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Recently I wrote about how I arrived inside Erewhon, Los Angeles’s most expensive health food store, for the first time ever in my life. The traumatic fecal-encrusted episode was somewhat fortuitous insofar as I had been planning to write something about the grocery chain for several weeks. Yet up until that point could not bring myself to Google a single Erewhon location, let alone imagine dipping through its sliding glass doors, to say nothing of coughing over $18 for some crappy Hailey Bieber “Skin Glaze” smoothie, no matter how indispensable it might prove to my research.
Further, a vast and expanding cottage industry of horrific TikTok content had tipped me off to the fact that, in the course of my research, should I find myself hungry and in need of a boost, beyond my basic Bieber smoothie I could absolutely add an espresso shot and muffin to my order and make it out the door for a modest $34. If I wanted any additional refreshment for the road, I could snag a bottle of another sad scam, Ophora Hyper Oxygenated Water, for $25.99.
Needless to say, crunching such numbers, I wasn’t exactly jogging down the street, wallet in hand, jonesing for the closest Erewhon grocer.
I’d figured the Erewhon essay would wind up like everything else I initiated—another project begun with enthusiasm then abruptly abandoned, left to rust out in the rain among the rest of the junk piled in the backyard of my brain.
It was weird coincidence then that, jogging in an unfamiliar neighborhood some weeks ago, I slipped and fell in a glistening wet pile of canine excrement, and desiring to rid myself of the diarrhea slathered all across my ass, discovered I was somehow standing behind an open door at the back of an Erewhon grocery store.
Deprived of wallet, phone, and ego, with little to lose of money or pride, I suddenly found the courage necessary to enter the infamous bourgeois bastion of Southern California healthism (or at least its employee bathroom) and also a confirmation—in the form of a coincidence—that I was perhaps somehow supposed to stick it out and actually write this miserable little Erewhon essay.
Sidebar—Now part of me wants to pause here and say more about this coincidence, and coincidence in general. But there are more coincidences coming. And not only that, they connect in several disturbing ways to what initially launched this rotten blog, namely, an interest in the hidden history of Los Angeles, and more specifically, the nuclear meltdown at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, which for various reasons outlined in prior posts I have been prevented from writing about.
So let’s not leap down any uncritical self-serving Jungian rabbit hole just yet. Let us instead linger here for a moment longer in the strange thicket that surrounds that weird world…
For years I’d heard that sound haunting the LA ether. Erewhon…
I’d always assumed that it had some wack ass New Age origin, that it was the name, say, of some purple sentient mist hidden in the mossy heart of some fabled elfin forest, a lame vague pagan power from which creepy old Swedish people, prior to the advent of IKEA, huffed a slightly above average lifespan. There was of course, too, the weird reverence with which these tense, wan, and well-groomed Angelenos tended to whisper the word in one’s periphery—Erewhon… air-uh-whon—as though its sacred ethereal syllables could barely withstand being brought to audible utterance.
“What the fuck is Erewhon?” I remember yelling years ago in a loud bar after one of Christina’s friends, Jenn, had devoted, in hushed tones, an astonishing surplus of blather to the abundant peace pervading her soul in the wake of eating brown rice broccoli bowls from Erewhon for lunch for a solid week straight.
“It’s some kind of horseshit health food store,” Christina hissed when Jenn finally strode off to piss. “People are obsessed with it.”
The ongoing foul impression of some divine faux-mystery was made all the more cumbersome by the fact that whatever health-giving benefit Erewhon might bestow, it was accessible not through the tedious labyrinth of disciplined spiritual practice, but the instantaneous gratification of raw capitalist transaction. Erewhon was, and is, just a grocery store. It’s a place where you can purchase shit that kept you from starving to death. What makes it somehow heavier, more significant, however, is the hellacious price tag it imposes.
Groceries seldom contain that kind of gravity.
Most people I know would be pitching a tent on Skid Row within a month if they started stocking their pantries with Erewhon staples. So what gives? Why the obscene popularity of Erewhon seen across the economic spectrum today?
I’m not sure, but I think that beyond the status conferred by conspicuous consumption, Erewhon is doing something new. Erewhon transforms the preservation of one’s corporeal existence into a privilege. Life becomes more valuable, and living more intense, more mysterious maybe, when you must pay massively for the privilege of continuance. It makes me wonder: Is it possible that behind the laughable price tags Erewhon maintains a deadly serious mission? Could it be that, by some strange twist of economic fate, having made the bar to entry so high—its barcodes hiding prices that prevent all food from finding easy entry into most of our mouths—Erewhon is attempting to extract not only a maximum profit but also a moment of reflection, to awaken us to the miraculous fact, before we mindlessly consume and move on with our misery, that there is no greater privilege than the intentional maintenance of our ephemeral flesh? Does Erewhon want to gouge us into consciousness?
To hear CEO Tony Antoci philosophize on the origins of the company name, you wouldn’t really think so. Antoci purchased Erewhon in 2011 when it was one small LA location with a smoothie counter staffed by a single hippie guy named Truth.
“I don’t understand what it means,” Antoci told writer Kerry Howley for a recent a cover story in New York Magazine. “It sounds weird.”
Sidebar: In another coincidence, Howley, a phenomenal writer who I went to grad school with, was briefly in LA actively researching Erewhon at the exact same time that I was sitting in LA actively thinking about researching Erewhon, hence her success!)
Either way, no matter its true meaning, Erewhon is certainly ahead of its time. Those $26 bottles of Ophora Hyper water are a harbinger of the future. They betoken the dystopia just down the road.
No doubt, after society’s collapse, when most of us are left to subsist on the blood of rats, we can all look back at Erewhon and laugh. $26 for a bottle of water—what a steal that was!
But what does that weird word Erewhon really mean? For years I assumed it was some kind of intelligent life-giving Gaia vapor plucked from the pages of YA lesbian Wiccan fiction. People I asked recently in informal brewery-based surveys all scratched their heads in baffled boredom. “It sounds like something from Lord of the Rings.” “Is that like a German wheat ale?” The mention of the books by Englishman J.R. Tolkien does, however, takes us a tad bit closer to what I find most terribly interesting about Erewhon. It’s a book!
“What the fuck even is Erewhon?” I asked Christina once more, after several years, as we looped round Santa Monica several weeks ago and saw one of the stylish storefronts looming at the back of the faux-Tuscan strip mall. It was this question, and her answer, which launched this whole dismal errand into Erewhon’s origins.
“Where does that word come from? Will you Google it?”
After years, having heard that weird word become a permanent fixture of LA air pollution, I still couldn’t say anything more informative about it other than the fact it was nowhere I ever wanted to be seen…
“Hmm,” Christina said, genuinely surprised. “It means nowhere.”
N-O-W-H-E-R-E |||—||| E-R-E-W-H-O-N
Yes, Erewhon was originally a dystopian novel written by the English author Samuel Buttler in 1872, coincidentally the same year that Charles Nordhoff wrote the best-selling book that first brought all the bros and hoes to Southern California shores: California for Health, Pleasure, and Residence. But what does any of this horseshit mean?
Stay tuned until next time when I’ll finally reveal ALL the secrets and you can discover at last the surprising wonder that lies behind some of life’s greatest mysteries.
Is Hailey Biebers skin actually in the smoothie?
Long time fan, first time commenter... Truth made me my first Erewhon smoothie circa 2008, I dnno what he put in it, but I felt like I was on really great drugs for hours. It was $30.
The Juicebar use to have a very, I used to do heroin but now raw food is my new thing. Palpable energy.