The New Adventures of Generation F: Handmade Food

A couple of hours after setting foot in Brooklyn for the first time, I find the heart of the action. It's 7 p.m. on a hot summer weeknight, and I'm hanging with a group of fashionable young people, all good-looking and under 30, who favor the uptown stylish look (pressed shirts, nice shoes) or that of the ubiquitous Brooklyn hipster (beard, plaid accents). They're socializing, having a laugh, and I'm hanging with them. We are not, though, in the latest hot restaurant and bar, nor are we listening to a painfully obscure band. No, we're standing in the commercial kitchen attached to a store called The Brooklyn Kitchen, canning pickles.

That's right: hipster picklers. Because whatever you may have read about being on the inside track of cool these days, for these New Yorkers, it's all about brining vegetables.

As the evening—which is basically a pickle seminar—unfolds, considerable ground is covered by affable expert Bob McClure, 32, co-owner of Detroit-based McClure's Pickles and a poster boy for a phenomenon sweeping North America: artisanal food production.

"Now for relishes," asks one pickle pilgrim, who looks like he might be a securities analyst when not brining, "do you use finished pickles or chop up the cucumbers fresh?"

Fresh, apparently. There is much head-nodding and brow-furrowing.

"Artisinal" is the big word in food these days. It attaches to a staggering range of producers, from cheesemakers to chocolate crafters, bakers, condiment producers, sausage curers, microdistillers, and quite a few more picklers than I would have thought the economy could support. The essence of the ethic—more than an idea, it's an ideal—is independent ownership, hand-crafted food, small-scale (often urban) production, fealty to real or imagined culinary heritage and, often, savvy packaging, canny marketing, social-media outreach and, sometimes, wacky experimentation with flavors (hot-chile-pepper ice cream from Ohio, for example, or jerk-flavored cheese from Seattle). Genuine handmade artisanal food production is a tiny part of the 60 billion dollar "specialty" food industry, but the artisanal movement thrills those who dream of beating back the industrialization of food. It is catnip to foodies, trend-sniffers, and those who survey and supply them: Martha Stewart and Williams-Sonoma both being well aboard the artisanal train by now, along with the Food Network and especially its new expansion effort, the Cooking Channel. At its heart is the conviction that a young country can both recover and invent the sort of real-food heritage that the Old World—whether Europe or Asia—built its cuisines upon. A tall order, but one the indie-food generation is excited to tackle.

Four years ago, Bob McClure was an actor in New York City, working temp jobs on the side. One jar of pickles made from his great-grandmother's recipe, brought to a dinner party, changed his story arc. McClure's Pickles now produces 800 to 900 jars a day out of a small Detroit facility run by Bob's doctoral-candidate brother Joe, and where both their mother and grocery-industry-veteran father are now employed. That's 800 to 900 quart jars, retailing for 8 to 12 dollars each, of what Brooklyn's Bedford Cheese Shop proprietor Charlotte Kamin describes as by far the most popular pickles they sell.