Back in March 2010, when the economy was even more dire than right at this moment, Salon and writer Jennifer Bleyer put out a piece called Hipsters on food stamps. Main thrust? Hipster artist foodies using food stamps to buy organic, grass-fed, free-range (pick a foodie cliché) groceries and ain’t you pissed about it? Commenting madness ensued. Gerry Mak, one of the artists, wrote a response two days later. Commenting madness ensued. Interesting time in our post-Bush, c’mon-Obama economic era, eh?
Two of the featured “hipsters” were Baltimore artists. I’ve been thinking about them off and on for the last two years, and when the SNAP (food stamp) program came under fire in the last months, prompting foodies to take Food Stamp Challenges even as Baltimore expanded access to fresh produce, I thought: Stalker Time.
Where are these hipster artists now? Still on food stamps? As food is fuel, what have they (and, by extension as a taxpayer, I) produced from their subsidized meals in the last two years?
Come with me to a hole-in-the-wall-vegan-option café in Baltimore to find out.
I talked to one of the Salon-featured artists, Sarah Magida, at a hazy-hot-and-humid-hon sidewalk table in Charles Village. She’s no longer on food stamps, though she says it’s a possibility for the fall, when she’s ramping up the number of her new grad school classes in publication design and quitting one of the two jobs she’s been working lately. Here’s what we talked about:
First, my top three questions to ensure that the person to whom I am speaking is actually a hipster (if the answer is yes to any of the below, we will still continue the interview, but I will regard you with a suspiciously cocked eyebrow à la Stephen Colbert throughout our time together).
1) Are you devoid of ironic facial hair or anything else ironic even-somewhat-permanently affixed to your person?
SM: Yes. BUT, I would love to have a curly mustache, waxed like Poirot.
2) Are you devoid of any tattoos? Of course not, so what do they depict? Are they scratch and sniff? If they were, what would the flavor be?
SM: Tattoo on my toe. Not scratch and sniff, and I’m not sure that would be nice. Thinking about getting the word MUSCLES tattooed on my bicep. That would be perhaps in silver glitter, and if scratch and sniff, I’m thinking something fancy. Like gardenias.
3) Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Republican party?
SM: No way.
When I lived just outside the Baltimore City line years ago, my neighbor wouldn’t say, “How are you?” She would say instead, “What you having good?” Her very Baltimore way of asking how I was doing was to ask what I was planning to have for dinner.
So, what you having good?
SM: My neighbor gave me a huge zucchini we’ve been whittling down all week. So, roasted veggies with basil/garlic oil and grated parm.
In response to the Salon article, much was made of the fact that hipsters had been using food stamps at Whole Foods and other high-end grocery stores. Still the same chi-chi shopping habits?
SM: Is the Giant Food two blocks away chi-chi? How about the farmer’s market? Local Indian mart?
Describe for us what you purchased on your last shopping trip and where, what you were wearing on said foray, and whether or not you had a small (or large) pound/rescue dog (or cat), heroin, or other hipster paraphernalia in your purse/pocket/down your shirt.
SM: Sadly, no rescue pup. And no heroin. Wearing $10 tie-dye canvas slip-ons from Shoe City. I bought eggs.
Much remarked upon from the 2010 Salon article was a meal of rabbit, tarragon, and sweet potatoes. Eat any rabbits lately? How about quail? Or soujuk (Armenian beef salami for all our not-quite-there readers)? I hear it’s on super sale at our local Eddie’s gourmet market. Wanna use my coupon?
SM: I’m a vegetarian. No bunnies. So, no thanks.
Did anything positive come of the Salon article and its fallout? Particularly, any good contacts made? Publicity for your work? Recipe suggestions? Particularly creative death threats to tack up on the fridge and laugh half sardonically and half nervously about?
SM: PBS in NYC, among others, asked for an interview. I refused them all. Didn’t want to be the poster child for food stamps. Still don’t.
Are there particular meals you eat in prep for a certain of your creative endeavors [aside from avoiding beans the day before dance practice with the Baltimore Experimental Dance Collective (BXDC)]?
SM: We’re not really diet-dancers at BXDC, but I like to keep it light, with really nice, cold smoothies. Made a good cuke and blueberry lemonade the other day.
I have a Molly Katzen (of Moosewood Collective fame) cookbook called Still Life with Menu, in which she pairs a painting of hers with a menu. Please provide same for the following of your recent works:
Untitled Embroidery
SM:
Coconut Curried Vegetables
Strawberry Rhubarb Pie
Eyes Everywhere
Paired wines with these? Or can’t those be bought with food stamps? Okay, so accompanying WIC-approved beverage of choice?
SM: Untitled: Juicy Juice (Grape), Eyes Everywhere: Hot Chocolate with Whipped Cream, Consumed: (ditto above – consume what you will). : While singing: Honey is a liquid, right?
Gerry Mak (who declined to meet me at the aforementioned vegan-option café, even though I might have bought him a nice cuppa) has been part of the creation of the group Luminous Intervention that, in part, grew out of the Occupy Baltimore movement. I remember being asked from Occupy-involved acquaintances for donations of peanut butter and coffee. Was he, perhaps, the recipient of any of my proffered organic, fresh-roasted almond butter or shade-grown, fair-trade Nicaraguan coffee? Can you please him to ask the Occupy movement to return my Hario hand-crank bean grinder and my Bodum French press, or did the police confiscate those along with the tents?
SM: Um. You might have to ask him yourself.
When you walk out of your rent-controlled (does Baltimore do rent-control? No, but we can pretend it’s Brooklyn) house in gentrified, artsy-fartsy Hampden, and stroll down the taxpayer-funded sidewalk, alongside the stimulus-package, recently repaved street to catch the state-subsidized MTA bus to head to your federal student-loan paid-for grad school class in Esotericism, do you ever just stop and think about what a bad person you are? And how much worse you’ve gotten over the past two years? Do such musings fuel your art? If so, and as such fuel, should said musings be subject to the proposed 6% Maryland fuel tax?
SM: I don’t live in Hampden anymore. As for the rest: What I am not is a decadent ice-cream-eating Marie Antoinette, indulging on the backs of the unemployed. (Though I do like it when my boyfriend buys me this really yum vanilla-lavender gelato. And no, he doesn’t use food stamps to get it.) Oh, and I think I pay enough taxes from my two jobs.
In conclusion, do you have anything to say to the folks who so wantonly attacked you a few years ago for your inconsiderate, oh-so-hipsterish abuse of government services?
SM: I don’t want to be thought of as living this lofty lifestyle. I’ve been taking some (free) classes on how to live a sustainable life as an artist. I surround myself with artists. Artists with hardships. And I feel really good about being an artist.
As an artist, Magida has been busy the last two years. The art community contributes about $380 million per year to the Baltimore economy. Artists helped win the Cold War. Yet we still don’t have specific, overarching policies to support them, like France and Ireland.
US artists are productive despite this. Call them hipsters, just don’t call them slackers. And in a country where neither the minimum wage nor most creative jobs pay enough for an artist to survive unaided, they’re cobbling together the support we don’t offer them, using as subsidies food stamps and other programs. They’re doing it whether you like it or not. Just you try and stop them.
Heidi Vornbrock Roosa is a recent grad of the Johns Hopkins MA in Writing program. Her fiction is available in The Summerset Review, Shots (as Regina Harvey), and is upcoming in The South Dakota Review.
