A Food Critic Walks Into a Fasting Spa

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. 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.

In the dairy aisle, you’ll find “milked” cashews opposite raw cow and goat milk, redolent of barnyard funk (and of the conservatives who have taken up the stuff as an anti-establishment cause). Shoppers who fear canola can choose sustainably derived algae oil or the hump fat of a wild camel. The mushrooms and other plant substances known as adaptogens, thought to help manage stress, are abundant in gummies and chocolate bars. Meanwhile, Dr. Paul’s smoothie is spiked with “immunomilk,” also known as bovine colostrum—the nutrient- and antioxidant-dense substance secreted by postpartum cows, the next best thing to being nursed by a cavewoman.

Erewhon might seem outré in most other places, but in Los Angeles it verges on the mainstream. The other day, on the patio of the branch in Silver Lake, I did a double take when I noticed a group of men, one of whom gave me a friendly nod, wearing Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department uniforms and sipping twenty-dollar smoothies. Though supplements and alt-milks are just a small part of the city’s vast and diverse food scene, Southern California has a long history as a testing ground for experiments in health and wellness. In the late nineteenth century, when tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in the United States, the region became an alternative to the sanatoriums of Europe. The mild, sunny climate, undeveloped landscape, and sense of freedom attracted both the ill and people who sought to heal them, setting the stage for the widespread practice of unorthodox medicine and fomenting the growth of fringe movements. In L.A., it even shaped the architecture: the iconic Health House, built by Richard Neutra, in 1929, for the L.A. Times health columnist Philip Lovell, was designed to facilitate nude sunbathing and an adherence to a strict vegetarian diet.

The cultural development of Southern California took cues from its economy. In the late eighteenth century, Spanish missionaries introduced citrus and other crops to the region, and, after the gold rush, agriculture became a major industry. When refrigerated railway cars began shipping the state’s produce farther afield, at the dawn of the twentieth century, the notion of “health food” emerged as a form of marketing, Suzanne Joskow, an L.A. artist and archivist, told me. We were paging through a selection of titles from her extensive collection of locally published cookbooks, such as “Modern Meatless Cook Book” (1910), “Eat and Grow Thin” (circa 1918), and “Mrs. Richter’s Cook-Less Book with Special Section on Curative Value of Natural Food” (1948).

Early gimmicks focussed on teaching housewives how to prepare California produce at home, but also pushed natural foods as a tonic—an idea that piggybacked on Indigenous foodways and the medicinal use of native ingredients like chia seeds and blue elderberry. “It’s a perfect storm, almost,” Joskow said. “You have religion tied to food, and food tied to the selling of L.A., way before L.A. was famous for Hollywood.”

The rise of the movie industry only fuelled the city’s appetite for hype diets, driven by actors whose livelihood depended on maintaining a youthful vitality, and by fans desperate to know what the stars were eating for breakfast. The cuisine of nineteen-sixties counterculture embodied ideas of health, too, as satirized by the “alfalfa sprouts and a plate of mashed yeast” scene in “Annie Hall,” which was filmed at the Source, a restaurant on the Sunset Strip opened by a cult in 1969. In the decade following, argues James Riley, the author of “Well Beings: How the Seventies Lost Its Mind and Taught Us to Find Ourselves,” hippie idealists started to turn their utopian thinking inward, with a focus on self-improvement beyond basic physical health. This laid the groundwork for what Riley calls the “commodified approach to wellness.” It’s easy to draw the line to Erewhon.

Looming over the myriad dietary possibilities in Los Angeles is the option of not eating at all. Daphne Javitch, an L.A.-based health-and-wellness coach, told me that her field can be preoccupied with inputs—with eating the right foods, taking the right supplements. “My experience with healing is, it’s really about what is coming out of the body,” she said. Like many in her line of work, she tries not to focus on weight or aging. Her turning point came ten years ago, when, she said,“I really started to think more about my colon than my cellulite.”

Javitch is a proponent both of responsible fasting and of colonics, the two main offerings at the almost forty-year-old We Care Spa, a celebrity-endorsed institution near Palm Springs. One recent morning, in the middle of a heat wave, I arrived for twenty-four hours of blissful not-eating. A lithe young woman named Sophia greeted me at the front desk and handed me some necessities, including a seventeen-ounce metal water bottle and a B.P.A.-free plastic cup.

Sophia explained that We Care’s founder, the eighty-six-year-old Susana Belen, had moved to the desert as an anxious young single mother of four, and found salvation through radical life-style changes, such as regular abstinence from solid foods. The idea, Sophia told me, was to “give your body a break from constantly digesting.” In the era of Ozempic, the concept seems almost quaint, and yet We Care’s facilities, which were once Belen’s home, have more than doubled in size since 2020, thanks to the founder’s “pure intention to spread the word,” Sophia said. When I asked her how she had come to work there, she hesitated for a moment before admitting that Belen was her grandmother.

A fasting clinic in California is the setting for Annie Baker’s critically acclaimed 2023 play, “Infinite Life.” The characters, under the direction of an unseen doctor, eat nothing, the deprivation offering relief from their chronic illnesses and laying conversation bare. We Care’s strategy seems to be keeping guests too busy to get hungry. A stay includes “complete liquid nutrition”: a rigorous daily schedule of drinks and supplements, at least a dozen a day, not including six refills of the water bottle. I referred to my chart constantly as I sipped green juice and “blood liver” herbal tea, so anxious to keep up that I missed an hour-long lecture on shamanic wisdom and energy clearing.

When it came time for my first “detox drink,” a mixture of psyllium husk, water, and olive oil intended to precede a colonic, Sophia offered to blend it for me. “Drink it quickly,” she said, “because it will harden, and we prefer that to happen in your body.” I gulped it down, and then, after reading what the Mayo Clinic advised, I opted out of the colonic. (We Care employees stressed that I was missing an integral part of the experience.) Instead, for reasons I couldn’t entirely ascertain, I found myself lying on an amethyst massage table, being basted in warm castor oil, and then wrapped in a space blanket; as my empty stomach growled, I thought of a fillet of fish being prepared en papillote.

The truth was that I wasn’t hungry so much as disoriented by the clock: Was I due for another cup of tea? And wasn’t it about dinnertime? What was time, without dinner, and other meals? My fellow spa-goers—mostly, though not all, thin white women with eerily taut skin—seemed to be seeking, in addition to weight loss or inner peace, a sort of bodily transcendence. While waiting for an evening yoga class to begin, I wondered aloud why people in California were particularly drawn to wellness. One woman, in her fifties and in remission from cancer, fixed a piercing gaze on me. “It’s because we’re light-years ahead of everyone else, because we follow our intuition,” she said. “Higher intellect.”

In the morning, a small group of guests gathered in the lobby to consume their first drinks of the day. A woman I’ll call Libby, in her sixties, with a round, smooth face, told me she spends a week or two at We Care several times a year, to jump-start weight loss, or to get over something: an addiction to cigarettes, the end of a marriage. “One time, I stayed in the Meghan Markle suite,” she said. “In theory, we used the same throne.” (The topic of bowel movements is a favorite at We Care.) To pass the time between treatments, Libby liked to drive to the nearby luxury outlet mall, to find deals on handbags. “When you’re hungry, you have to go shopping!” she said. “It feels so good,” agreed another guest, who had recently bought a Louis Vuitton diaper bag for her expectant daughter.

My time at We Care ended with a class called Breaking the Fast, which offered guidance on how to eat, and to live, on the other side. The instructor, seated on a cushion on the floor, passed around various recommended products, such as powdered bone broth for drinking at the airport on the way home. (Eating on the plane, she noted, was strongly discouraged.) It was difficult to match the rapt enthusiasm of the other guests, yet, as I left, I had to admit that I felt great. Maybe it was the aloe juice. A more likely explanation was that, away from my kids for the first night in months, I’d slept in.

As people who have been to Burning Man will tell you, it can be hard to convey to the unenlightened what you experienced in the desert. When I told my five-year-old son about where I’d been, he seemed shocked. “What did you have for lunch?” he asked. “Nothing,” I said. “What about dinner?” he said, growing more incredulous. “Nothing!” I said. He seemed exasperated. “Well, you must have had breakfast before you got there!” I admitted that I had. He thought about it for a second and then added, “Never go to that spa ever again. You should have just gotten a hotel room.” ♦