Hipster Food

 

It's hard to believe this unassuming photo would change pop culture history. In the early part of the 21st century, portions of society known as “hipsters” would routinely share digital photographs or “pics” of their food before eating it, though the reason for this practice is the subject of much debate. Historians do agree, however, that Hugo Carpenter (1983-2092) changed this practice on a fundamental level in 2013. While others posted “instantgrams” of food to Facesbook, a primitive social media network where people bragged, plagiarized, and complained to win the most Likes, Hugo decided to embrace the hipster philosophy of celebrating a thing before it is another thing by sharing a photograph of his dinner “before it was food.” Soon, others emulated this food regression, which in turn inspired Noah Wilkins (1998-2088) to share an image of a cow in a wheat field with the caption “My cheese burger before it was ingredients.” This photographic regression escalated with photos of lakes which were “sodas before they were well water before they were clouds” and parents who were “macaroni and cheese before buying ingredients after having a kid and changing their eating habits to 'whatever the brat will eat' (my parents don't understand me).” The trend culminated in 2025 when Arabella Jones wrote a hundred thousand word annotated caption to a photograph of pure blackness, tracing the origins of her sushi all the way back to the Big Bang. This comment would eventually be published as the best-selling book My Dinner Before It Was Anything: How I Won the Hipster Internet. Following this seminal scholarly work that combined physics with geology, anthropology, history, sociology, and many other disciplines, the hipster movement fell apart, and camera sales plummeted to pre-internet lows.

- Originally mailed to M. Haley of Lake Orion, Michigan