What Your Favorite Junk Foods Look Like When Rebranded for Hipsters

Hipsters and junk food don’t mix. After all, how’s one supposed to fetishize obscurity when stuffing one’s mouth with the same Twinkies that have been enjoyed by generations of squares for almost 90 years now? Besides, try squeezing into skinny jeans after squeezing a few of those spongey, sugary, cream-filled tubes into your throat. And don’t even get unnecessarily bespectacled Brooklynites started on whether the fruit in Fruit by the Foot is locally sourced (or even fruit at all). Which is likely what inspired Dan Meth, a talented and hilarious artist who’s worked for BuzzFeed among others, did the marketers of some of the world’s favorite garbage snacks an enormous favor by rebranding them as hipster junk foods to tap into that sweet, sweet, ever-lucrative hipster market.

Twinkies, Before

Twinkies are literally the gold standard of trash food. Nothing about them feels natural. Ask yourself: What seems in your brain to be the more likely source of Twinkies: that a baker baked them in a bakery, or that astronauts discovered them in an alien’s nest in a space forest on the dark side of the moon?

I think you know the answer. Twinkies are probably not of this world.

Twinkies, After

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One of the hallmarks of junk food is individual wrapping. There’s no hope of dignity in eating dessert after you’ve desperately clawed it out of some crinkly cellophane. That’s why hipster Twinkies aren’t wrapped, but placed lovingly in a decorative box.

You don’t frantically extract these snack cakes from some crass, plastic wrapper. Instead, you select them from their artisanal packaging. You’re so discerning.

Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries, Before

Everything about the Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries box screams at you. First, there are the crunch berries themselves, whose colors read like warnings. Then there’s the visage of the Cap’n, in which his eyes appear to be silently crying out for rescue. And the disembodied demand to “

CRUNCH-ATIZE ME, CAP’N!” carries deeply discomfiting sexual undertones. The whole package is violently threatening.

Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries, After

Now this is more like it. This version of Cap’n Crunch is an invitation. I’m lounging on my porch swing with a bowl of Crunchberries and a mug of steaming coffee. Sunlight dissolves the dawn mist as a cool breeze off Narragansett Bay welcomes me to the morning.

I hear the muted call of a seagull in the distance. I am serene, a sense of peace rippling through me from the anahata. I close my eyes and accept the soft release of death. Thank you, Cap’n.