The news is true: I am in LA. Last week, I was in Santa Barbara for the mudslides and omg this crazy world! I read this article as I sat inside, listening to rain. I tried to go swimming but there had been an oil spill. I am here at decidedly the worst time for a person to be here, which is honestly fun and funny. The last few days, the sun has come out.
It took about six hours into the first day in Los Angeles for me to end up at Erewhon, about which I have been deeply curious. I first heard about the place a year ago, when I was having an Emma Chamberlain moment. I became mesmerized and troubled by her obsession with walking through the aisles, eating the same kale salad over and over again, buying an overflowing bag of groceries so that she – heaving through the mundanity of her depression – could do a haul.
There have been many a thinkpiece -ish about Erewhon, so I will be quick. It is a fancy, profoundly expensive supermarket. It has a font that should be on athleisure, and often is. Erewhon, now an L.A. staple, was first opened in Boston in 1966 as a macrobiotic haven. In a quick switch-up, it opened its first Los Angeles doors in 1968, with the idea – as the website shares – that “if we fill our bodies with the very best that the Earth has to offer, we can become our best selves.” Then it was sold and has opened up seven total locations in Los Angeles since 2011.
The name Erewhon comes from the 1872 satirical novel by Samuel Butler. It is an anagram of NOWHERE. It represents a utopia where humans are responsible for their own health.
The store in Silver Lake was terribly crowded. I exhaled and walked about three different times around the store, feeling too big for the aisles, marveling at the outfits out of the corner of my eye. Beyond the prevalence of filler and le Labo, I was particularly moved by the way that produce was stacked. The prepared snacks lived quietly in personalized Erewhon mason jars that called to mind the famous Kardashian fridges, decidedly transparent and so perfectly-organized that I grow disconcerted.
Sure, I felt overstimulated by the amount of supplements I could and would buy if I had a certain amount of money. I felt chaotic imagining how much better I could look and feel if I only shopped here, ate from here, let this space feed my existence. I felt all the feelings a person is kind of supposed to feel at a store like this: a mixture of validation from breathing amongst elite produce and people, and a dark wondering that I myself may not be a piece of elite produce. I felt those things, but they were familiar and kind of easy to ignore because of something else, a pulsing from outside myself. It took me a second, then I realized: Erewhon is alive with colors. Ecstatic!
Color was everywhere, and strong. I’m a visual person, but this was a whole new level. The colors were so artificial-looking and so beautiful. I absolutely needed to consume them, and now! I headed straight for the smoothie bar, tout de suite!
I got a Coconut Cloud :)
The cloud tasted like ice cream, but wasn’t. The entire thing was a very sweet, blue pillow. I enjoyed it because the sugar activated my pleasure sensors, but also because it tasted just like how it looked, which tasted SO different from what was supposed to be inside it: ingredients like avocado, almond butter, spirulina. In my hands, I felt I was holding something very special. I felt no shame as I posed for a pic.
The distance between substance, aesthetic, and flavor brought to mind molecular gastronomy, a huge part of food cultural capital in the moments where Whole Foods trended the most. Whole Foods, started as Safer Way Natural Foods, is often compared to Erewhon; a cautionary tale as well as an inspiration. The 90s are *slaying* right now and in 1992, Whole Foods – now owned by Amazon – went public.
Whole Foods has grown up to become more accessible, less moral, and hyper-depersonalized. Erewhon has watched its older sibling and done something smart: operated on an idealized personal. Leaning into celebrity, hard. Many smoothie collaborations, right now with Bella and Hailey Bieber and simply Lord knows who else! Making products so social media-oriented that they have a life of their own but also *somehow* taste good.
As Jason Widener, one of Erewhon’s directors, told the Times: “I think we leveraged the digital community. But the digital community leveraged Erewhon.” Flavor profiles are formatted as so terribly easy (drinking a vanilla cloud) and so glamorously arduous (a regenerated block of kale that I paid 1 million dollars for and ate yesterday, wheezing down the 101) that a person feels worthy of something, virtuous by association, no matter the object of consumption.
It’s funny because these colors are so fun but don’t necessarily look extraordinary on social media beyond the recognition of their brand specificity. Perhaps there is not so much to decode as that everything is more beautiful, somehow okay calling more attention to its beauty.
And now, I will say something that will surprise no one. I love L.A. I don’t honestly know that much about L.A., and I think that makes me love it even more. I grew up in NYC, went to college in Ohio, spent half a year in Bordeaux, lived for 1.5 years in the San Juan islands, lived for 6 months in Hudson NY. Those are a lot of places, kind of, but there is one thing I know for almost certain: I love L.A!
I often get told, hilariously, that I seem ‘very California’. I think it’s because I speak with a cadence (involuntary!) that I makes people think that I have smoked weed (I do not!). Also I am very willing to talk about things like “energy”. I love sunshine and I hate cold. I get a significant amount of serotonin from beach, mountains, and watching people perform. I meditate a lot and am soon to complete a yoga teacher training. I do astrology and burn what is likely a harmful amount of palo santo.
Most of these things embarrass me. They don’t embarrass me organically, i.e. I don’t feel bad about these elements of myself when I am alone. It’s a learned embarrassment, born from a cultural sentiment that intellect and wellness trends are mutually exclusive. There’s a very specific feeling in which a person decides that you may be not smart because you gravitate towards “the holistic” or “self-care”. It’s not just a perceived lack of credibility because of belief in some aspirational invisible, but even more: that you are dumb enough to spend money on shit that is easy to interpret as fake. If you pay for greens powders and astrology sessions, you’ve bought into the easiest capitalist branding scheme: salvation. Much of my adult life has been anticipating critique towards these practices and finding ways to decide to defend them or not… because ultimately, sweetie, who cares if I am communing!
After Erewhon, we went to go meet a friend. I was still holding my smoothie and quickly told him I hated myself for it. I wanted to reassure him! He’s from New York and explained gently that here: people don’t self-loathe about stuff like that. Gulping down the rest of my cloud, I was speechless.
Driving home in our rented RAV4, my arm hanging out the window in a way that I was sure looked cool, my sunglasses on because it literally was hard to see, I thought of two Eve Babitz quotes.
1. “I love hordes. They screen out free choice; you’re free at last: stuck.”
2. “So it turned out that power was the quality of knowing what you liked. An odd thing for power to be.”
COMING UP: LA PART TWO: EAST COAST INTERPRETATIONS/EATING OFFAL AT NIGHTTIME