COVID-19 adds fuel to `hipsteader' phenomenon
When COVID -19 arrived this winter, Chase Beathard worried so much about meat shortages that he took advantage of a Craigslist ad offering a free boar. Now the 34-year-old breeds pigs.
Producing pork, from his home in Shelton, Wash., places Beathard in a cohort that plunged into do-it-yourselfism while hunkering down during the pandemic.
They are gobbling up content, like a YouTube series on growing food from Homesteaders of America that had a 10-fold jump in subscribers in 48 hours.
Meanwhile, sales more than doubled at Etsy, an online market for handmade goods. Revenue gains at DIY giants Home Depot and Lowe's are the highest in nearly two decades. And if you're looking for a pressure canner, chickens or mason jars; they're often sold out.
“COVID-19 has just accelerated some of our long-term homesteading goals,” Beathard said.
While COVID-19 has decimated large swaths of the global economy, it has sparked others, like video conferencing and home appliances. Do-it-yourself pursuits, such as bread making, gardening and crafts, have also boomed and appear primed to last after the pandemic becomes a dark, distant memory.
Just as victory gardeners supplemented rations and boosted morale during the First and Second World Wars, the DIYers of coronavirus are facing quarantines and shortages with a mix of survivalist bravado and self-expression. Many are skipping the usual retailers, and instead turning to recycled goods, small businesses or individuals for their needs.
Not all of these consumers are as hardcore as Beathard, a plant scientist who lives off a 10-acre plot of land with his wife and four kids.
Take Abdel Elshiekh, a neuroscience doctoral candidate at Montreal's McGill University. He tried to find moss poles for his houseplant hobby, but they were sold out at Home Depot and Canadian Tire. So the 31-year-old built his own from coconut fibre. Then he made plant fertilizer with banana peels, eggshells and coffee grounds. Soon he was propagating his own flora.
“It's a way for me to seek refuge from external events I can't control,” said Elshiekh, who is also cutting his hair and baking bread.
People who were already DIY hobbyists are expanding their skills.
Tynika-Ann Carter, a 24-year-old former model in Western Cape, South Africa, turned to farming and gardening years ago in a quest to replace materialism with something more wholesome. Since the virus, she's added making baskets, weaving and crocheting. “COVID has given me more time to dive in and give myself fully to the things I love,” she said.
Beathard, Elshiekh and Carter model a new attitude about what's cool, and show how the pandemic is accelerating it.
Like hipsters, they're setting new trends and flaunting the look on Instagram. But they're also doing a lot of the hard, survival-focused work that defines homesteading.
Some have dubbed them the hipsteaders.
“We had to learn to do more for ourselves, to be more self-sufficient,” Mary Osirim, a professor of sociology at Bryn Mawr College, said of the past six months of lockdowns and sporadic shortages. This do-it-yourself ethos is being driven by more free time because of less travelling and commuting, but also necessity, she said.
Osirim and her fellow sociologists are only beginning to measure the pandemic's impact.
A survey by Bloomberg News and Morning Consult suggests not only that many more people cooked, baked and worked out at home than ever before, but that they want to continue doing so after the virus.
The poll of 2,200 U.S. residents in late June showed that a third of Americans grew herbs and vegetables and did their own sewing and clothing repairs. Equally significant, 60 per cent of Americans expect in a fully reopened economy to do more for themselves, instead of paying for services.