly forbidden. Back in 1984 when I was working my way through college by stocking wine and beer at a hipster liquor store in Berkeley, I witnessed an aspiring hipster suffer the humiliation of being admonished by one of my co-workers, Skyler Oliphant, for bringing a bottle of pre-made salad dressing to the cash register. Skyler was the classic hipster snob over-educated for his position as a wine clerk. He often discussed literature with the customers, explaining, for example, how reading Flaubert’s Madam Bovary in the original French better captures the nuances of provincial France. Or as he bagged the brie, smoked salmon, and Sauvignon Blanc, he often explicated the finer points of Don DeLillo’s White Noisewhile defending the novel’s lack of plot and narrative arc. He spoke three languages. He always lets the customers know through his conversations that he had a life outside his job that was far more meaningful and exciting than what he did for an actual living.  Skyler in fact was an expert in Japanese landscaping. He also built futons with his bare hands and sold hand-crafted Japanese mattresses and pillows, Sobagaras, that he stuffed with buckwheat hulls.

Skyler was fond of admonishing customers if they shopped for products in the store that reflected mediocrity, convenience over quality, or the greatest plague of the upper class—philistinism. Skyler was eager to save people from these plagues, so that whenever customer sets pink Chablis, onion-flavored processed cheese and frozen microwave lasagna on the counter, Skyler sighed, rolled his eyes and proclaimed that he adamantly refused to sell these products. “Those are for the troglodytes,” he would say, “the out-of-towners who came out of their caves for a quick bite.”

On one notorious afternoon, a young couple—soon to be married—entered the store and said they were in a rush to go to a dinner party of which they were responsible for bringing a salad. The man, dressed in a preppy light blue sweater with the shirt collars folded over the sweater as was in vogue during that time, brought a bottle of poppy seed dressing to the counter, at which point Skyler nearly had a fit. “Why are you buying this overpriced salad dressing when you could make it yourself?” Skyler asked him holding the bottle and scouring the ingredients. “Not to mention that this stuff is crap.”

“Just sell it to me. We’ve got to be at a dinner party.”

“Nonsense.  Bringing store-bought dressing is an insult to your hosts. It won’t take more than a few minutes to whip up a good dressing.” Ignoring the man’s repeated concerns that he was rushed for time, Skyler recited a list of ingredients for a home-made dressing—mustard, cider vinegar, olive oil, onions, sugar, and poppy seeds. While the man became annoyed that Skyler was making him and his fiancé late, the woman was thankful and said it would be okay to be a few minutes late if it meant bringing a high-quality dressing to the dinner party. The man and woman bickered back and forth and as the man gesticulated while holding the salad dressing bottle, he inadvertently whacked the bottle into a sharp corner of the candy bar rack, causing shards of glass and dressing to splatter all over his fiancé’s body and face. He then stormed out of the store while Skyler applied first-aid to the attractive young woman.

To make a long story short, the couple’s wedding was called off and Skyler soon after starting dating the woman, whom he eventually married.

Word quickly spread throughout Berkeley and San Francisco as to the cause of this couple’s breakup and ever since that fateful day buying store-bought dressing has become emblematic of being backward, provincial, and downright anti-hipster. 

Principle #12: Hipsters Are Eating Contrarians. Zevon made it clear that hipsters are too diverse a group to all be vegetarians or vegans. He explained that vegetarianism is just one way to be a food contrarian, going against the cultural mainstream. “It doesn’t matter what contrarian eating position the hipster takes, Zevon said. “Whether it’s gluten-free, anti-diary, pro-dairy, detox, all-raw, anti-oxidant, pro-soy, anti-soy, the point is that hipsters have to be prepared to argue their eating position to the death. In other words, it’s not the diet that matters so much as the level of expertise. Hipsters research their diet with the rigor of a specialist and use their contrarian eating habit as a springboard for showing off their fluent knowledge of chemistry, anthropology, history, and bio-medicine. Zevon admitted that it’s common for hipsters to go from one food fad to the next, which is lame, but at least they arm themselves with a profound knowledge of their subject so that they can vigorously rationalize their position.

 

Over the ensuing month, I did my best to adhere to the Hipster Eating Code, reading Nietzsche and Pascal as I ate my morning oatmeal and exploring new ways to add golden beets to my radicchio salads. But while obeying Zevon’s dictate to never count my calories, I gained five pounds. It turns out that my genetic DNA and metabolic rate are definitely anti-hipster.

So as our new President adroitly heads the Executive Office looking svelte and presidential, I must resign myself to looking less like Barack Obama and more like Larry Csonka. 

The Hipster Eating Code

 

My trusty hipster guide Zevon made me home-made falafels slathered with babaganoush and Umeboshi paste, and presented me with his artisan cheese platter featuring Zamorano, Epoisse, Fontina val d’Aosta, Adriatic figs, and guava chutney while explaining that while he appreciated my desire to lose weight I would have to do so by adhering to the Hipster Eating Code of which there are twelve principles.

 

Principle #1: Hipsters Don’t Go on Diets. Zevon made it clear that I could not under any circumstances go on a diet, for dieting is anti-hipster and, owing to the Herd who take marching orders from Low-Carb Fascist Dr. Atkins, Beverly Hills Diet maven Judy Mazel and other dietary charlatans,  going on a diet is downright gauche.

There is another important reason hipsters do not go on diets and that is that diets promote self-denial and going on a self-punishing diet is a sign of capitulating to the media’s tyrannical notions of what constitutes a pleasing body image. Zevon made it clear that dieting is anti-hipster because hipsters are what Zevon calls “educated hedonists,” meaning they indulge their voluptuary and sensualist appetites with temperance. A hedonist eats expensive high-grade dark chocolate, for example, but savors it meticulously, caressing each subtle flavor more like a professional food critic than someone in desperate need of a chocolate fix. In other words, eating rich, indulgent foods is a hipster imperative, but equally important is the attitude the hipster adopts while eating. “Eating,” according to Zevon, “is an exotic adventure. It is never the base act of feeding at the trough like an animal.” I then explained that eating like an animal, hoarding food, and being driven by a voracious, unforgiving appetite pretty much defined my entire existence upon which Zevon shook his head and said I had much to learn. 

 

Principle #2: Hipsters Don’t Get Bloated. The trick to being a hipster is to be slender and to eat lavishly but in small quantities. This principle is both embraced by the French and the Japanese who wisely adhere to the saying, “Hara hachi bu,” which means eat until you’re 80% full.  The Anti-Bloat Principle, not surprisingly, prohibits a hipster from eating at all-you-can buffets or any eatery where large portions are emphasized over quality. 

Principle #3: Thanksgiving Must Be Anti-Bloat and Anti-Traditional. For hipsters, Thanksgiving is a necessary evil—an obsolete tradition rooted in revisionist history and one that asks us to indulge in backward eating habits. Piling an incoherent amalgam of food slop on a plate and eating until one is debilitated is definitely anti-hipster. But Thanksgiving is also a time for hipsters to gather and enjoy a sense of “shared experience,” a favorite term for hipsters. To make Thanksgiving cool, hipsters avoid turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie and other ingredients that constitute the “eating clichés of the Herd” and demonstrate that one is shackled to close-minded provincialism. A more open-minded, cosmopolitan hipster Thanksgiving feast might feature home-made sushi, Okinawan purple sweet potatoes, miso collard greens and Ichigo Daifuku sweet cakes. Faring international food at one’s Thanksgiving table is conclusive evidence that one is enlightened enough to see the folly of the traditional Thanksgiving, but warm-hearted and magnanimous enough to seize any opportunity to embrace a time when family and friends bond and get together. 

Principle #4: Hipsters Don’t Get Punk-Fed by the Man. Zevon made it clear: Hipsters are the most educated eaters on the planet. And their modern-day Food Sage is author Michael Pollan who proselytizes over and over in his books, In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, that the human race should shun the processed foods made by the Evil Food Industrial Complex and eat only real food. By processed foods, Pollan is referring to the chemical-laden “foodstuffs” like Pringles, Doritos, Twinkies, frozen pizzas, all of which can be identified by ingredients with polysyllabic chemical names so long and confusing as to defy correct pronunciation even from the most erudite microbiologist. On the other hand, real foods aren’t meddled with. How much can you do to an orange, or an egg, or an almond, or piece of salmon? It is food in its unmolested form that constitutes the badge of being “real” and is therefore hipster. The highly processed foods, on the other hand, are made by the Evil Industrial Machine, AKA, the Man, and hipsters never, ever let the Man punk-feed them. 

Principle #5: Hipsters Only Eat Foods That Are Part of a Grand Pastoral Narrative. As food writer extraordinaire Michael Pollan expounds in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, there is a certain kind of shopper who frequents Whole Foods because many of the foods are attached to pamphlets or have some kind of literature that attests to the Edenic setting from which truffles, coffee beans, Mission figs, artisan yogurt, and “free-range” chickens are cultivated by benevolent, rosy-cheeked farmers and make it to the Whole Foods market without leaving too large of a carbon footprint. The hipster is eager to share the fact that his dark chocolate was founded by a visionary, socially responsible explorer who adopts orphans in remote regions of Latin America, pays them generous wages for their labors of picking cocoa beans and establishes scholarships for all of them so that eventually they become neurosurgeons, college professors, and activist lawyers, and Pulitzer-Prize winning authors. 

Principle #6: Hipsters Only Eat While Conversing Or Reading. As a general rule, hipsters go against the grain of mainstream America. For example, Americans eat the largest food portions in the world and have made eating the equivalent of “feeding the beast.” By this I mean too many Americans eat with a shameless rapacity which renders their brains completely empty. The American penchant for consuming slop until one is moribund and incapacitated is astutely explained by Laurence Shames in The Hunger for More, where he posits that the America’s frontier, fueled by the myth of Manifest Destiny, created an appetite for conquering vast lands. In the absence of virgin forestry, we, as Americans, still have the hunger to conquer and exploit, but now we’ve circumvented that rapacity into consumer excess and in the process, I would add, we’ve regressed into our troglodyte ancestors. To be sure, this troglodyte-style eating is an anti-social act. For example, I’ve heard there is a steakhouse in Houston where each partitioned table has its own color TV. Hunched over like ravenous carnivores, customers squint at the TVs, just inches from their face, while cutting into their oversized rare steaks, blood and meat bits splattering against the television screens. Every now and then a busboy rushes to the TVs and wipes blood juices off the screens with a sponge. He works around the patrons who, transfixed by their program, will not budge from their spot. I imagine that as the busboy places his hands dangerously close to the chomping mouths, he sometimes gets a finger or two bitten off. His digits, sticking out of the patrons’ mouths like chicken bones, are probably inhaled during the feeding frenzy.

The feeding orgy I have just described is quintessentially anti-hipster. For a hipster, eating is a communal, almost sacred, act rich with ebullient repartee with like-minded hipsters. Hipsters like to talk about the foods they are eating with the same artistic rigor they might apply to an analysis of a Renoir painting. The point is that for hipsters the food is not of value by itself, but is only provides an opportunity for bonding and luxuriating in a bath of ideas. If no one is available for conversation, then a book is needed, featuring such standard hipster reading material as the notebooks of Albert Camus, the philosophical musings of E.M. Cioran, or the latest manifesto from Jeremy Rifkin. 

Principle #7: Hipsters Know Their Sushi. Going into a sushi restaurant and being completely lost with the menu and not knowing the sushi protocols, such as the correct technique for using chopsticks, is definitely anti-hipster. Perhaps because sushi is so diminutive in its portion size and so artistically presented, it represents the antithesis of troglodyte eating and is therefore prized highly by American hipsters who navigate insouciantly in a sushi restaurant, fluently ordering agari (green tea) and hamachi (yellowtail tuna). However, Zevon warned me that bringing a sushi guide into the restaurant would result in the loss of “Hipster Points,” as would ordering the ever loathsome California rolls. 

Principle #8: Hipsters Grind Their Own Coffee Beans and Use a French Press. Zevon made it clear that hipsters were at their fascist worst when it comes to coffee preparation. A list of infractions that can never be forgiven are using percolators, instant coffee, and sub-grade coffee beans. Equally egregious is tarting up one’s coffee with flavored creamers and artificial sweeteners. Not only must hipsters grind their own beans, they must use a burr grinder because the cheaper blade grinders make inconsistently sized crystals, which compromise flavor. Anyone who does not know the distinction between a blade and a burr grinder, Zevon emphasized, cannot be a hipster. 

Principle #9: When It Comes to Setting the Table, Hipsters Favor Japanese or Swank. Hipsters sniff at conventional tableware and prefer Japanese earthen bowls or sushi sets or in the absence of a distinctly Japanese aesthetic, they go swank, which means setting the table with retro tableware from the early 1960s, including magnetic orange juice glasses on checker or chess boards and billiard ball shot glasses. Zevon made it clear that going retro is not about nostalgia. It’s all about cultivating irony and showing off that one watches the consummate hipster television show, set in the early 1960s, Mad Men. 

Principle #10: Making Gourmet Comfort Food Is Ironic and Therefore Cool. Sometimes patting themselves on the back for knowing the meaning of “oxymoron,” hipsters love to make comfort food—something from the archived recipe books of our frumpy mothers—and reinventing it as the contradictory “gourmet comfort food” by adding some fancy touches and thereby making the dish ironic. For example, macaroni and cheese might be made with brie, camembert, roasted garlic, truffles, and Mission figs. Or cornbread might be made with blue cornmeal, chipotles, sun-dried tomatoes, and Havarti cheese. Hipsters are fond of calling these comfort food variations “deconstructions” to show that all the time and money spent on grad school did not completely go to waste. 

Principle #11: Hipsters Never, Ever Buy Store-Bought Salad Dressing. One of the hipster’s most rigid codes is the dictate that “thou shalt make thine own salad dressing from scratch.” The reason behind this fierce rule is considered by some to born of urban legend, but as someone who witnessed the circumstances that are responsible for this strict decree, I wish to explain, first-hand, why store-bought salad dressing is strictly forbidden. Back in 1984 when I was working my way through college by stocking wine and beer at a hipster liquor store in Berkeley, I witnessed an aspiring hipster suffer the humiliation of being admonished by one of my co-workers, Skyler Oliphant, for bringing a bottle of pre-made salad dressing to the cash register. Skyler was the classic hipster snob over-educated for his position as a wine clerk. He often discussed literature with the customers, explaining, for example, how reading Flaubert’s Madam Bovary in the original French better captures the nuances of provincial France. Or as he bagged the brie, smoked salmon, and Sauvignon Blanc, he often explicated the finer points of Don DeLillo’s White Noise while defending the novel’s lack of plot and narrative arc. He spoke three languages. He always lets the customers know through his conversations that he had a life outside his job that was far more meaningful and exciting than what he did for an actual living.  Skyler in fact was an expert in Japanese landscaping. He also built futons with his bare hands and sold hand-crafted Japanese mattresses and pillows, Sobagaras, that he stuffed with buckwheat hulls.

Skyler was fond of admonishing customers if they shopped for products in the store that reflected mediocrity, convenience over quality, or the greatest plague of the upper class—philistinism. Skyler was eager to save people from these plagues, so that whenever customer sets pink Chablis, onion-flavored processed cheese and frozen microwave lasagna on the counter, Skyler sighed, rolled his eyes and proclaimed that he adamantly refused to sell these products. “Those are for the troglodytes,” he would say, “the out-of-towners who came out of their caves for a quick bite.”

On one notorious afternoon, a young couple—soon to be married—entered the store and said they were in a rush to go to a dinner party of which they were responsible for bringing a salad. The man, dressed in a preppy light blue sweater with the shirt collars folded over the sweater as was in vogue during that time, brought a bottle of poppy seed dressing to the counter, at which point Skyler nearly had a fit. “Why are you buying this overpriced salad dressing when you could make it yourself?” Skyler asked him holding the bottle and scouring the ingredients. “Not to mention that this stuff is crap.”

“Just sell it to me. We’ve got to be at a dinner party.”

“Nonsense.  Bringing store-bought dressing is an insult to your hosts. It won’t take more than a few minutes to whip up a good dressing.” Ignoring the man’s repeated concerns that he was rushed for time, Skyler recited a list of ingredients for a home-made dressing—mustard, cider vinegar, olive oil, onions, sugar, and poppy seeds. While the man became annoyed that Skyler was making him and his fiancé late, the woman was thankful and said it would be okay to be a few minutes late if it meant bringing a high-quality dressing to the dinner party. The man and woman bickered back and forth and as the man gesticulated while holding the salad dressing bottle, he inadvertently whacked the bottle into a sharp corner of the candy bar rack, causing shards of glass and dressing to splatter all over his fiancé’s body and face. He then stormed out of the store while Skyler applied first-aid to the attractive young woman.

To make a long story short, the couple’s wedding was called off and Skyler soon after starting dating the woman, whom he eventually married.

Word quickly spread throughout Berkeley and San Francisco as to the cause of this couple’s breakup and ever since that fateful day buying store-bought dressing has become emblematic of being backward, provincial, and downright anti-hipster. 

Principle #12: Hipsters Are Eating Contrarians. Zevon made it clear that hipsters are too diverse a group to all be vegetarians or vegans. He explained that vegetarianism is just one way to be a food contrarian, going against the cultural mainstream. “It doesn’t matter what contrarian eating position the hipster takes, Zevon said. “Whether it’s gluten-free, anti-diary, pro-dairy, detox, all-raw, anti-oxidant, pro-soy, anti-soy, the point is that hipsters have to be prepared to argue their eating position to the death. In other words, it’s not the diet that matters so much as the level of expertise. Hipsters research their diet with the rigor of a specialist and use their contrarian eating habit as a springboard for showing off their fluent knowledge of chemistry, anthropology, history, and bio-medicine. Zevon admitted that it’s common for hipsters to go from one food fad to the next, which is lame, but at least they arm themselves with a profound knowledge of their subject so that they can vigorously rationalize their position.

 

Over the ensuing month, I did my best to adhere to the Hipster Eating Code, reading Nietzsche and Pascal as I ate my morning oatmeal and exploring new ways to add golden beets to my radicchio salads. But while obeying Zevon’s dictate to never count my calories, I gained five pounds. It turns out that my genetic DNA and metabolic rate are definitely anti-hipster.

So as our new President adroitly heads the Executive Office looking svelte and presidential, I must resign myself to looking less like Barack Obama and more like Larry Csonka. 

It Is My Patriotic Duty to Lose Weight

Our new President is a lithe six feet, two inches tall and weighs a reed-like 195 pounds. His lean, fat-free body fits his message that if my fellow Americans and I are to extricate ourselves from our economic malaise, we will have to tighten our belts and start living within our means. Our good President has made it clear that our economic woes are a wake-up call to the fact that we have been on a collective binge for too long and an economy built on credit bills that we are in a constant struggle to pay down is doomed to perish. Let there be no mistake about it, our spending binge has been accompanied by the growth of another binge and that is nothing less than the insatiable appetites of all of us, evidenced by the fact that our calorie consumption is going up and up and up. May I refer you to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization periodical studies of American calorie consumption, which show that between 1979 and 1981 Americans averaged 3,180 calories a day. Then between 1989 and 1991 the calories increased to 3,460. The most recent study covers 2000 and 2002 and the daily calorie intake of the average American is 3,790. I’m a bit alarmed to consider that 3,800 calories is about the amount I ingest on a daily basis, give or take a few. And this number explains why at 46 years of age my 230-pound bodyweight is 30 pounds heavier than I want it to be for appearance and health reasons. Let there be no mistake about it, a hipster cannot be a porker. For a hipster leanness is of paramount importance since a slender physique evinces someone in control. Look at our most recent Presidential debates between the young mellifluous hipster and the aging maladroit fuddy-duddy. The latter candidate lost points, and eventually the election, because his seething temper, evidenced by eye-rolling, excessive blinking, an hostile exhalations that whistled through his dentures, rendered him unsuitable for the Executive Office and lose he did. In contrast, our hipster President is a man of temperance and self-control and it is our duty to conform to our leader’s virtues. I therefore must embrace temperance, moderation, and self-control for my own life and there is no better way to begin than by curbing the excess manner in which I consume food. Ladies and Gentleman, it is strange, but I have been blind to my woefully overweight state and did not become aware of it until our new hipster President was elected. The svelte silhouette of the magisterial Barack Obama highlighted my own bloated condition. This revelation occurred five days after Obama won the election. My wife and I celebrated the Dawn of a New Hipster Age the following Sunday by having a brunch in Hermosa Beach. Uncomfortably full, I convinced my wife Carrie that we should take a stroll down Pier Avenue with the hope that each step might make my breaths less strained. Alas, it was almost impossible for me to walk. Overcome with joy at the knowledge that our new President was a well-spoken intellectual cosmopolitan, I had just ingested a 5,000-calorie breakfast of macadamia nut pancakes, French toast made with Hawaiian sweet bread, turkey sausage patties, and scrambled eggs with melted cheddar all washed down with several tall glasses of freshly-squeezed orange juice. As I strutted my 242 pounds outside the buffet room and past a clothing boutique window, I saw the reflection of a portly gentleman, dressed in safari shorts and a turquoise tank top, which sported the striking image of the iconic sea turtle. This unsightly man I gazed upon looked like the stereotype of an overfed American and was clearly anti-hipster. I walked closer toward the bloated image and I was overcome by the shock and anxiety that the reflection was not some other guy for whom I could judge with gleeful ridicule but me. I was that dude, the type of person that I had mocked and scorned most of my life. This was a huge moment for me, what literary people might call an “epiphany,” and I was fortunate to have experienced it. Most people are denied, or deny themselves, such moments of clarity. It is my belief that something like 95% of the human race walk around Planet Earth with their heads up their butts and this is how they die—never knowing what the hell is really going on. But on that clement November day in Hermosa Beach when I saw that the corpulent man in the window was in fact me, my head uncorked from my butt and I was able to see reality for what it really was. And this reality—me being a chubster—was contrary to the new America our lean, hip President was trying to create. Losing weight—at least 30 pounds—was now a moral imperative. To do so was to show my fidelity and patriotism, not only to my country but to the new Hipster Zeitgeist.

Joining the Hipster Jean Cult

I had my first consultation with Zevon and Petra while dining at a tapas bar in Los Feliz. As we munched on salmon and sweet potato croquettes and washed them down with Lambic Framboise,  we discussed my woefully frumpy dress code. Petra made it clear that my polyester wrinkle-free elastic waistband khakis had become both obsolescent and unpatriotic in the face of our a new multi-ethnic President whose elegant fashion wear, mostly dark two-button suits with white dress shirts and tastefully placed boutonnieres, had become the inspiration of such fashion luminaries as Sonia Rykiel, Donatella Versace, and Jean-Charles De Castelbajac.  In addition to buying similar wardrobes, I would need to find some casual fashion that would complement our culture’s shift to Hipsterdome. Specifically, I would need a pair of hipster jeans. This would prove a difficult task as I had purchased the twenty-dollar variety of jeans at Costco and Target over the last decade or so. Petra made it clear that this simply would not do. She handed me a list of “acceptable” brands and told me to acquaint myself with it.

Evisu, True Religion, G-Star, Slim Flare, Citizens of Humanity, Nudie, 7 For All Mankind, Diesel . . . I found myself a bit intoxicated as I recited the names of jeans that cost between $200-400, jeans that boasted of denim so soft, so textured, so resplendent, so magical, so distinctive, and so empowering that they put all other jeans to shame and rendered the wearers of those inferior jeans pariahs unworthy of the New Hipster Age. The glorious name-brand jeans I am speaking of had almost supernatural powers so that simply wearing them would afford me membership to a special club, a high-brow coterie of people in-the-know, people who could not be bothered by the rest of mundane humanity.

This was not always so. For many years designer jeans, especially acid wash jeans and jeans that featured lightening bolts on the back pocket, were considered passé, low-brow, and vulgar as a more minimalist approach to jeans, like 501 Levis, was considered the utmost expression in good taste. But the jean makers brainstormed and found ways to make designer jeans cool again. They used sheer fabrics, cool logos, such as gorillas and a smiling Buddha, and “distressed” the jeans by shredding them with cheese graters, scratching them with sandpaper, and shooting bullets at them, so that the wearer looked like he had just doubled as Bruce Willis’ stuntman in his latest blockbuster. Designers jeans were chic again. And to keep their mystique, the marketers often drove them underground, keeping them away from mainstream stores so that if one wanted to keep updated on the new designer jeans, one would have to join a secret society of jean fetishists.

 This underground designer jean society often communicated on Internet message boards, chat sites, and met monthly at swank cocktail parties where they would show-off their jeans to others whose jean expertise made them qualified to truly appreciate the way the jeans showcased their svelte thighs, cupped and massaged their rock-hard buttocks, and delineated the appropriate, eye-brow-raising bulges in their serpentine crotch. Marriages and other dynamic relationships were born from these designer jean parties where matches were made in denim heaven.

Of course, ordinary people lacked the imagination and refined sensibility to seek out and wear the designer jeans I am speaking of. Rather, only a rare breed, a self-described cognoscenti, coveted these elite jeans. They were people who were plugged-in to a mysterious network through which their belonging entitled them to know everything that went on in this world that “really mattered” before it “went mainstream.” They had, for example, unique access to special underground warehouses in the garment district where they could buy jeans as rare and mysterious as the Dead Sea Scrolls. These were remote locations so secret they had to be blindfolded and escorted down several spiral stairs to a dank basement where an old lady with moth-ball breath would rudely shove the pair of designer jeans into their hands after they gave her a wad of cash. They weren’t even allowed to try the jeans on, but because their very elusiveness gave them unusually high cachet among the designer jean community, they took the chance that they’d be a perfect fit and usually they were right and found that these underground designer jeans afforded them glories that no other jean could give them.

This isn’t to say members of the elite designer jean cult were absent of problems. They had some, to be sure. One is that once they put on a pair of jeans that they absolutely loved, they found it almost impossible to take the jeans off, even for showers, the beach, and bedtime, so that their jeans doubled as bathing suits and pajama bottoms. Also the first day they got their jeans they’d often be overcome with a sort of ambulatory mania by which they’d feel compelled to walk all over town so that the world could see them in our perfect-fit jeans. They’d strut across the mall, around the neighborhood, and into strange homes and do a pirouette until they were escorted off the premises or chased away by vicious attack dogs. They couldn’t wash these jeans because every wash faded and thus diminished them. Thus they walked around in filthy, great looking denim rags, Fabreezing them, but soon, that's wasn’t enough to curtail the stench.

I wanted to join their ranks. I wanted to wear fabulous jeans that allowed me to wear a tattered shirt with hole-ridden sneakers and still be “dressed up” and so I spent hundreds of dollars on G-Stars, Lucky Brand, Diesel, and Banana Republic jeans. My attempts at becoming a cool jean wearer failed. One problem is that the fit often looked good in the store’s dressing room mirror but when I got home the pants seemed too baggy or slouched in the wrong place or simply lacked the pizzazz I saw inside the store, a phenomenon I attributed to the store’s “showroom” lighting.

And then one day while traipsing at the supermarket in my new G-Stars I discovered the root of my problem: Two skinny girls stared at my tight-fitting jeans before bursting into shrill laughter. I didn’t know what they were laughing at, but then I looked at my reflection in the dairy case and saw two bulging thighs that looked less human and more brontosaurus-like. The jeans looked so ridiculously spray-painted on my chunky quads that I would have looked more appropriate wearing a undersized kilt. It was time to face the facts: I was not built to wear ultra-cool jeans because my Irish and Polish ancestors were surly peasants with long trunks and chunky legs who survived draughts with their sluggish metabolism and repelled invasions by intimidating their intruders—barbarians, marauders, Huns—from their precious potato larder. I can imagine one of my ancient relatives, a burly brute, clobbering a would-be thief over the head with a huge raw potato before taking a bite out of the rock-hard vegetable, his teeth black and rotten. My family history dictates that no matter what I do I am destined to be built like a gorilla with body lines unsuitable for Speedo bikini briefs, body-hugging silk shirts, Italian leisure suits, and, yes, designer jeans. Logic dictated, then, that I should give up my taste for designer jeans and opt for baggy Jeanie pants and overalls.

I called Petra and vented my frustration. She said she was sorry and regretted telling me earlier that I was too big to be a hipster.

“The hipster always has a tight ass,” she said. “And the trick is he maintains his tight ass without trying.”

“Where does that leave me?”

“You will have to work hard at turning those buns of yours into steel.”

“But you just said the hipster never tries to be lean. He just is.”

“Or he makes an effort, but doesn’t tell anyone.”

It seems like the first rule in Hipster Club is that as soon as you let people know you’re trying to be a hipster, you are no longer a hipster. 

Zevon Hipster Tip #2: Adding Yams to Pizza Is Very Hipster

 

I explained to Zevon that there were many habits and appetites I had that were very anti-hipster. Watching football all Sunday. Calling in sport talk radio shows and being on hold for over an hour while eating Doritos and reading my latest issue of Motor Trend. Then there was the matter of pizza. I could never wean myself off this essential food group. Zevon said not to fret. One of the secrets of being a hipster was taking something that’s anti-hipster and doing a twist on it so that it becomes very hipster. For example, dating a stripper is crass and very anti-hipster. But dating a stripper who is also a published author and tours the university lecture circuit enlightening the country about her iconoclastic insights about sexuality is very, very hipster. Or watching football all weekend is very anti-hipster. But watching football obsessively and blogging about this emotionally-arrested pastime  by finding some esoteric angle in which you show that football, both its structure and temperament, is rooted in the pseudo-historical Gaelic folklore of Lebor Gabala, translated into The Book of Invasions, and suddenly you are very, very hipster.

This principle applies to pizza. Order a pepperoni pizza from Dominoes and you’re a hopeless slob. Put yams on your pizza, use corn meal, and make the dough yourself and suddenly you’re a hipster champion.

I have to say, even though I did not make the homemade pizza with yams and mango chicken sausage and had to rely on my wife’s cooking acumen for this delicious meal, I still gained serious Hipster Points and suddenly felt Hipsterdome was not so elusive after all.

 

Zevon Hipster Tip #1: Know the Original Hipsters

Zevon begins by giving me a lecture about the origins of hipsterdome:

You need points of reference and inspiration. Hipsterdome isn't entered through mimicry; it's entered through tasteful remixing. For starters, you might want to explore the aesthetic and mental space that exists between Oscar Levant and Gene Kelly as they appeared in the fevered 1951 musical An American In Paris. See Levant there, a little gangly and serious. His mouth can't conceal something brooding in him, despite his brilliance at the piano. Kelly, tap shoes on, is all effortless ebullience here, pure old America distilled and dandified while he sings and dances. Kelly's free to be fey, and free to use rich women to his advantage, and free to paint mediocre Paris street scenes, and free to sing with the little French children. Levant is free to dream of symphonies, dark solipsistic reveries emanating from his frenetic fingers:

An American in Paris

The point is, America is the new Europe. A good place to get some hipster inspiration is through a Technicolor depiction of a time when Europe was the new Europe and Paris the perennial hipster shining star. You will find the seeds to your hipster self somewhere between Levant's dark talents and Kelly's nimble, naive purity. I'll leave it to you to fill in the details. I trust you will find a way to move closer to the dome.

I've tried to absorb the history lesson. France was the hipster Mecca and now, apparently, it's America. Or as Zevon puts it, "America is the new Europe." In other words, our new President Barack Obama is more hip and more European than any European ever was and that makes us, as Americans, the coolest people in the world and yet we’re known to hate the whole hipster French thing. It's all so confusing and now I feel more lost and befuddled than ever.