HIPSTERFOOD was a finalist in the Best Original Recipes category of the Saveur 2013 Best Food Blog Awards. “Hipsterfood is a food blog here to show you that vegan food isn’t a fad,” they proudly declare in their sidebar.
Every post is accompanied by a large, color photo of the product in question. These photos come in the same soft focus,slightly color-altered aesthetic made popular by Instagram, the photosharing site renowned in current popular culture for hipsters using their phones to take photographs of their food.
A quick survey of the posts shows that many posts aren’t recipes at all. They do more to show off the food than instruct in the preparation. The author regularly posts pictures accompanied by some variation on the theme of “lunch today was…” This reflects the same stereotype of the hipster merely showing the world what they’re eating as though it were special.
The blog format allows HIPSTERFOOD to keep their message moving forward. With a book, there isn’t necessarily a long-term commitment by the author. Once the book is published, it’s published. A follow up takes a lot of effort, and takes some time separation from the first book. With a blog, they can reinforce through continual updates their assertion that “Vegan food isn’t a fad.”
The structure of the blog itself is very clean. The backgrounds are simple, the text allows the images to shine, and the layout runs in only two columns with a clear body/sidebar setup. This setup forces the focus on the food and provides no distractions. The authors explain that they are simply there to show off vegan cooking, not to add anything pretentious about it, and the simplicity of the blog serves that idea well.
As a lifestyle blog, they do a good job of providing information for the curious. There are FAQ pages that answer questions about the lifestyle and why they make the choices they do. These ideas aren’t presented in the posts, but in separate pages that link from the main page. This ensures that only those looking for the lifestyle information will find it, and anyone merely looking for food will get just what they are looking for.
The name itself is curious, though. They say that the name of the blog is a joke on the idea that people associate veganism with hipsters. In a sense, by presenting themselves with the hipster aesthetic as an in-joke, it reinforces the very idea that they seek to avoid. They try to avoid the image of veganism as “some silly, fleeting trend” by presenting it through an aesthetic that is very particular to the early 2010s.