WELL, WELL, WELL

Eating—and not-in the epicenter of hype diets.

- HANNAH GOLDFIELD

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 Petersoninfluenced 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. A narrative of modern ills emerged, and if these are universal-who among us does not seek higher energy, improved immunity, and better sleep, sex, skin, and hair? the means for achieving them seemed to boil down to two strikingly polar schools of thought. One side, more predictably, extolls the plant-based diet, which eschews animal products, while the other recommends consuming as many products from as many different animals as possible.