Facebook X Email Print Save Story If every city has a culinary punch line, it’s easy to identify Los Angeles’s: Erewhon, the cultish chain of grocery stores, where a half gallon of “hyper oxygenated” water will run you an unconscionable $25.99. It started, in 1966, as a bean-sprouts-and-bulk-bins health-food stall in Boston, the brainchild of Japanese immigrants who evangelized the macrobiotic diet.
Since then, it’s moved West and morphed into a slick, high-end wellness behemoth—a constant site of workaday paparazzi photos, a case study in capitalism posing as counterculture. The chain is especially famous for its “tonic bar,” which hawks vibrantly hued, supplement-laden smoothies that often double as billboards for influencers and pop stars (see Katy Perry’s pre-album release Orange You Glad I Love You) or for self-described health-care professionals pushing highly specific diets. The latter category includes Dr.
Paul Saladino, an advocate for an early-human-inspired menu of grass-fed meat, fruit, and unpasteurized dairy, and the twisted mind behind the Raw Animal-Based Smoothie, made with freeze-dried beef organs, raw kefir, and blueberries. A tour through Erewhon is a tour through the cultural pathologies of the day: seed-oil paranoia, Jordan Peterson-influenced masculinity panic, gratuitous self-medication for the remote-work set. In my first few weeks as a resident of L.
A., where I moved recently from New York, I stalked the aisles with forensic focus. .