As someone who lives on a homestead, and uses mason jars to can the food we grow, I can confirm that our usage of them for drinking is not a statement in any way, nor intended to have any meaning to our culture. We simply have hundreds of them. It is much more practical to drink out of them than to buy separate glasses for drinks.
Fun article, but a bit reaching in its emphasis on cultural significance. I think more could be said about the jar's exceptional functionality, universal availability, and low price.
I think you may be exaggerating the significance of utility in creating trends. We all know that almost no one would be drinking anything out of those jars in ten years (just as almost no one drank from them ten years ago), while the jars will still be just as useful and just as cheap.
I've been using them for at least 10 years as the sealed top is a very convenient way to carry a drink in a lunch bag. I was a bit self-conscious about it, but now I find that I was a hipster all along!
Like most epidemics, it's difficult to trace back to patient zero. Somewhere out there was the first cool bar/cafe/whatever to start using Mason jars. They may have been doing it for years before someone else saw it and copied it. Then there were two, then there were four, and pretty soon it's everyone.
From where I'm sitting it's already a played out trend. You wouldn't catch a cool cafe nowadays using jars. But I bought some beer a few months ago and as a special offer it came with two free beer glasses. They're "jars" -- or rather, they have a thread, but no lid, and a handle like a beer glass.
Interesting to discover that Mason jars are suddenly hip. A year ago, I learned how to make sauerkraut from cabbage and related vegetables (essentially: salt, compress, and seal).
Now we regularly enjoy homemade kraut from various types of veggies. It's delicious if you like pickled vegetables, and contains lots of probiotics. And, of course, Mason jars are a useful component.
I don't see how using Mason jars as drinking vessels furthers one's back-to-nature ambitions, but learning to use them for food fermentation and storage certainly does.
My next project: making wine (and vinegar) from various fruits. I especially wish to make lychee wine, because that was my favorite drink while living in Taiwan as a college student, and it's hard to find here in the U.S.
I recently bought a couple of Fido jars, made in Italy. Similar to Mason but they have these cool clasp-able lids that release the CO2 gas that is produced by fermentation without your needing to unscrew the lid every few hours as is the case with Masons. At least, so I'm told by a fellow sauerkraut maker. Am about to give it a try. Mason jars are definitely a lot cheaper, but each has its use I suppose.
Ah, so nice to talk about something other than technology once in a while. Balm for the mind and for the stomach.
I use a few wide-mouth ones as glasses, but also to have them handy and washed as food storage containers for leftovers or pre-prepared stuff. I'm not sealing them, just using the plastic lids (not sure if they're still available).
Having convenient glass storage containers that I can stick in the freezer or microwave and not worry about melting, etc. is worth it - the use as glasses is just so I have them in regular washing rotation to have available.
Mason jars are used by some people as glasses because those people have a bunch of mason jars handy.
"Hipsters" appropriate that for purely image purposes. A mason jar is in most ways worse than an actual glass. And a cocktail bar in east London doesn't happen to have a bunch of mason jars for preserving home grown produce. They buy them in.
It's annoying to see rich people play-acting like poor people for fun. Jarvis Cocker sings about it in Common People. Wayne Hemmingway has spoken about his dislike of people who collect kitsch for irony.
Does anyone "own" any aspect of any culture? While I agree there is a degree of image projection and wanting to look a certain way, does it really matter? Am I appropriating middle class by wearing matching clothing? Am I appropriating upward mobility by attending university? Really, I'm of the mind that none of the cultural signifiers are owned and thus there is no appropriation.
People are free to either follow trends or not follow them and I really don't care. Let people do as they like. You grew up in housing estates and enjoy classical music, great. You came from a middle class family and inject east London lexicon into your speech, great, enjoy it.
Everyone is a unit onto themselves and owe no one any apology for wanting to express themselves the way they want. crying appropriation is insular and is ironic in a sense. Yes. We are part of a society but it will turn on you in an instant, so, no, we don't owe it any deference.
No, you're totally right. It's ridiculous of me to be grumpy at young people having fun -- they're not harming me; they're part of the awareness that brings more scrutiny on these items, and thus more awareness on the people who use canning and pickling jars.
It's a nasty tendency of mine, and I nede to keep it in cehck.
"Appropriation" is one of those terms that has been overloaded and abused. Real appropriation is using another culture's culture and using it to pervert the meaning to the opposite. I completely agree with your point, just also pointing out that there are also real examples of appropriation out there - I guess many of the holiday traditions would qualify (native american thanksgiving stuff for commercialization, pagan christmas symbols used for christianity, etc).
Actually, to me, it makes no difference. So Christians took yuletide traditions and appropriated them. No difference to me. Etc, etc.
Take whatever you want as an individual, I don't care.
If it were not for "appropriation" society would not be beyond farming. The greatest philosophical lineages which allow us to have these discussions are mostly Greek and Chinese traditions. The rest of us have appropriated those institutions along with learning and education which have all allowed us to ponder these things.
Else we'd be like nomads and tribes who have traditions and culture but are little conscious of their provenance. It's not as if non modern cultures just up and spontaneously developed in cultural vacuums. We all have borrowed taken and appropriated consciously or unconsciously with and without premeditated purpose by weaker and stronger parties. To me, neither make a difference. Let everyone be what they want to be individually. In large groups their use can seem unfair, but individuals are not their groups. Not only that, but to not appropriate can only work in unconnected monocultures and I really don't think that's the direction either groups or individuals want to take, by and large.
To some degree it seems denouncing appropriation is a bit like wanting to eat the cake and have it too.
Well, I think you'd agree that abuse is bad. So, in the cases where cultural "borrowing" is driven by the intent to abuse, rather than the actual desire to assimilate the practice into one's own culture, would you agree that that is bad, also? Because that is the only point I'm making - that that is what the original definition of appropriation was about - where willful abuse was the point of it. Where it's a method of abuse.
Beyond that, it's a spectrum and a matter of degree. Mason jars is not appropriation. A silly pop star wearing cornrows is probably not appropriation, although some valid counterpoints might exist. Someone wearing a native american headdress to sell cars, or the Washington Redskins refusing to rename, or the KC Chiefs singing the tomahawk song at their stadium... those debates get a bit meatier.
When I drink water, I like having a big glass, to avoid filling it up every two minutes, so I either use a quart Mason jar or glasses I made out of magnum wine bottles. Otherwise, you're pretty much reduced to cheapo-deapo plastic Walmart glasses at that size.
I do tend to always have mason jars kicking around, though, because every time I go home I get loaded down with freshly-canned produce by my mother.
