Yeast in the Air Makes Hipsters Rise

Welcome to the last week of April, please keep all hands and feet inside the ride at all times.

As we barrel headfirst toward a meat shortage, I can’t help but wonder whether the people who bought up all the flour feel vindicated or not. In a world without bacon, will the satisfaction of giving homemade sourdough the ole college try suffice? Will a nation of forced vegetarians be more or less inclined to brag about their culinary prowess online?

I had been looking for flour for weeks so I could make chicken parm, non-sour English muffins, and a host of other pedestrian dishes. This past week, my local cheap supermarket finally replenished its supply of Pillsbury’s dehydrated Wonder Bread. I loaded up on processed, bleached flour, scoffing at its PhD-toting, Goop-reading cousins made of almonds, cashews, and more foods whose version of glue-factory afterlife is a grim choice between reincarnation as milk or as flour.

For weeks, the shoppers at my particular market, like so many other homebound yuppies, had joined hands to buy up all the flour and make god damn sourdough. The nation’s yuppies are either collectively trying to impress somebody new or hoping to recover from a breakup via this notoriously time-intensive hobby.

I first tried to make sourdough in between bites of granola at liberal arts college, when I realized I needed something to talk about other than Birkenstocks and socialism. I had heard that beginning with somebody else’s starter is easier than creating one’s own out of thin air. It’s a kind of “who delivers the mailman’s mail” question, but I thought I’d try the immaculate conception version. My starter bubbled, and my dough rose enough to instill hope.

It was therefore to great disappointment that I pulled a kettlebell of carbohydrates out of the oven. I left this wheat ingot out at a party. I laughed whenever somebody mistook it for bread, and I cried whenever a flannel-clad baker lectured me on which aramaic incantations would curry divine favor and induce a more successful harvest.

So, three years later, when I found that the sourbroughs had depleted the baking aisle, a rage took root inside of me. I had tried this before it was cool, but I had failed. I had done all the homework to achieve bona fide hipster status, but I couldn’t pass the class. It only made matters worse when a friend dropped off half a loaf—which was delicious—from a coworker who had such a gift as to have “made too many.”

I tried to free my mind from this torture, so I took off for a run. The lake had been closed for a few weeks because everybody who’s now making sourdough had tried to take up running first. I had my usual route, but I found parts of it far too crowded for a Tuesday evening. From the looks of it, many folks wore brand new sneakers. It hurt to discover that the late adopters were faster than me.

Back home, I felt myself craving some chakra realignment. I first wrote about my new yoga habit with the same zeal that drives new vegans to create Instagram food blogs. As an update, I can only touch my toes after a long warmup, and my peace of mind is fragile at best.

I managed to relax until the end of class, when the teacher asked that I lower myself out of bridge “vertebrae [sic] by vertebrae [sic].” The whole illusion imploded. How could I relax if the teacher didn’t know the difference between the Latin singular feminine nominative and the plural feminine nominative? She asked that those of us practicing at home—lest we be duped into believing anybody was elsewhere—continue to lie in shavasana for a further 10-15 minutes. I opted instead to return to my desk, where I responded with bad posture to a non-urgent work email.

The vacuity of typing such phrases as “I hope you are well” and “thank you for your comments” let my mind wander, as seems to happen. I realized my disgust came from somewhere deeper than the teacher’s malapropism, the speedy Chicagoans, or the sourbroughs.

A scroll through Instagram these days reveals an army of people flaunting their successful hobbies. The watercolorists display a particularly condescending combination of artistic talent, patience, and steady hands. The latter are only available to those who abstain from nervousness, coffee, guilty consciences, and alcohol. They’re pickling vegetables, writing unsolicited email diatribes, holding inverted yoga poses, and some jerk from my summer camp has even developed an ersatz smoker. He seems to be producing some really top notch bird, that asshole.

These people have read longer books, grown thicker mustaches, learned more niche instruments, and defeated me.

I have sat helpless as this whole thing exited a honeymoon period of opportunistic self improvement to return to toxic self appraisal. Now, we’re back to work. There are quarter-full glasses of water all over the nightstand, and the laundry basket is overflowing.

The competitive spirit won’t die, though, cultivated with my friends through fickle phases of Words with Friends and online chess. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. These are healthier competitive outlets than striving to become the best damn watercolorist in my network. Nevertheless, it turns out that, for those lucky enough to have stable health, housing, and employment, the Coronavirus has created a world in which more in our lives than ever before, from flour to park space, is rival in consumption.

We live in the age of “that place is so crowded, nobody goes there anymore.” As soon as everybody starts baking, the flour is sold out. As soon as everybody starts running, they close the park. Escaping competition is harder than ever. The only way to have fun is to do it before everybody else comes and ruins it.

Longtime hipsters who hired sourdough sitters to feed their levain during vacations should feel justified in the smug “I did it before it was cool” because now, once something is cool, it’s over. It’s like how you can’t go to any bar in Brooklyn your dad knows about.

With all this indoors time, there has been a hipsterization of the yuppy class. Nobody’s wearing shoes, though everybody’s outfit should include shoes. Everybody’s a data scientist who can best explain curve flattening. Simultaneously, they’re also creatives making latte art. They have beards, buzz cuts, piercings, and weird hobbies. Plus, everybody’s got an inside source about this COVID-19 business that makes them the one who’s right.

I used my stovetop espresso the other day and frothed some almond milk in my French press. I tried so, so hard, but my latte art proved too well formed to be cubist yet too indiscernible to be surrealist. Uncertainty reigns, which makes it harder than ever to be right about anything. I just hope a few sourbroughs butcher their aramaic worse than I did.