Wordwatch: Crafted

The pack of soya milk on my breakfast table  bears many messages – too many, no doubt. One is this: “Our guarantee to you is TASTY SOYA at its prime. Carefully crafted, deliciously chilled so that you can ENJOY IT AT ITS BEST.”

This short piece of advertiser’s copy raises a lot of questions. I didn’t know soya could ever claim to be “tasty” for one, and this milk certainly has very little taste of any kind. When is it “at its prime”? Chilling doesn’t usually add to flavour – it subdues it, surely. But the word that draws my attention is “crafted”.

Here is a pack of industrially produced (though doubtless with all the necessary health precautions) beverage and it asks me to believe that it was “crafted”. That is, I suppose, made by a person technically skilled in soya-milk manufacture. Is that something learned in a non-industrial context, a village dairy or farm outbuilding?

For me, a “craftsman” is someone who exercises a traditional skill in making something of unpretentious function, bringing knowledge and sensitivities to bear so that the resultant object is of aesthetic as well as functional value. He or she is, above all, the exponent of a traditional procedure, using long-accumulated skills.  It is quite possible that those skills may be of fairly recent origin, but I don’t think it reasonable or honest to call in all these ideas when describing a process of industrial mass-production.

Some beers are proclaimed as “craft beers” now, and they almost qualify as products of craftsmanship or artisanal skill. The word is usually employed in a pretentious way though, used to imply purity and originality: the connotations of “art” are deliberately invoked. That is partly because of the phrase “arts and crafts” which goes back to the days when William Morris (1834-96) tried to counter later nineteenth-century industrialisation with a coordinated return to local manufacture and traditional materials.

“Crafted” is now fashionable as a loaded description of many products of various character. Soya milk seems an unlikely co-ordinate. A local bakery might use it with reference to its “artisan” loaves, but a large supermarket like Waitrose is surely stretching the point when it employs the word in that context. “Artisan”, of course, begs a similar question.