Last fall, my friend and I took our husbands to dinner at The Old Spaghetti Factory. We acted like it was a joke but really...it wasnât. We wanted the brown butter and mizithra cheese pasta, a treat from our childhood. We planned to order it as part of a combo plate that also included meat sauce over noodles.Â
There are dozens of OSFs. The location near my high school, large and dimly lit, had stained glass, a train car in the middle of the restaurant (!!), and bread baskets. The location we selected for this dinner, hundreds of miles away, had the same menus, the same velvet-trimmed booths.
So how was our meal? Delicious. The mizithra cheese didnât come from a farm down the street. It was probably made in a lab, a mixture of chemicals and paste. What else would you expect from a restaurant calling itself a Factory? The pasta did not purport to be handmade. At the end of the meal, our complimentary spumoni arrived: pistachio, cherry, chocolate, melting together in a little silver dish. How was it? Divine.
As a kid growing up in the suburbs, I wore clothes from Old Navy and Nordstrom Rack. I wore makeup from Walmart, namely Maybelline Great Lash mascara that came in a pink-and-green tube. When I learned to drink coffee, I drank it in Starbucks. Later, I gravitated toward Peetâs, which felt sophisticated. (Turns out, Peetâs is owned by Starbucks.) My friends and I ate at Panera and Panda Express â chain restaurants in strip malls. We saw blockbuster movies, and drank cherry Icees. There was no Spotify tracking anyoneâs listening patterns, so nobody knew which songs were playing through my headphones. (Off-Broadway hits, angsty folk.) There was no Instagram, of course, so nobody knew that I hadnât thrifted my clothes, or visited a hole-in-the-wall cafĂ©.
Itâs not that everything I liked or did was âmainstream.â I found myself at some cool concerts, and wore sandals I procured from a drugstore in Hawaii, and read experimental novels I found at the library. But this was all happenstance. I did not spend hours on Yelp finding a trendy place to eat late-night burgers with my friends. We just went to Applebeeâs, and had a good time. I did not comb through reviews about products â like I do now, before I buy eye cream, or a backpack, or sandals â that were niche and cool and up-and-coming but also somehow, already, possessed by everyone. I wasnât ashamed of liking things that were cheap and commercial, basic and (shudder) suburban.
John Mayer. Black olives. Kirkland-brand wine. Cowâs milk. Subway honey-mustard sauce. Decor from HomeGoods. The band Maroon Five. Workout clothes from Marshalls. Shoes from DSW. The channel formerly known as ABC Family. The channel currently known as TLC. Jet skis.
Joining the âliberal eliteâ? Be prepared to disavow these pleasures. In academia, in the media, in big cities, in trendy circles, the surest sign of sophistication is how far away you are from Costco pinot noir and âLive, Laugh, Loveâ signs. Swear off any chain, any mall, and any restaurant with no reviews. (Unless itâs a hip, undiscovered little joint â in which case, donât worry, the reviews are on their way.) Forgo the tacky. Scorn the âcheugy.â Think critically about everything you purchase, or eat, or deign to enjoy. Obsess about it, even. You can shop at Target, yes: but only ironically.
Avoid, at all costs, those suburban women (two words said to me, with scorn, by more than one New Yorker). These are women who shop at Kohlâs and cook with hamburger meat, who watch reality television, who engage with the monoculture. What rubes! What fools. Never mind that perhaps they donât have the time, money, leisure, opportunity, or (and this is really it) ego to take all of their purchases and preferences so seriously. They just need school shoes. They just need to make dinner. No subscription toothbrushes, no âradically transparentâ perfume.
This isnât really about money. Many of us twenty-something elitists canât really afford the âniceâ chocolate and the âniceâ plants and the âniceâ candles, even though we buy them anyway. This is about class. Itâs about culture. Itâs about speaking a language of material goods that indicates weâre insiders.
Let me be clear: Local is great. Craftsmanship? Great. All products should be fair-trade and fair-labor. It is good to support a farmer, cheesemaker, or butcher whoâs also your neighbor. Clothing thatâs made in clean and safe conditions is better than âfast fashionâ made by children. If only we could all afford fresh food, and jeans stitched by someone paid a living wage. If only thatâs what the market incentivized.
Also, we buy too much stuff anyways. The movement toward owning one, higher-quality item rather than the fifty shoddy ones is good in that it encourages us to have and need less. Big-box stores and chain restaurants absolutely encourage overconsumption, and outsourced production, and bad working conditions, and low-quality bang-for-your-buck. The world would probably be a better place without them.
But I think weâre fooling ourselves if we say our reasons for preferring chic diners or craft cocktails or hand-sewn sheets or recycled-material tennis shoes have only to do with ethics, or the environment, or human dignity. We can buy good things for bad reasons. We like the farmers market because of the produce...and because we like being the kind of person who buys produce from the farmersâ market. Oftentimes, our good desires to be natural and handmade and anti-corporate and artisanal, crafted and curated and local, are intertwined with our desire to be seen as superior, to mark our identity, taste, and goodness by means of what we buy. Weâre virtue-signaling. Or weâre just being snobs. Oftentimes, our obsessions over what we consume â the sourcing of our coffee, the provenance of our purses â allow us to ignore real injustices, to use stuff as a stand-in for justice. And sometimes, the companies that purport to be âbetterâ â for us, for the earth, for our neighbors â end up not living up to their promises.
When I was a teenager, I spent more time living my life than thinking about the items and experiences it contained. That was nice. I donât want to go back to eating the quesadilla burger at Applebeeâs (Iâm not sure my body could handle that anymore). But I do want to return to an existence thatâs less classist, and less curated. Less concerned about products, and more concerned about, well, everything else. Able to admit â yes, itâs true â that HomeGoods has nice dishes, and John Mayerâs new album has some bops, and that pink-and-green mascara? It honestly works just fine.
Love,
Kate
My album recommendation
You guessed it: Sob Rock
Best song IMHO: âI Guess I Just Feel Likeâ
Reading material:Â This review of âSob Rock.â
An actual book I recently read and enjoyed: On Freedom by Maggie Nelson (coming out 9/7).
Summer recipe: This fig cake.
I have often tried to articulate how and why our kids have so much more noise to contend with, I think this gets to a signiarficant part of it â so much more thinking about what to do than doing it, living a curated is anathema to authenticity defined as what comes naturally. The scrutiny is confining as the praise is addicting. Peer pressure on steroids.