CHAPTER 5

Conspicuous Production

For most consumers that Earthbound Farm organic baby arugula from Whole Foods isn’t an opportunity to dismantle the infrastructures of the modern world; it’s simply salad. Dressed with a little Tuscan extra-virgin olive oil, a splash of sherry vinegar, some shavings of Parmigiano Reggiano, and fleur de sel from the Camargue, it makes a very nice appetizer. To insist that we are consuming not just salad but a vision of society isn’t wrong, but it’s biting off more than most people are able and willing to chew.

—Steven Shapin, “Paradise Sold,” New Yorker, May 15, 2006

Beyond the renovated industrial lofts of downtown Los Angeles, through the rapidly gentrifying Echo Park and the already hipsterized Silver Lake is Glassell Park. While much of East LA is going the way of Silver Lake and Los Feliz, Glassell Park is rarely mentioned in the gentrification discussion. This is partially due to the lingering gang activity, and persistent reputation for crime (whether accurate or not). The area also lacks parks, cafés, bookstores, and the other sort of amenities that the young, urban creative types seek out. Physically, it lacks the interesting architecture of downtown, the natural beauty of the West Side’s oceanfront, and the hills and bohemian art scene of the East Side. Unlike most of Los Angeles, there’s empty space, seemingly plenty of it. The industrial corridor along San Fernando road remains pretty active. Big trucks park outside the warehouses and factories, and blast down the road toward the Interstate 5. There is the glamorous noir of the Hollywood Hills that feels just out of a Raymond Chandler novel, and then there’s Glassell Park, where the noir feels like something more akin to Escape from LA with Kurt Russell raging around a fiery urban wasteland.

But these demerits allow Glassell Park to play home to what could easily be the next big wave in American industrial activity. For in Glassell Park, there are big, old warehouses being used for exactly what they were designed for—not nightclubs, artist studios, or big gallery space (although there is certainly some of that too)—but for making stuff. These warehouses are not out in the middle of Minnesota, but rather in the heart of one of America’s major metropolitan areas. And what’s going on here is both a new concept for America and a return to previous, almost pre–Industrial Revolution production of small-batch, artisanal products made, packaged, and sold in the same country of origin, with a clear story and road map from conception to production to consumption. Here in Glassell Park, I got to see this phenomenon really happening, and how it could fundamentally change America. While in Veblen’s time status was a function of the product itself, in the twenty-first century status emerges from how the product is made and its point of origin. Rather than conspicuous consumption, today many goods attain their status from their conspicuous production.

This particular story starts with the coffee shop Intelligentsia. Intelligentsia, born out of Chicago in the late 1990s, is one of the first post-Starbucks success stories. Unlike Starbucks, which has 13,000 stores nationwide, Intelligentsia only has nine—a few in Chicago, one in San Francisco, two in Los Angeles, and a newly opened branch in Manhattan, near the High Line in Chelsea. The important thing to keep in mind when talking to anyone who works for Intelligentsia is that it is nothing like Starbucks, barring the fact that both companies have convinced consumers to spend five dollars on a cup of coffee. However, where Starbucks adds a dollop of caramel and a cup or two of milk to make the consumer’s money worth it and essentially creates a liquid dessert, Intelligentsia has managed to get consumers to spend the same amount for a plain cup of coffee, dairy and syrup not included. In fact, the line around the block at the Silver Lake shop is mainly for their slow-brewed obscure coffees from faraway parts of the world, not cappuccinos and certainly not the decadent 510-calorie Pumpkin Spice Latte, which, if requested, would get you laughed right out of the store onto Sunset Boulevard. Where Starbucks made its fortune in bringing luxury to the masses, Intelligentsia makes its (smaller) fortune proclaiming its rarity.

Intelligentsia belongs to an emerging group of companies focusing on “specialty coffee.” For most people, Starbucks would be the obvious example of such a consumer good. However, Starbucks may be a step up from Maxwell House and Nescafé, but it mainly operates in a space that produces coffee-esque drinks, where coffee is not necessarily the whole point. To put things in perspective, Starbucks is one of the biggest purchasers of dairy products in the United States. Specialty coffee companies are a different breed altogether. Intelligentsia’s claim to fame is that it focuses on the coffee beans, how they are roasted, how the coffee is brewed, and perhaps most importantly, where the coffee comes from in the first place.

I arrived one Wednesday morning to Intelligentsia’s Glassell Park Roasting Works warehouse, where I was greeted by Mark Zambito, the manager of the Silver Lake coffee house. Mark and I had met a few weeks back to talk about Intelligentsia as a consumer good, and in listening to his discussion of “craftsmanship,” “select harvesting,” “green buyers,” and in-house “educators” to train the baristas (almost daily) how to brew particular coffee beans, it became apparent that something else was going on. Most of us have been brewing some version of coffee since we were teenagers, but specialty coffee is more akin to wine than tea or Coca-Cola, and the process of acquiring beans and roasting them (never mind actually making a cup of coffee) took such an amazing amount of time and resources that I was surprised that a cup of Intelligentsia coffee didn’t cost more.

Zambito is the picture of Silver Lake, or Williamsburg, or any other hipster enclave. Thin, small, wearing a tie and vest, Zambito is soft-spoken, but when he does talk it is clear that he is incredibly knowledgeable about all things coffee, and is equally passionate (or even more so). Zambito doesn’t spend much time talking about how good Intelligentsia’s coffee tastes; in fact he focuses mainly on the process of making good coffee, starting with how the company acquires the beans. As he explains, coffee cherries (that’s what they are before they are picked and roasted into coffee beans) do not ripen evenly in a bundle. So in order to get the ripe cherries, they have to be handpicked, then put in water to see which cherries sink and which ones float; then the ripe floating ones are skimmed off for production. If you’re Starbucks, with 13,000 stores, the sheer cost of labor for all that handpicked coffee would be prohibitive, but for Intelligentsia, it’s possible.

Of course in order to handpick the right coffee cherries at a large scale that serves several major American metropolitan areas, Intelligentsia still needs some larger structure of operation and a good, trustworthy relationship with coffee farmers, most of whom live and grow coffee in East Africa and Central America. Intelligentsia gets farmers to fastidiously pick perfectly ripe cherries by simply paying them more. Starbucks, famous for its “fair trade” (which has been criticized as a bit of a misnomer), doesn’t hold a candle to the practice of “direct trade,” whereby Intelligentsia works with the farmers themselves, removing the middleman.1 According to those I spoke with at Intelligentsia, this practice gives farmers 25% more money than fair trade, and also allows Intelligentsia not only to supervise harvesting, but also to enforce fair labor practices and environmental sustainability, both essential aspects of the company’s policies. Intelligentsia sends staff to far-flung parts of the world to develop relationships with farmers, establish trust, and then oversee the farms and harvesting processes. This part of the company is wholly separate from the coffee roasting, brewing, and selling business.

This area of the business is run by Geoff Watts, one of the owners of Intelligentsia and a green coffee buyer for the company. He was charged with acquiring the unroasted, immature green-colored coffee beans, essentially the beginning stage of the entire process. Watts is the opposite of Zambito—he looks nothing like the Silver Lake denizens he employs and who patronize Intelligentsia. The day I met him, he was wearing a flannel checkered shirt without a hint of irony. He has nice, thick, floppy hair and looks like he’d be more comfortable in Humboldt County than in the heart of LA. Watts’s business acumen and articulation are so impressive that I asked him where he got his MBA; he replied he had a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and mainly picked up the knowledge on the job. Watts used to oversee all of the coffee buying, but as Intelligentsia grew, more buyers were necessary and now he only manages 20%. But that 20% requires detailed dedication and extensive research. “We see coffee farmers as our partners and we need a team. We can invest in roasters and baristas but how the coffee is grown is 60–80% of the coffee, so we need them to do a good job. We went down there [to Central America] and saw how destitute they [farmers] are and that they were making bad coffee but not because they can’t make better coffee but because they didn’t have the resources.”

Watts continued, emphasizing his point with his hand, “You need to plant the right coffee, harvest selectively. We pay them to pick only the ripe fruits, put them in hermetically sealed bags to protect them. If they can do this, we’ll pay a really great price. We also pay based on the real cost of production, not the futures market [like other coffee buyers]. We invest in a lot of these farmers so they have finances, resources, and knowledge. We bring them to our stores, bring them all together to meet the other farmers, we bring in scientists on the frontiers of coffee quality research so they can learn [and] learn from each other. A farmer from Kenya will show El Salvadorian farmers their techniques and vice versa.”

With roasting machines in Los Angeles and Chicago, the company is able to roast all of its own beans, primarily selling in its own stores but also to other small specialty coffee shops and more recently in Whole Foods and other upscale grocery stores. This is another interesting aspect of their production process. Intelligentsia has managed to acquire some of the last of the Gothot Ideal rapid roasting machines, highly sought after roasters from the 1940s and 1950s that are no longer made. Stumptown specialty coffee, with eight locations nationally, also uses 1950s-era Probat roasters (the company that bought out Gothot), and this is a selling point for them too. Standing next to one of these machines as the coffee beans were being churned over slowly and methodically, I asked the roaster why these machines were better than something more technologically advanced. The flames for roasting, he explained, were at the top rather than the bottom of the roasting tin, which allows for a more gentle and precise roast. While I still can’t figure out why Probat doesn’t just make more of these machines, without question the rarity and return to a previous era is part of the appeal (along with the distinct taste of the coffee beans). All parts of the production process are transparent. When you buy a pound of coffee from Intelligentsia you will see the farm, country of origin, roast—every aspect is outlined on the bag.

After all the due diligence, it would be hard to say that Intelligentsia is ripping anyone off with their $5 coffees. This company really cares and spends a shocking amount of time getting things right. Their dedication, from the very first green coffee cherry to the small cup of coffee sold at Chelsea’s High Line Hotel, housed in an old seminary, is remarkable. Intelligentsia workers, whether baristas or the founders of the company, are both knowledgeable of and involved in every precise aspect of the production process, and this process is tied inextricably to the company’s identity and unique selling points and actual product. All of this is what makes the coffee taste good both physically and metaphysically. Intelligentsia would have attracted employees like Watts and Zambito, but it couldn’t successfully sustain a business, with lines out the door, in the heart of Los Angeles and Manhattan, if it didn’t have consumers who cared about the exact same things. Consumers’ desire for these less ostentatious forms of consumption is crucial to conspicuous production’s success.

I found this out the morning I arrived at the Intelligentsia Roasting Works just in time for what specialty coffee brewers, buyers, and baristas call a “cupping,” which is the process of tasting particular roasts and coffee beans and determining the precise ratio of water to grounds and the brewing method and timing to produce the best flavor. The taste tests commence after the coffee grounds have been extracted for 15 minutes—whereby hot water is poured over the coffee grounds and then the grounds rise to the top of the water. After the fifteen minutes are up, the tasters “break the crust” and scoop the grounds off the top. Then, over the course of 45 minutes, two cups of each coffee are tasted (to ensure quality control) for a total of three “passes.” Akin to a religious ritual, the cupping is an almost silent production, bar the slurping and spitting noises, as the tasters move around the table evaluating the coffees brewed at different temperatures. For each pass, each taster scribbles down various notes, marking the coffee’s acidity, sweetness, and emerging compounds—whether chocolate, toffee, or berries—creating an aggregate score out of 100. The first pass focuses on sweetness and acidity, the second on flavor and aftertaste, and the third makes small adjustments to early assessments. Watts explained, “For example, you thought you tasted blackberry but it’s actually raspberry.” Only after each coffee is scored by each taster and the comments and scores discussed are the farm, bean, country of origin, and roast revealed.

At this particular cupping, the four tasters were considering 13 different coffees and, despite a seemingly subjective process of evaluation (“reminds me of caramel apple,” remarked one taster. “I got that blackberry when it was kind of hot,” “I tried to say it’s ‘dark chocolate’ but actually it tastes like mold,” said one of the young women), they generally arrived at the same conclusions, scoring a Kenyan bean roasted in Portland with the highest mark of that day’s cupping (90/100).

The process of evaluating specialty coffee is not unlike that of tasting this year’s Bordeaux wine, and the coffee tasters may not be as skilled as sommeliers but they operate within the same space. Assessing specialty coffee involves a process of tasting at different stages and different temperatures and quantifying a seemingly subjective and taste-driven product. And the coffee cherries, how and when they were picked, and seasonal fluctuations determine the ultimate score, just like grapes for wine. Therein lies the key distinction between Intelligentsia and Starbucks, and it transcends taste. Rather, what makes Intelligentsia fundamentally different from Starbucks is that its founders, producers, and customers all really care about where the stuff comes from. Starbucks may stamp “fair trade” on its pounds of coffee, but Intelligentsia buyers actually become friends with their coffee farmers and fly them to Los Angeles to meet the rest of the staff (and some of their customers).

THE RISE OF CONSPICUOUS PRODUCTION

This latter point is the key to understanding not only Intelligentsia but also the rise of a social and economic consciousness and awareness emerging across the Western world and its cultural, post-scarcity goods. The rise in specialty coffee is really the story of conspicuous production and it can be seen at grocery stores, clothing boutiques, farmers’ markets, and restaurants across the world. Conspicuous production goods are a key type of aspirational class consumption. For the aspirational class, we are what we eat, drink, and consume more generally, and this is why for some goods the opaque process of production has been replaced by transparency for every step. This transparency doesn’t simply add value—it is the value—of many cultural goods. We will eat the smaller, sadder apples from the farmers’ market because we met the farmer and we know he didn’t put any nasty chemicals on his fruit. We will spend three times more on a linen shirt because we know it was picked up from a small shop somewhere on the Amalfi coast, and we met the store owner who personally made the voyage and met the tailor (and his children). We will slather on organic coconut oil instead of Retin-A, and eat in restaurants that charge $20 for mac and cheese because they list the originating dairy farm in chalk on a rustic sign in the front. Or, as Mark Greif observes in his book Essays Against Everything, “When you eat the supermarket tomato that tastes terrible, it is ‘terrible’; when you bite into the heirloom tomato that happens to be tasteless and watery, you adjust it to taste ‘real.’”2 The production, rather than the consumption, becomes the key conspicuous status signal embraced by this new formation of the economic and cultural system, which is why we see the unemployed hipsters at the same coffee shop as the successful Hollywood screenwriter. Finally, after centuries of diametrical opposition, these two groups have banded together as the aspirational class, and they want and value the same things.³ The emergence of conspicuous production in the twenty-first century revolves around three key forces: the backlash against globalization, the rise of information and the premium on transparent information, and the luxury to care about these things as a result of a post-scarcity, postmodern society and its values. We see this transformation in where we buy groceries, the restaurants we frequent, what we wear, and even our toothpaste. Capitalism, historically dividing the capitalist from the proletariat, has been turned on its head.

MORE THAN JUST ARUGULA: FOOD AS CONSPICUOUS PRODUCTION

We may thank Starbucks for introducing the idea of the $5 cup of fair trade Kenyan coffee, but Whole Foods is the mainstream, mass-produced leitmotif of the conspicuous production movement. Founded in 1980, Whole Foods emerged from the bohemian tradition of Trader Joe’s and the crunchy Berkeley Bowl and somewhere along the way started selling arugula and chard for five bucks a pop. Over the course of the last several decades, Whole Foods’ founder, John Mackey, has transformed his natural food store, originating from his Austin apartment, into a $9 billion-plus enterprise with more than 300 locations.

People who shop at Whole Foods are not oblivious to its contradictions of capitalism. Affectionately called Whole Paycheck, the grocery store beams purity, goodwill, and a return to nature—but all at a shocking price tag that is unaffordable for most of society. Whole Foods shoppers know that they can get organic tomatoes for half the cost at Trader Joe’s, or even the local chain, but the grocery store creates an entire shopping experience that for many is worth the price. Even people who probably don’t earn the income to afford luxury food (those same unemployed playwrights and artists buying $5 cups of coffee) end up in the store’s deli buying sweet summer kale salad for $11.99 a pound. Since the regional stores have quite a bit of autonomy, local distinctiveness emerges. In New York City’s Columbus Circle location, jazz plays softly, while others, like the Orlando, Florida outpost, offer chair massages. Glendale, California’s Whole Foods doesn’t offer massages but indie music plays in the background, with a pressed juice and coffee bar at the entrance. Even though shopping at Whole Foods is not marginally but significantly more expensive than Trader Joe’s (which offers similar kinds of food) or Albertson’s or Giant (which has more common brand-name food), many still trek to Whole Foods every week, telling themselves that the food is better there than at other, more convenient grocery store locations.

But consumers may be telling themselves something because they want to believe it. I’m not a foodie, so these minor nuances in taste are lost on me, but I end up shopping here too. Honestly, I, like many a fellow grocery shopper, go to Whole Foods mainly because of the Whole Foods experience. The stores tend to be relatively big, not very crowded (or offer very efficient check-out lines even in the heart of Manhattan), there’s reasonably good music, and coffee, juice bars, and various amenities offered while shopping. Then there’s humane chicken, strawberries without pesticides, and weirdly colored vegetables that make a consumer feel virtuous and counterbalance the bars of chocolate and coffeecake that may also be piled in their cart. All of these items have stories of the places where they are created and the people who create them built into their branding. “Zen muffins” from a small neighborhood in Los Angeles, whole milk with a little picture of the farm where the cows roam freely and happily, Mary’s free-range Heritage farm turkeys from California’s San Joaquin Valley, and yes, Intelligentsia coffee. This storytelling is so effective that even the chocolate and the coffee cake seem less bad, maybe even good for you, compared to similar forms found at other grocery stores—even though surely they are not.

Whole Foods makes you believe you are a better global citizen and healthier person by shopping there even if the calorie content, nutrition facts, and price tag will quantitatively and insistently tell you otherwise. A wide-scale Stanford University research project studying the importance of organic foods compared to conventional fruit and vegetables revealed that the former were no better for us in a meaningful way. Or more plainly put, as my sons’ pediatrician wearily remarked when I was discussing Plum’s Organic Peach baby puree with him, “Did you eat organic when you grew up? I didn’t. We’re fine, aren’t we?”

But Whole Foods’ success isn’t about organic products or better tasting food. Whole Foods’ secret lies in how it effectively creates an identity and story to which people wish to subscribe. The key to understanding Whole Foods and the whole conspicuous production movement itself is recognizing that it is about the process and its implications rather than the product itself: Buying Whole Foods groceries signals consumer awareness, an animal rights ethos, environmental consciousness and, more broadly and perhaps most significantly, being an informed and conscientious member of society, just like Intelligentsia does on a much smaller scale. One does not attain any such attributes at a local Safeway or Giant, which, fair to say, is a neutral shopping experience for most. To understand the powerful consumer identity of Whole Foods, simply consider that it’s one of the only chain grocery stores to offer one.

When asked how Whole Foods selects locations, Mackey himself explained, “Well, there’s no more important decision that you’re going to make than where you locate a store. If we’re going to invest, depending on the size of the store, anywhere from $8 million to $20-plus million in capital for a new store, and sign a lease of usually 20 years or longer, we’re making a long-term commitment and putting up a lot of capital.” Mackey continues,

So we spend a lot of time and energy sorting through that. We do site analysis. We analyze our competition in an area. We look at the demographics of who’s living there. We look at education levels, income. There’s a whole bunch of variables, but I think by far the most important variable is the number of college graduates within a 16-minute drive time … I can tell you that about 80 percent of our customers have college degrees. I can speculate that our customers, on average, are better educated and better informed. And a college degree, while not a perfect proxy for that, is the best we have in terms of demographic data that we can get. If people are going to change their diets and become more health conscious, they need to be generally better informed.4

Mackey is right. Education level correlates with higher levels of knowledge and higher income levels, much of which is linked to greater concern for animal welfare, fair trade, and environmentalism. We’re more likely to find animal rights activists among the metropolitan elite than in gun-slinging NRA territory in rural Pennsylvania, which is why we see Whole Foods mainly in urban areas and their close hinterlands. But more importantly, Whole Foods propagates the group identification attributes to which members of the aspirational class espouse and aspire. Just walking into the grocery store suggests one’s values are on track or certainly will be guided correctly during the shopping experience. Even if one shops at the store weekly, there is always a social, political, and spiritual place just out of reach, and Whole Foods’ pressed juices might get you there. I feel like a jerk when I turn up at the checkout without my reusable bag, and am catapulted into better person status when I buy the step 4 humanely treated beef for $15.99 a pound. Whole Foods allows us to consume our way to a particular type of persona, and the Whole Foods reusable bags, 365-product line, and organic local red chard are the conspicuous goods that uphold this identity. So actually, that Earthbound Farms baby arugula is more than just salad.⁵

Whole Foods offers the conspicuous production story to millions of people in a fancy, highly commodified package. Yet, the same concept emerges less formally from farmers’ markets, curated clothing boutiques, and farm-to-table restaurants popping up in small, affluent towns and major metros around the Western world. Coined “localism” by travel sections in newspapers and special features on Umbrian cheese, these entrepreneurial ventures convince consumers that in addition to buying something for themselves, they are doing a public service to smalltown business owners. In the general vernacular, localism describes the production of goods, particularly in arts and crafts and cuisine, which develop from the resources and skills of a local region and are sold within that market. It makes consumers feel as though they’ve returned to the trade and agrarian society of the pre–Industrial Age. It used to be enough that buying shoes from Italy or perfume from France provided authenticity.6 Today, consumers demand more: where the product is made, how it is made, and that the production process is fair, non-exploitative, and environmentally conscious are all important factors. These data points justify both the products and our choice, as consumers, to buy them.

Farmers’ markets perhaps most closely embody the merging of localism and conspicuous production and successfully exist in the heart of distinctly non-agrarian cities across the United States. Any weekend afternoon in Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, or Notting Hill offers half a dozen such gatherings of farm-fresh produce heralding from pastures and fields located in the city’s hinterlands. Farmers’ markets allow farmers to sell directly to consumers, essentially turning Karl Marx’s alienated labor on its head. Or as Elizabeth Bowman, who runs the Altadena Farmers Market just outside of Los Angeles, explained, “Farmers’ markets are about reinstating that trust between the producer and consumer of a good [and making it] a direct relationship … [But] in terms of time and what you get back, the tents, the insurance, the gas mileage, it is actually much harder to find people to commit to show up to the market. [Given the above variables], you’re pricing under market value for issues of food justice.” Indeed, from an economies-of-scale or -scope perspective, the farmers’ market makes no sense—there aren’t significant advantages for the farmer or the consumers, who would otherwise be Whole Foods customers perhaps avoiding long lines and the parking lot. People don’t go to farmers’ markets for deals—most of the fruit and vegetables are the same price as in upscale grocery stores—nor do they go to get diversity of produce. After all, the farmers only sell what’s in season, rather than the cornucopia of flown-in exotic, out-of-season fruit found at the average supermarket in the dead of winter.

Yet, despite the unprofitable and constricting elements of the business, farmers’ markets are growing in great strides: According to the USDA, in the past five years the number of farmers’ markets in the United States has nearly doubled from 4,685 to more than 8,000 markets nationally. Since 1994 (the earliest documented figures on farmers’ markets), the number has increased almost 500%.7 Simultaneously, Whole Foods (certainly very profitable but operating under the same ethos) has grown 350% over the past 15 years, operating 365 stores, primarily in the United States. All of these heirloom tomatoes and pesticide-free blackberries are underpinned by another surprising trend: For the first time since World War II, the number of agricultural farms is growing in America.⁸ In the UK, farmers’ market revenues grew 32% from 2002 to 2011.⁹

These statistics are part and parcel of a number of other unforeseen trends occurring within food production. Farmers’ magazines are gaining a greater following (and new ones are being published even today), farm-to-table restaurants are becoming commonplace, and community urban farms are the norm from Brooklyn to the Mission to Santa Monica. The ethos reinforcing these changes is perhaps most famously championed by Alice Waters, the godmother of the slow food movement and founder of Chez Panisse, one of the most challenging restaurants in the world at which to get a reservation. Opened in 1971, Chez Panisse serves all organic, local, and biodiverse-sensitive cuisine. Chez Panisse remains expensive and exclusive (not necessarily by Waters’s design, but surely a result of the ongoing demand for slow food in Berkeley, California where the restaurant is located). Slow Food is a movement focused on sustaining local ecosystems, and as such the cuisine is regional and derives from seasonal ingredients local to the production and consumption. In recent years other restaurants and local establishments are taking Waters’s cue and putting the produce from farmers’ markets in front of many more of their diners as well. Forage, a Los Angeles farm-to-table restaurant, works directly with urban home growers (that is, people who are not farmers on a large scale but harvest small crops of vegetables and fruit, often grown in their backyard). Forage’s website features pictures of the farmers and the particular produce they provide to the restaurant—figs from Pasadena brought by Malika, Santa Monica apricots from the Lewis’s backyard, and so forth. Forage also features the home growers’ own blogs, in which they provide explanations for growing produce and general modus vivendi. (Forage’s chef, Jason Kim, used to be the sous chef for the award-winning Lucques and is a protégé of Waters herself.) As Eugene Ahn, Forage’s head of PR, explained, “Jason was immersed in the values [of Waters] … Here in this world of restaurants, it’s so critical that if you want to be authentic, being able to share that with other people, falls into this category of making available your process to others.” But Kim wanted to do something Waters couldn’t do. While Forage operates largely under the same principles as Chez Panisse, the restaurant is much more egalitarian. “[Jason had] rarified but accessible values towards food. He wanted to take the $50 dining experience and make it a $15 experience—something you can experience daily.”

Indeed, that is exactly the experience of Forage, a small restaurant barely noticeable against the bustle and endless automobile traffic of Sunset Boulevard. Yet inside it’s packed with bohemian locals, ironic hipsters, screenwriters, and affluent, educated stay-at-home moms having lunch with their kids. Around the world, newspapers from Hong Kong to London are writing up its practices and cuisine. The food really does taste good, and as with Intelligentsia, I’m puzzled as to how they pull it off and why they charge so little for all that effort. The same could be said for Bare Burger, a chain with outposts in Los Angeles and New York, which offers all organic, pasture-raised meats, or Shake Shack, a national fast food chain that produces hormone- and antibiotic-free hot dogs and burgers and cage-free chicken. Both of these chain restaurants manage to offer their environmentally conscious food at affordable price points. Commitment to values rather than profit drives conspicuous producers. They could make more by charging more or lowering standards, but these actions would challenge their basic ethos of how things should be made and sold.

In ways big and small, the organic, slow, and farmers’ food movement is part and parcel of twenty-first-century conspicuous production. What makes it so pervasive and prolific is its ability to bring together people from opposite ends of capitalism’s spectrum. Or, as one observer put it with regard to the magazine Modern Farmer, “That means the magazine has attracted readers who include an Amish farmer and vegetable supplier to Whole Foods, Brooklyn rooftop farmers harvesting kale and broccoli and myriad young farmers going back to the land.”10

The environmental awareness and social consciousness that Whole Foods and farmers’ markets propagate is what inspires many of its dedicated consumers. What the sociologist Josee Johnston calls the “citizen-consumer hybrid” of ethical consumption is the way in which we use our consumer choices as a form of social practice. By shopping at Whole Foods, consumers “vote with their dollar” and signal their belief in animal rights, sustainable agriculture, and fair trade, essentially politicizing their grocery store experience—why else would anyone spend so much money on the same bread, beef, and vegetables that could be bought elsewhere for significantly less? Alison Alkon’s study of farmers’ markets reveals that both the farmers and the consumers are actively willing to sacrifice for what they believe is a more morally sound, sustainable food system. Consumers realize that they are paying a premium to shop at farmers’ markets but see that as the “cost” of supporting local and ethical food practices, while farmers consciously sacrifice more lucrative financial opportunities to be a part of a greater social good.11

But Johnston would argue this is naive and self-interested nonetheless, particularly on the part of the consumers. As she points out, the environmental awareness and social consciousness that give Whole Foods items (and farmers’ markets) a cost premium are actually about meeting personal desires around identity rather than necessarily enabling collective action to solve larger social problems. Johnston posits that it’s easy to be ethical and a “good citizen” at Whole Foods, where consumers are offered an array of consumer choices within a milieu of jazz music, cappuccinos, and ease (not exactly the same experience as being a Peace Corp volunteer).¹² From Johnston’s perspective, shopping at Whole Foods makes consumers feel good about themselves, but it does not actually make the world a better place. Similarly, the idyllic depiction of the farmers’ market and local food movement in general is what scholars have called the “white farm imaginary,” which is the over-valorizing of the white farmers and vendors that hides the under-represented minorities who are the actual laborers toiling away. Patrons of farmers’ markets self-identify as ethical supporters of local family farmers, and this practice itself becomes a status marker. The “community imaginary” of the farmers’ market (showing up with one’s basket to visit vendors from nearby farms) allows these customers to feel good about themselves without meaningfully engaging minority groups or poorer classes who remain excluded from these mainly white, privileged experiences. For these critics, Whole Foods and farmers’ markets act as enclaves for white, affluent people to feel empowered in their omnivorous cultural tastes and to find others just like them without actually helping the world.13 In his critique of Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, n+1 writer Mark Greif observes that this “luxury food trade” essentially satisfies the elites’ desires while also making them seem deeper and thereby justified for good health and the environment. Greif takes particular umbrage against Pollan’s distaste for the mainstream success of organic food. Implicit in Greif’s critique is that Pollan no longer supports such organic farming precisely because the masses now have access to it, and thus Pollan seeks ever more elitist food practices. “His [Pollan] championing of it [grass farms and smaller producers] entrenches a form of localism that stays dependent on the patronage of a few buyers at the very top of the income distribution, where Pollan seems to sit.”¹⁴

The critique of this type of conspicuous production is not without substance, but it also ignores the upsides to the new emphasis on humane and socially conscious food practices. By participating in food practices and culture that espouses sustainable values and environmental awareness, this smaller group of consumers may over time change larger social norms by supporting farmers who can, by virtue of increased demand for their goods, in turn produce food at lower price points for a wider market. For food policy experts like Paula Daniels, the elite’s changing ideology and consumer practices around food at first may be a privileged position, but over time their hope is that as a result of more support for the industry, more people are able to access local, humane, and more sustainable types of agriculture, which would serve a greater good. Daniels, who is the founder of the LA Food Policy Council and founding chair for the Center for Good Food Purchasing, believes that social change often comes through the market, even if it starts with just a few. As Daniels explained to me, “Market forces have a great impact, environmental and local values build a midscale level of environmentally conscious food products. [By way of example], California is the largest agricultural economy by dollars and volume because California produces the greatest number of high value specialty crops. [The state is also the] highest in production of organic agriculture, something like 22% of all organic production in the US.” Daniels continued, “What does that mean? That means we have more acreage in production that is pesticide-free, not using hormones and using practices that are much better for the environment. With market demand for organic, we start increasing that potential [for more sustainable agriculture practices].”

For Daniels, this approach creates a larger market and also greater capabilities for the farmers. In the case of Whole Foods, Daniels cites the grocery store’s experience in Hawaii. As a native, Daniels recalled that when she lived there, the grocery stores were limited in their offerings and quality. But when Whole Foods opened stores in Hawaii it directly supported local farmers. As she explained, “Whole Foods made agreements with local producers of food … and increased local food production. I have personally witnessed this. The local produce section in the Whole Foods Markets in Hawaii is even better than many of the Whole Foods stores I shop in LA. The impact they’ve made is that these otherwise subsistence farmers in lower income communities like Waimanalo are now beneficiaries of Whole Foods’ consistent demand.”

The end goal for sustainable food experts is that environmental, humane, transparent food production is the norm. As Daniels, who is a lawyer by trade, recalled,

I remember when recycled paper was being introduced. It was expensive and not [readily] available. I was practicing law at the time and we used a lot more paper then, more than we do now. I was part of a state bar committee that reviewed rules for the state and a proposal came to require the use of recycled paper. My view then was we need to require people to do this then the market place will catch up. You know now that [this] is the case: you can go to Staples and buy 100% consumer waste paper that will work in your printer and it is cheaper [than standard paper]. I’m pretty convinced we can do this with food systems. That system is more complex … [But if we] create more scale, more support for local economies and farmers, we can encourage more wide-scale regenerative production practices.15

FASHION AND THE NOT-MADE-IN-CHINA MOVEMENT

In 1919, in his treatise, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, John Maynard Keynes, commenting on the diversity of consumer choice at his disposal, remarked that “The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth.”16 This observation was pre–World War II and pre-globalization as we know it. Yet in many ways fashion has returned to a pre–mass produced world where point of origin matters as it did with Indian tea and Persian silk. Fast women’s fashion in the form of H&M and Forever 21, and the standardized goods made en masse and anonymously in China, Vietnam, and Mexico, have made Western consumers less interested in the big, global brands, particularly those that are produced in far-flung parts of the world with a slapped-on American label. This type of consumer good is increasingly criticized for being cheaply made, ersatz, and part of a general concern that we simply buy too much stuff.

The story of conspicuous production is really powered by consumers demanding something different and authentic. This new demand, while seemingly niche, plays into the development of local boutiques that sell only small-batch designers and raw denim whose weave comes with a unique story and place of origin. In these types of boutiques, those rare items on the rack that are in fact made in China are rebranded as “Designed in Scandinavia” (or France, or some such reputable point of origin), with a subtle second line to the label, “Made in the People’s Republic of China”—as if this location is any different at all from China itself.

One such place that captures the return to place in product is Urban Rustic, in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.¹⁷ With battered, unfinished wood floors and mason jars for glasses, this small boutique only sells food and drink sourced and made in New York, a business model that seems precarious in the long term, but thus far has been wildly successful. The shelves are lined with candy sticks from a bygone era, fresh simple flowers seemingly picked from the owners’ backyard, and beer and pickles proudly brewed and brined (respectively) in New York. For all of these examples, the products and the stores in which they are sold possess a distinct story that imbues them with authenticity and value. It’s no longer enough to buy an Italian suit or Parisian perfume. The entire production process (and materials used) are far more centralized and specified, right down to the neighborhood and artisan who made them. This type of store has popped up all over metropolitan America and its affluent hinterlands. The goods inside these boutiques are artisanal and strongly tied to their place of production. For example, the Broome Street General Store, which has two locations in Silver Lake along with an online presence, offers Barbour waxed coats from England, St. James striped cotton t-shirts (the company that has dressed the French military since the 1800s), and Mast Brothers’ chocolate from Brooklyn.

Another example, Bucks & Does in Los Angeles, operates a front office as a boutique with handpicked, expensive items from around the world and a back office filled with sewing machines, fabric, and a dozen seamstresses and designers who also produce clothing sold in the shop and distributed to other boutiques around the city. Just down the road from Forage, Bucks & Does (and Mohawk General Store, another boutique a few stores down) is fashion’s equivalent of conspicuous production—a curated assemblage of clothing, shoes, and accessories taken from specific cities and regions known for producing these goods and materials. Struck by the list of designers I’d never heard of scribbled on a chalk sign outside the store, I decided to take a look. The moment I walked in, the young store clerk showed me some beautiful gray cashmere sweaters that were “just picked up in Ireland by the store’s owners”—this description was the only selling point the young man gave me to convince me to buy the sweater.

Industry of All Nations (IOAN) is another enterprise that also captures this pre–Industrial Revolution type of production. Located in Culver City, a formal industrial corridor of Los Angeles, IOAN works with small and medium-sized manufacturers around the world to design and produce indigenous basic goods from around the world. Like Intelligentsia, their model is one of direct interaction with the producer, which means the founders fly around the world meeting indigo dyers in India, sneaker makers in Kenya, silk producers in China, and so forth.

Juan Diego Gerscovich is the founder of IOAN, which he started in 2010. Gerscovich is not a fashion designer or businessman by trade. Initially an architect hailing from Argentina, Gerscovich became involved in fashion as an outlet for his social causes. As he put it, “We don’t want to negatively affect others with our work. The way we live is to be good and do good. The minute you do something that you are harming others, that’s no good. There are a lot of good young people who think like us, so that’s the future of the world.”

As an architect, Gerscovich appreciates beautiful things and the history and origin of how they came to be, and fashion, at least in theory, captures these qualities. Yet fashion, he explained, had gone away from producing goods with integrity and an authentic point of origin. As he explained, “The past three or four years, even a Burberry coat is made in China and it’s such a disappointment. Imagine being English and making raincoats for the past 200 years and then getting a raincoat made in China. We buy stuff in China, but the correct stuff—like recycling plastics, China is very advanced in this.” IOAN’s vision is to work with local producers to make goods with a real story and a specific quality of material and manufacturing that is unique to that place and product. In the beginning, Gerscovich spent hundreds of hours trolling websites of manufacturers around the world to find the best producers of basic materials and then making contact, arranging visits and so forth. One such quest involved finding a business that still produced natural dyes. As Gerscovich put it, “It’s almost dead [as an industry], but there are a few little spots in India where they do it. These businesses started doing organic cotton t-shirts and dyes 25 years ago! They were in India, not Paris or New York. And until now, no one gave them the opportunity [to sell on a wide scale to the Western market] until us.”

Gerscovich has traveled extensively to meet potential manufacturers to produce these basic goods that, practically speaking, would be much easier, more efficient, and cheaper to produce in China. Yet, Gerscovich wouldn’t have a business with that approach. As he explained, no one just wants a white t-shirt anymore. “I don’t want to just see the product. I want to see the information. Like a politician’s face, we need to know more about what is behind the expression, the explanation with information.”

One such example is a small cotton sneaker manufacturer in Kenya. Prior to working with IOAN, the business sold its shoes solely on the dusty roads in Mombasa. Gerscovich found the company online, went to Kenya to meet the owner, and decided the sneakers were exactly what he wanted to sell. Named the “Kenyatas,” IOAN’s catalogue describes them as made of 100% African material and sold outside of Africa for the first time in the 40 years of the company’s existence. “Before us, they used to sell their sneakers in the street markets on dirt roads. They didn’t even have sizing. And in like six months, the shoes have sizes, they are selling in Tokyo, Paris (at Merci) and around the world. They are still selling their shoes on the streets of Kenya; that is their main business still, of course.” A few years ago, one batch of shoes sent to Gerscovich arrived in a bag covered with red dust and a smattering of fingerprints. He determined that they were the fingerprints of the employees and the dust of the Kenyan roads. “At first, we were like ‘oh God,’ and then we thought, wow this comes with the dirt from the roads on the employees’ fingertips…. it’s real.”

Along with their Culver City outpost, IOAN operates a very successful online store where they do most of their business. The success of IOAN lies in their commitment to their philosophy of production more than the goods themselves—after all, these companies are still producing basic t-shirts and cotton sneakers that could be mistaken for Fruit of the Loom by the undiscerning eye. Patrons of IOAN are opposed to the economic and environmental consequences of conventional manufacturing. IOAN explains itself as “inspired by how things are done. We are not creating a new brand just to fill up shelves. In this modern time it is so easy and in everybody’s hands to do most anything, so the most important thing should be how we do these things.”18 In the fall of 2013, J.Crew sent Gerscovich a fan email stating how much the company loved what IOAN did. In March 2014, IOAN produced its first line for J.Crew’s kids’ line Crew Cuts, and some basics for men, and as Gerscovich explained explicitly, “We are producing the same stuff for J.Crew but without dropping an inch in our standards.” Today, on J.Crew’s website, one can find IOAN’s specially dyed madras t-shirts for kids, fleece sweatshirts made with organic cotton hailing from India, along with an interview with Gerscovich in which he explains the importance of sustainability in clothing manufacturing.

“ETSY’S INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION”

As Whole Foods made organic a global, mass market phenomenon, Etsy enabled artisanal goods to go mainstream. Etsy, established in 2004, is a sort of Ebay for artisans selling handmade boots, candles, jewelry, belts, paper goods, and pretty much any other product so long as it conforms to the company’s production standards. Founded in 2005 in Brooklyn (of course), Etsy is what is called a peer-to-peer e-commerce company where members can buy and sell crafts, craft materials, and artisanal goods in their “Marketplace” arranged under a wide array of choices such as weddings, birthdays, men, women, and jewelry. Vintage goods are also sold (but must be at least 20 years old). More prolific and industrious sellers can open their own “shop” which sells a variety of different handmade and vintage goods, of which Etsy gets 20 cents for every listing and 3.5% of the sale price (most goods are sold for $15 to $20). The average seller is a college-educated woman in her twenties or thirties. Initially, Etsy only allowed handmade goods, but more recently (and despite criticism by the diehards), the company allowed producers to work with some small artisanal manufacturers provided the relationship is direct and it is still people rather than companies selling things. This revision of rules is a matter of practicality: As a marketplace, Etsy has become more successful than its producers can handle, and to actually fulfill consumer orders more hands (or machines, as it turns out) are needed. The proof is in the numbers. In 2010, Etsy generated $180 million in sales, and by the next year that figure jumped to $314 million.19 In 2012, Etsy generated $895 million in sales; by 2013 that number was $1 billion. In 2014, the company boasted $2 billion in sales. In April 2015, Etsy went public with an IPO of $16 a share but opened at $31 a share. Yet despite these clearly capitalistic moves, the company aims to keep its philosophy and raison d’être in place. Etsy is still about the “life stories of the sellers,” as The Economist put it in a profile of the company. For Etsy, its triumph is in the hands of consumers not producers, the former of which care an awful lot about where things come from and who made them.²⁰ Today, other than its billion-dollar sales figures, Etsy boasts a membership of more than 50 million registered users who are happily making or buying handmade goods from all around the world and unique versions of mainstream consumer goods.

CONSPICUOUS PRODUCTION GOES MASS MARKET

These more specialized firms are not the only ones embarking on conspicuous production. More mainstream companies may not be traveling the world for uniquely dyed cloth, but they are seeing the importance of the “made in USA” label (rather than China or India or Bangladesh) as a symbol of good quality and authenticity. Consequently, they are looking for ways to construct at least the sense of authenticity, which for consumers is a sign of quality and social consciousness. They observed what happened when globalization hit the United States’ manufacturing economy at full speed. From the collapse of the manufacturing economy in the mid-1970s, to the easing of import duties by NAFTA in 1994, to China’s membership in the WTO in 2001, the US apparel industry experienced shocking contraction over the past 20 years, as jobs moved to Mexico, India, and China. From 1990 to 2012, textile and apparel contracted by 76.5% or lost 1.2 million jobs. In 1991, American-made goods accounted for 56.2% of all clothing purchased in the United States; by 2012, that number had dwindled to just 2.5%.21 The AFL-CIO attributed a loss of 700,000 jobs to NAFTA alone. Technology didn’t help either—advances in machines automated much of the work for which people were once needed. As a result, cities around the country witnessed a hollowing out of their factories and an entire urban job base disappeared, creating a crisis in our inner cities and the rise of permanent “joblessness,” which created decade after decade of intergenerational poverty.

The shock of global economic restructuring resulted in consequences that transcended the practical. American consumers and companies became aware of the social implications of widespread American unemployment and concurrently the exploitation of developing-country workers. Irrespective of the plummeting price of goods, it became impossible to ignore the human cost. The proof is in the recent upsurge of the US manufacturing industry and the change in consumer and company preferences as documented by recent research. Indeed, a recent survey by Boston Consulting Group found that more than 70% of consumers would prefer not to buy “Made in China”²² and, according to a New York Times study, 60% would pay more for “Made in the USA.”²³ In another study, 30% of manufacturers considered moving some production back to the States, while about 15% already had done so. Overall, US apparel manufacturing has experienced a significant turnaround after globalization, NAFTA, and outsourcing led to decades of inactivity.²⁴ Much of the manufacturing resurgence can be attributed to small firms: More than 75% of US manufacturing firms employ 20 or fewer workers.²⁵ And while these small firms only account for 9% of the sector, these artisanal manufacturing businesses account for much of the job growth in the post-Recession period.26 As textile factories open up across the country, the job listings are piling up.

The problem is that a return to Made in the USA costs real money. Nanette Lapore, the successful New York City–based designer, who sells high-end clothing, recently joined forces with J.C. Penney. However, to make any of the 150 clothing pieces with the “Made in USA” label, there would be a premium in the price and one that would likely put off Penney’s customers. As Lepore simply put it, “That [less expensive] price point can’t be done here [in the United States].”²⁷ The problem is that cheap goods simply can’t be made in America. Consumers who are socially conscious and want Made in the USA (or made in France, Italy, or England, for that matter) are willing to pay more. But, as the business journalist Stephanie Clifford, who has been chronicling the new wave of American manufacturing, put it, for those looking for cheap prices, “even when consumers are confronted with the human costs of cheap production … they show little inclination to pay more for clothes.”²⁸ When the average piece of clothing in the United States sells for $13.49, it’s pretty hard to convince an average consumer to pay double for a label no one else will see. Therein lies the contradiction of conspicuous production. It does not exhibit ostensible status in the good through a brand name, consumers are motivated by their internal values and preferences, and these more subtle markers become points of judgment for them and their peer group. The lack of obvious status takes away some of the impetus behind why people consume in the first place.

Yet, change is under way in certain parts of America, and not simply along the boutique-lined streets of the Mission, Venice, and the Lower East Side. Wages in the US apparel industry are up 13.2% since 2007 (compared to just 1.4% for the private sector)²⁹ and US textile exports are up 37% since 2010.³⁰ Part of this change in production is a function of consumer preferences. Even if the average American is not wholly buying into conspicuous production and its accoutrements of farmers’ markets, pressed juices, and handmade slippers, American consumers are increasingly aware and concerned about where things come from. News reports of the Bangladesh fire that killed more than one hundred garment workers,³¹ the Bangladesh textile building collapse that killed more than one thousand workers,³² and more generally the unsafe labor practices and child exploitation associated with sweatshop labor all make the cheap clothes from China and its brethren less appealing.33 In short, consumers are taking notice of globalization’s discontents and slowly pushing back. Globalization may have brought $5 t-shirts but increasingly, consumers are willing to pay more to ensure that workers are well cared for. According to Perception Research Services, 80% of consumers notice, and 75% will be more likely to buy a product because of the “Made in the USA” label.³⁴ Keeping jobs in America is a part of the motivation for some, but those in the industry say that consumers are mainly concerned about quality and safety, and recent reports from abroad call both of these into question with outsourced goods. “We don’t have the mass market mentality in the US anymore,” observes Jeffrey Cornwall, a professor of entrepreneurship at Belmont University.³⁵

HOW DID WE GET HERE? GLOBALIZATION, INFORMATION, AND POSTMODERN VALUES

The origins of conspicuous production can be found in mainstream society’s increased awareness of environmental and social problems and, most importantly, the channels to do something about them. It all started with pandas. In the mid-1990s, the World Wildlife Fund launched a conservation campaign that gave even conventional, middle America pause. I remember being in high school in a small town in Pennsylvania, and suddenly I cared about rain forests in South America. I got the t-shirt, the bumper stickers, and could recite the statistics (today deforestation occurs at a rate of 20 football fields per minute).³⁶ Aesthetically, WWF puts out a good campaign. Developed in 1961, the WWF is universally recognized by its stark panda graphic, inspired by the arrival of the panda bear Chi-Chi to the London Zoo the same year.

But WWF has accomplished more than the proliferation of panda bear bumper stickers. From their 1960s efforts to preserve the life of the Galapagos Islands to their ongoing international rain forest campaign (particularly in the Amazon), WWF has made environmentalism and preservation a real and pertinent issue across the world. The organization’s work has resulted in conservation treaties, a moratorium on commercial whaling, and documented proof of biodiversity loss. WWF has intervened in the logging in the Congo, pioneered efforts to curb carbon emissions, and made rain forest destruction a household topic.37

Even if WWF’s mission is compelling and its work important, the organization’s efficacy relies on people, donors, and other organizations willing to respond to and support their causes. In short, lots of different actors and institutions must work together to accomplish big goals around conservation and environmentalism. Environmentalism, after all, has been around for centuries, but change in our behavior is a much more recent occurrence. In 1845, Frederick Engels remarked upon the decrepit and degraded environment of England’s industrial cities.³⁸ Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden in 1854. The 1960s and ’70s brought major environmental awareness and subsequent action in the United States: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), the Clean Air Act (1963), the Water Quality Act (1965), Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax (1971), and the Clean Water Act (1972).³⁹ These monumental moments in environmentalism may have shifted the dial on a macro level, but today many of us practice a quotidian environmentalism, which partially explains the rise of conspicuous production.

For starters, when did many Americans start using cloth bags at the grocery store? And start lining up multicolored bins for recycling? I used to think it was a city thing until I observed my mother, who lives in rural America, organizing all of her bottles and cans and driving them to the recycling center. She also uses cloth bags and gets mad with herself at the checkout line when she realizes she’s forgotten them. When did caring about the environment become a way of life, a part of mainstream Western consciousness? I started wearing my WWF t-shirt in the mid-1990s and was organizing river cleanups with the Ocean Conservancy by the time I was 20 years old. Why did I, along with all of my friends and thousands of other middle-class folks around the world, start caring so much about the environment? Understanding mainstream environmentalism helps us understand why people conspicuously consume in the first place.

The phenomenon that explains much of these changes is “postmodern values,” a term that was coined by the University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart. In his 2000 Washington Quarterly essay on the topic, Inglehart argues that we are able to care about environmentalism, feminism, and a host of other value-laden causes because we have the post-scarcity luxury to do so. In other words, we are no longer worrying about being fed and keeping the lights on and so now, as goes Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we can self-actualize. In a survey of thousands of people around the world, Inglehart finds that for the pre–World War II generations, material goods still matter significantly, but for the postwar kids who grow up in relative prosperity, what matters most are nonmaterial matters, such as self-expression and a sense of belonging. And this isn’t a slight difference between the two groups. Inglehart finds that the older age groups cared about material goods more than self-expression and postmaterial values by a ratio of 14 to 1. After long periods of rising economic and physical security, Inglehart believes that values and priorities change, which is why the younger generations care more about environmentalism and less about materialism—and this trend continues throughout their lives. Inglehart believes that this shift from “modern to postmodern values” is taking place “throughout advanced industrial society.” “If one grows up with a feeling that survival can be taken for granted, instead of feeling survival is uncertain,” writes Inglehart, “it influences almost every aspect of one’s world view.”40

The transformation Inglehart observes revolves around two key hypotheses: the scarcity hypothesis and the socialization hypothesis. The scarcity hypothesis suggests that the socioeconomic context in which a person grows up reflects his values in the long term. Those who grew up with fewer resources put a premium on that which is in short supply. For the pre-War generations, there was still uncertainty about food, water, shelter, and many basic material needs being met. For the post-War generations (right up to present-day teenagers), who have lived largely prosperous lives and whose basic needs are met, there is instead an absence of meaning and purpose. The socialization hypothesis simply means that this transformation of values takes time. Thus, while the pre-War generation may have come into abundance, the values of frugality and the necessity for reserves remain in place. It takes time, in other words, for society to become accustomed to post-scarcity and then have a value system that reflects it. In fact, most of us have a value system that reflects the socioeconomic conditions of our childhood.⁴¹

As most of the consumers of Whole Foods, farmers’ markets, and “Made in the USA” grew up at a time of great prosperity and peace, we are able to develop the postmodern values that prize fair labor and environmentalism. Paradoxically, those of us who have never experienced any of the atrocities of labor exploitation, compromised food sources, or the tragic effects of war are the very people who care so deeply about wiping out these problems and advocate social and economic change. Many of the things that preserve the environment, and emphasize labor rights and fair trade, actually slow down production and economic processes, and in the case of environmentalism, stymie them altogether. Postmodernity and conspicuous production are essentially at odds with globalization and the economic growth it has brought.

We would not even be aware of globalization’s negative impact on the environment and on the labor movement if not for the Information Age, which makes data and details in all aspects of human society almost transparent. With a quick keystroke, we can search a topic on the Internet and return troves of information about corporate prices, government actions, and materials and chemicals used in our clothing. The Information Age has not only created transparency; it has made transparency a key value of our society. Whether Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a polemic against industrialized food production and fast food, or the revolting documentation of McDonald’s food production in Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, or the presence of formaldehyde in Victoria’s Secret lingerie,42 consumers expose and are exposed to insider details about how products are made, and it turns out these things aren’t made very well.

Thus, consumers now prize production information nearly as much as the product itself, and trust between consumers and the producers is essential. As Kevin Carney, owner of the small, conspicuous production boutique Mohawk explained, “You see a lot more people really wanting to know the story around each piece—nontoxic, no run-off into the environment.” Or, as Eugene Ahn of the restaurant Forage succinctly sums up, “People want to know where the food comes from. There was a whole time when we did not know where things came from and now we know the consequences of not knowing: We have vastly compromised food sheds, natural resources, food not adding nutrition, instead adding toxins to our body. If we knew more about what we consume, we could make better choices. Knowing the process increases the value.”

Elizabeth Bowman of the Altadena Farmers Market explained it by way of anecdote:

We had a whole dialogue with our egg vendor. He has like 50 chickens and 50 ducks and he needed another outlet to sell. And he priced it all out and he called me and said, ‘I need to charge a dollar an egg to make money and I’m making 10 cents profit per egg even to sell it at that price.’ That doesn’t even count for his time, his gas money, just feeding the chickens. Hours and hours of conversation about the one dollar egg and you know what, people bought those eggs! Because that was his story, and that’s why they bought it.

“VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY”

Much of this type of spending fits into what has been called alternative consumption—nontraditional, less materialistic ways to spend that are a reaction against mainstream modern capitalism. Money that is spent is done so in low-key ways and consumer goods aim to be modest and inconspicuous. Followers of this modus vivendi fit into what has been called “voluntary simplicity,” which as the name suggests is the voluntary practice of limiting expenditures and signals of material consumption. This type of consumer draws inspiration from a long line of nonmaterial philosophies including those of the Quakers, Buddha, and Henry David Thoreau.43 Those who participate in the voluntary simplicity movement tend to sacrifice money in exchange for leisure time or to seek out nonmaterialistic and environmentally conscious forms of consumerism.⁴⁴ Followers of this movement engage in three types of behavior: “downshifting,” the practice of lower income consumption; “strong simplification,” the application of a high-end lifestyle to pursue more meaningful activities (much of which falls within inconspicuous consumption), and “simple living,” which is the rejection of urban conspicuous consumption.⁴⁵

The ethos behind the voluntary simplicity movement links strongly to concern around the environment, socioeconomic equity, and a general distaste for mass market modern consumer behavior. While the main principle of voluntary simplicity is to downgrade one’s consumerism, members of the movement do find signals to reveal their lifestyle choice, such as style of dress (understated, no labels), attendance at yoga classes, or purchasing food at farmers’ markets. But like postmodern values in general, the voluntary simplicity movement is a function and luxury of prosperity, literally anathema to the experience of being poor and being forced to limit consumption.

While there are middle-class “downshifters,” who have chosen less money and part-time work to regain leisure, many voluntary simplicity members are able to make this life decision because they can live off of accumulated wealth.46 In short, one must be wealthy enough to afford to live simply. Further, the signals of being less consumerist are also expensive—those farmers’ market eggs priced at a dollar each may be very much in keeping with the voluntary simplicity ethos and are hardly a flashy status item, but they are four to five times more expensive than the version that most people buy at a grocery store. The content of conspicuous production (Chemex coffee brewers, hand-knitted sweaters, the slow food movement) has shifted from the 1980s zeal for convenient products (Mr. Coffee, McDonald’s) to an appreciation for the production process itself, but it comes with a price.⁴⁷

ARTS AND CRAFTS AND THE POST–INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Conspicuous production has historical roots in the Arts and Crafts movement of the latter half of the nineteenth century—a distinctly different setting than its contemporary urbanity. Arts and Crafts, emerging from rural England and pioneered by William Morris, was a reaction against both technology (recall the Luddites) and mass production and the erosion of artisanal workmanship as a result of the Industrial Revolution. While wildly successful aesthetically—think the Morris chair, Stickley wood furniture, delicate flower motifs—Arts and Crafts was ultimately not very successful economically. There was no way to slow down the Industrial Revolution, and fighting it made one a loser from the outset.⁴⁸

The central tenet of the Arts and Crafts movement was anti-capitalism and anti-industry, and this underlying sentiment explained its ultimate failure as an economic force. Arts and Crafts referenced an artisanal pre-capitalist point in history that was more idealized representation than reality.49 As the archeology professor Elizabeth Wayland Barber put it, “The truth is that almost none of the objects that we think of as handmade truly are. And that has been the case for thousands of years,” referencing a fragment of Egyptian linen from 2500 BC as one such rare, fully handmade item.⁵⁰

While the Arts and Crafts movement was a purposeful reaction against capitalism, it was already being practiced (without a label) across rural England from Lancashire to Yorkshire as a way of being. For those in the English countryside, the rise in crafts, artwork, and local goods (and the use of barns and local resources to produce these items) was simply a mode of self-preservation for farms that were no longer sustainable solely through agrarian use. Though not politically motivated conspicuous production, localism has for some time been a practical reality and survival technique for rural communities who diversified and repurposed their agricultural land and infrastructure⁵¹ into something more profitable.

Today the rise of conspicuous production is driven by similar anti-industrial sentiment but also by a number of social, economic, and cultural trends that are twentieth- and twenty-first-century phenomena. Environmentalism and postmodern values are the dominant forces that have changed how we consume. Conspicuous production, like voluntary simplicity, is a reaction against conventional mainstream capitalism. Paradoxically, while globalization takes identity away from the production process of goods, the Information Age prioritizes transparency. And, like the Arts and Crafts movement, today’s conspicuous production is a simulacrum of a previous, more wholesome time. The rustic chalkboards in Whole Foods listing Swiss chard and new batches of artisanal cheese (what does “artisanal cheese” even mean?) evoke an earlier agrarian era, even if one is living in the heart of Chicago or San Francisco, with taxis blasting by and cell phones buzzing around as one picks up a locally cultured buffalo mozzarella. Part of conspicuous production is the romanticizing of an era removed from modern industry and mass production, and as the chalk-scrawled listings of fresh produce indicate, anti-technology too.

REVISITING KARL MARX

Unlike previous movements, however, conspicuous production is not anti-capitalistic. Rather, conspicuous production fully embraces capitalism, but reinterprets it. Herein lies the fundamental uniqueness of this movement. Unlike Morris and his followers, who were ultimately trying to do away with capitalism rather than work with it, the conspicuous producers are working within the system, not against it. Those who conspicuously produce are still operating within a market economy, but with different motivations and rules. Money is exchanged for goods, rarity is prized, and yet some of the other hallmarks of capitalism, namely exploitation, Marx’s alienated labor, and the neoclassical theory of profit maximization, have been shunned to create a whole new economic ethos working with a capitalistic framework. As the Industry of All Nations’ website defines itself, “I.O.A.N. is pure capitalism. We don’t seek people in need; we seek productive people. There is nothing noble about suffering, there is nothing courageous about poverty; but industriousness, working for a better life, it is the bravest thing in the world. That’s what we seek; the industry of the people, the Industry of All Nations.” Without question it’s clear that conspicuous producers are pioneering transparency and making their production process as straightforward as possible. Much of this effort is due to a social and economic consciousness against globalization and the resulting exploitation of people and the environment. But built into this process is also a refutation of what Karl Marx called “alienated labor.”

In his book The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx, so horrified by the conditions of the Industrial Revolution, outlined four basic types of alienation that emerged from capitalism: Alienation from the worker to the product he produces, the worker to the production process, alienation of the worker and his identity as a human being (or what Marx called “species-being”), and the worker to humanity and the others with whom he worked.52 In Marx’s eyes, workers have no control over the design of the goods they are told to produce (via the capitalists), they engage in repetitive processes rather than any craftsmanship, they don’t know the people who buy the goods, and they get nothing emotionally meaningful from the work as they are limited to very regulated tasks. Finally, because capitalism is individualistic and fundamentally about profit, not collective good, capitalists aim to get the greatest work out of their workers for the least wages paid to them. Thus, the constant struggle for higher wages pits workers against each other in a competition. Indeed, a look at mass industrial production in the twentieth century would suggest Marx’s observations were spot on. Workers were cogs in a wheel producing dozens upon dozens of the same product, to be shipped to consumers thousands of miles away, who are as ignorant of the producers as the producers are of them. As Gerscovich remarks of such products, “We have a term called ‘orphan products’ for things made by workers who have no idea what they are doing. Made by people who have no idea what they are doing, no history. One day they are making wallets and then they are making raincoats for Burberry. We don’t want orphan products, that’s just creating trash. [What we do] is like the opposite of alienated labor.” Put simply, within this new breed of conspicuous producer, no matter whom I interviewed or what they made, their raison d’être remained the same: The basic ethos of conspicuous production is to fight alienated labor and to create a strong link between the producer and the consumer. As Bowman of Altadena Farmers Market remarked, “We are turning Karl Marx on his head. The farmer or the craftsman is now connected to his labor. We are connected to the good.”

In fighting alienated labor (even if most of the conspicuous producers interviewed did not call it such, nor reference Marx), conspicuous producers give up another tenet of modern capitalism: profit maximization. In neoclassical economics, the general theory is that firms work to the goal of profit maximization above all others. Yet, every single one of the conspicuous producers I interviewed, from food to fashion to farmers’ markets, admitted they are making very little profit (if any at all) or they are giving up the chance to make real money given the expense and time it takes to produce their socially conscious goods. Gerscovich of IOAN plainly admitted, “For our company, almost no profit.” Or as Bowman remarked of the conspicuous production movement in general, “No one is doing it to get rich.” Those at Intelligentsia explained that their business model inherently limits them from the bounties that companies like Starbucks or Peet’s reap.

Conspicuous production has imbued a market economy with postmodern values, and those values take precedence over profit and economic growth. Put simply, their values are worth more than money.

“DON’T SELL OUT”

But what happens when the money does start to matter? In 1999, Garret John LoPorto had a plan to save the world via Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.53 When word got out that founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were facing an acquisition by the international conglomerate Unilever, LoPorto, then a 23-year-old tech upstart, decided to fight back. His “Save Ben & Jerry’s” grassroots campaign, involving Vermont governor Howard Dean, Congressman Bernie Sanders, and thousands of other activists, used the mantra “Don’t Sell Out” and protested against the bullying by globalization and capitalism of a small Vermont-based company that (at least in their view) should stay that way.⁵⁴

Cohen and Greenfield didn’t want to sell. Founded in Burlington, Vermont in 1978, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream operated locally and under a wider philosophy of social responsibility, environmental awareness, and bohemian sensibilities. Ben & Jerry’s took well-known stances against practices they felt violated their code of ethics. In 2005, the company made a 900-pound Baked Alaska dessert and dumped it on Capitol Hill to express their criticism of a vote to open up the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge for drilling.⁵⁵ The company has widely shunned GMO produce, rGBH hormone dairy, and for a time, used only “eco-pint” unbleached cardboard packaging for all of its flavors.

These public stances against globalization and its negative impacts on the environment, not to mention their penchant for curious but delicious ice cream flavors (many of which also convey a social message), brought them many fans. Unsurprisingly, this local Vermont business looked pretty attractive to opportunistic big international companies—so much so that, despite the grassroots campaign, when Unilever stepped in to buy Ben & Jerry’s, it was virtually impossible for the founders to turn them down. Unilever offered significantly more than what Ben & Jerry’s was worth on the Nasdaq; declining the conglomerate’s offer would actually do a disservice to the ice cream company’s shareholders and would put Cohen and Greenfield in the position of a possible lawsuit. Ben Cohen described the day the deal went through as “Just about the worst day of my life.”56 Jerry Greenfield has remarked that preserving the values of the company remains a “constant struggle,” as the small Burlington company’s ethos runs almost antithetical to its global behemoth owner. Or, as Cohen explained more plainly, “We very carefully negotiated an acquisition agreement that was supposed to maintain the values of Ben & Jerry’s. What we are learning is if you are owned by a corporation that, despite whatever words they might say, does not share those values, it’s incredibly difficult to maintain those values.”⁵⁷

Ben & Jerry’s isn’t the only small, socially responsible company that has been subject to takeover. Burt’s Bees, the natural, eco-friendly beauty product company established in 1984 in Maine, is devoted to “The Great Good.” Like Ben & Jerry’s, Burt’s Bees’ mantra is that of social responsibility, respect for the environment, and a commitment to natural ingredients. In 2004, the private equity firm AEA bought 80% of Burt’s Bees for $173 million. In 2006, Unilever’s John Replogle became the CEO of AEA. In 2007, with its eyes on the natural care market, Clorox, already generating $6 billion in sales a year with 9% growth annually, offered $925 million—in cash—to buy Burt’s Bees.⁵⁸ AEA’s powerful position in Burt’s Bees’ future, and the fact that the small-town company was already a step removed from the founders, made the sale to Clorox that much easier.

In 2006, for $100 million, Colgate-Palmolive purchased an 84% stake in Tom’s of Maine, a small natural care company established in 1970 with a loan of $5,000. If possible, Tom’s of Maine is an even crunchier and more eco-friendly enterprise than Burt’s Bees or Ben & Jerry’s; its logo looks like something from days of yore and fennel is its most powerful agent against plaque. One of the founders of the husband and wife team, Kate Chappell, sits on the board and makes sure that the hippy company’s culture is preserved and its initial policies remain intact.⁵⁹ One such reinforcement seems to be that despite the Colgate-Palmolive takeover, Tom’s of Maine packaging does not identify it as a Colgate subsidiary. That’s probably a good thing, because it is unlikely that the bohemian shoppers who troll the aisles of Trader Joe’s to pick up Tom’s of Maine natural toothpaste and deodorant would be pleased to know of the Colgate connection. The irony is that Tom’s of Maine is known as a natural and “cruelty-free company,” while Colgate-Palmolive engages in animal testing and mass production of fairly chemically laden dish soap, among other products.60

These examples bring us to a problem that undoubtedly some other conspicuous producers may face fairly soon. Today, Burt’s Bees, Tom’s of Maine, and Ben & Jerry’s can be found in Whole Foods and some small natural care companies, but also in Target, Walmart, and mass chain stores. Perhaps the democratization of natural, eco-friendly products is a good thing, but in what sense do the founders have any control over whether their product is sold in businesses that align with their core values, let alone have a say with the large multinationals that acquire them in the first place? Just as mass appeal for natural care products led to these takeovers, the increased desirability to a wide variety of consumers may create a situation in which companies like Intelligentsia and Industry of All Nations may have no choice but to sell out to bigger conglomerates (particularly if they become public companies). Even if the founders are personally less interested in profit than social values, the market, their shareholders, their board, and sheer capitalism may ultimately pull them into the mainstream, globalized economy and all of its mass-produced discontents. As they become indoctrinated into multinational companies, the products become patinas of the conspicuous production process from which they first emerged.

WHITHER INDUSTRY?

The final irony of conspicuous production is that much of the behavior of actually consuming these goods is not conspicuous at all. Sure, you can tote around your Whole Foods shopping bag or feel like you’re part of the in-crowd at the farmers’ market, but truthfully, when you’re at home eating your heirloom tomatoes, no one but you knows where they were purchased—or that they are organic, for that matter. And that lovely gray cashmere sweater hand knit from Ireland may look fantastic, but nobody is thinking about the lady who knitted it. Despite being embedded in issues of status and class, such consumption is actually quite inconspicuous. Unlike conventional versions of conspicuous goods, where the production is anonymous but the good provides status to the consumer, the conspicuous bit of conspicuously produced goods is in how they’re made and where they come from, which is the primary motivation for spending more money on them. Perhaps that is the point.

For all the good that this movement brings in terms of fair trade, localism, and anti-exploitation, and the noble values underpinning the whole process, there’s something slightly naive about its anti-industrial, anti-globalization ethos. Globalization and the freedom of trade may have displaced some workers, but it has created jobs in many parts of the world that are desperately in need of economic growth. Whatever there is to say about the issues around labor exploitation (and there is plenty to say), there is something important in providing economic resources and possibility to countries that would otherwise not have participated in a capitalist market. And, the cheap clothes produced by free trade agreements and the rise of mass-produced goods have been helpful to middle-class families trying to keep clothes on the backs of their kids (again, not to say that consumers aren’t also loading their closets with frivolity). Industry, mass production, and their consequences are the motivator for much of the conspicuous production movement and a good target for blame. But, while a member of the aspirational class is eating kale salad in his made-in-Brooklyn t-shirt, let’s not lose sight of the fact that the current elite consumer ethos is only possible because of the economic growth and affluence that industry created and the luxurious postmodern values it allows us to possess.

Those made-in-Brooklyn t-shirts may not really matter, other than to signal, at least internally and to fellow members of the aspirational class, a particular ethos. They too, along with the rustic chalked signs advertising English cheddar, become a patina of conspicuous production and signifiers of one’s membership within the aspirational class. But consumption of these subtle items is not simply indicative of our friends, income, or education level. Values have come to determine how we consume. Consumption suggests values and those values determine our consumption. But how we arrive at those values and internalize them is equally a part of the story. The geography of production matters, but our own geography plays a key role in consumption as well. Where we live has a huge effect on both our conspicuous and inconspicuous consumption choices and how we define ourselves. To what extent are the phenomena I write about in this book isolated to particular places? That is, to those particular places where most aspirational class members live and consume and thus transmit values and status to one another. To what extent does the story of the aspirational class resonate with all of America and to what extent is it actually the story of metropolitan America and its hinterlands? As the next chapter will show, cities have emerged as the central node where many of these choices, values, and tastes play out. Cities are the geography of the aspirational class and their consumption patterns.