The industrial food supply will be the last bastion of the luxury economy, and we may mirror the cannibalism of an apocalypse movie before surrendering our unique diet to austerity.
Capitalism is great because it stimulates relentless competition between brands and the branding of products that should be generic. Organized and categorized by which produce boasts the best flavour, the most sustainably sourced ingredients, or the earliest ripening produce that can have side effects such as toxic leaching. Chemicals enter the city’s food and water supplies. And these same brands dutifully patent antidotes to expensive snake oil that causes poisoning. Side effects of pollutants can manifest in the body as mineral depletion, heavy metal overload, or lethargy (chronic fatigue, leaky gut, hyperactivity, dissociation, anhedonia). Fortunately, the same system that has caused mass disease and physical and mental atrophy is also the same system that has led to the poisoning of food, soil, water, and air through factory farming and the branded backlash against genetic modification. There is a possibility of creating a market for “eating”.
What makes late capitalism even more special is that so-called clean foods and whole foods have created enough food to prevent most of society from investigating where their food comes from and how it gets to people. There is a possibility of a short circuit. What is a farm? What is the supply chain? Who are the farmers who harvest your food and the truckers who drive it on the interstates? Do they earn a living wage? you? What is topsoil? What is a supermarket? A muse of Allen Ginsberg, his ecstatic poem “California Supermarket” captures the numbness of excess, an orgy of options that are both too much and just enough. Under fluorescent lights, we forget all those questions. That is our food funeral parlor, where mechanical propagation strips away our nutrients and we feed from the giant slot machines of industry. What is a supermarket?
Around 1916, Piggly Wiggly opened in Memphis, Tennessee, offering the first self-service grocery store. Customers used carts or hand-held baskets and roamed the aisles with lists, which often grew because there were so many products. Branding has become essential for differentiation to gain easy recognition and loyalty from customers, but in this previous context, labels regarding purity or lack of content were not important. So-called “Big Food” was born in the same realm of consumerism that gave us Elvis. By the 1950s and 1960s, the American middle class and bourgeoisie were buying meals, snacks, and radio programs as if they were all part of a set, ready-made, built into cities and suburbs. There was a sense of easy access to hit songs. Personal refrigerators were stocked similar to early markets, but now with more “processed foods.” Frozen meals for lunch or dinner, endless varieties of chips and dips for grazing, and more. And this American teenager had enough disposable income to spend on frivolous snacks to go along with his upbeat music and lifestyle. As a result, there are now as many supermarket chains in the sacred minor warehouse as there are food categories.
Before the advent of self-service grocery stores, retailers required patrons to come into the store with a detailed list of the items they needed, hand the list to an employee, and collect the items. Products were either packed loosely in boxes or in flimsy generic packaging with no ingredients or labels. Today, this feels like a step above state-sanctioned rationing. At the same time, there’s a new niche for container-free, “zero-waste” grocery stores like Re_Grocery in Los Angeles. And what these elite boutique shops don’t necessarily realize is that they are turning wellness into a luxury for the elite and those who reproduce elitism for influence. It is an evil mode of decadence. In decadent minimalism, overt virtue signaling meets a seemingly nervous illusion of purity, and customers dance in the glare of a plethora of trash cans.
I have the most vivid memories of supermarket parking lots from my childhood. Sometimes my mom, dad, and I would go buy milk and she would go inside while we waited in the car. One night, my father asked if he should leave her behind and drive away, as if to suggest that before he owned us forever like the market. I replied with a monotone no. The supermarket gave him an ominous feeling. In a suburb of San Diego called Carlsbad, I would call him from a pay phone in a supermarket while he was sitting in prison. His paranoia was confirmed. Then, after he passed away and we moved to Los Angeles, my mother embarked on the inevitable journey of recovery. She hired a meditation coach who introduced her to Enya and a ’90s health food chain called Mrs. Gooch’s. The store boasted calm, neutral bins and amber aisles, a contrast to the popular chain’s loud neon lights. Instead of brand names like Fruit Roll-Ups, Mrs. Gooch’s carries fruit leather made with real fruit, and instead of hints of pork, it’s made with tofu or other soybeans on the inside fillet of the hot dog. It was packed. You can buy freshly squeezed juice in glass bottles. On the way home, I stopped to take some photos of wheatgrass. During her bouts of depression, she would leave money on the nightstand and we would walk to Vons or Ralph’s house and buy whatever we wanted. At home, I had books on raw veganism by Dick Gregory, grape remedies, detox methods, and healing music. We had a stake in every market. We were turning grocery shopping into a therapeutic symbol of semi-functional American family life and agency over our own lives. Unknowingly, we were part of a group beta testing a combination of health, vitality, and luxury shopping.
Whole Foods replaced Mrs. Gooch, but after Amazon eliminated it, it became obsolete and ceased to be a status symbol. Around the same time, terms such as food deserts became mainstream, defining areas within urban areas where the only types of food available were those that were addictive and could kill you a little faster. The new concerns were not accompanied by any solutions. The ability to articulate the struggle for decent food became another useless virtue signal.
Then, a high-end health food market called Erewhon emerged. Its name comes from an anagram spelling of the word “nowhere.” Its name comes from a novel by Samuel Butler. In this novel, poor health is a crime and citizens must preserve their lives or risk imprisonment. In its depiction of a perpetual crisis of faith in our food supply, there are grains of dark but slightly brighter truths. The market first opened in Boston in 1966 and then reemerged in 2011 after a couple purchased it from its original owners. Private equity firm Stripes Group now owns a minority stake, and the chain has expanded to every upscale neighborhood in Los Angeles. Thanks to the internet, its reputation has transcended LA and become known as a luxury meal across the country. Tourists make the pilgrimage to try Hailey Bieber smoothies, which cost about $22 and are packed with obscure superfoods. This is the typical price for Elephone smoothies. Everything in the store is organic, with a preference for local ingredients. The aisles are sepia-toned and crammed with everything from bone broth to fresh fermented crackers to dried fruit (without sulfur dioxide) to organic hygiene products to specialty waters from every brand in the world. are listed.
While Erewhon’s prominence was a temporary response to Whole Foods’ declining fortunes, its rise in popularity is a result of the trauma of food insecurity caused in 2020 and our increasingly palatable tastes in food and health. It is also a reaction to how to calm yourself down. It’s no longer enough to wear designer or unbranded “quiet luxury” clothes. A new way to show class is to buy Erewhon without worrying about cost and avoid the genetically modified and thoroughly low quality gut-destroying foods that the US is now famous for. Celebrities shop at Erewhon and have their photos taken by paparazzi. Kim Kardashian collaborated with Balenciaga, bringing a brown paper Erewhon shopping bag designed by the dubious brand to an outdoor fashion show in Los Angeles. It was sticky. Influencers sample Erewhon’s smoothies and prepared foods mukbang style on TikTok and YouTube. The feeling of fullness can be felt through the camera, and the feeling of fullness can be felt by luxuriating in something so pure and so clean. And many of us have headed there with friends and had a relaxing night just to feel something. With Erewhon expanding to so many locations, the chain is sure to suffer the same fate as Whole Foods and be replaced by new chains with more conscience in the clean-eating superfood movement.
Meanwhile, as shown in Butler’s novel, this aggressively revisionist supermarket became part pharmacy, part place of repentance for past consumption. You can’t see the farm from anywhere. We work with the energy of peasant labor and transform it into fetish objects, and on the Los Angeles set it almost feels beautiful.
We are in a game of survival of the fittest. There, survival itself feels akin to luxuriating in what is supposed to be hostile territory and conquering an environment we have banded together to destroy. The next step, of course, is to make everything we consume from scratch, like traditional wives and supermodels-turned-influencers do. But you can’t buy their influence from Nowhere. It’s part German-South African supermodel Nala Smith, who has become famous on TikTok for her gorgeously boring recipes for everything from gum to potato chips to full-fledged meals, and part Gwyneth Paltrow. preaches his eating style and sells it in bulk. Just like the celebrity fitness gods, they can be shipped straight to your door.
Smith started making meals from scratch after being diagnosed with lupus and eczema. A model and mother of three who is married to model Lucky Blue Smith, she has become the embodiment of high fashion that meets its lifestyle counterpart, with just a touch of morality. . This family is nearly perfect in All-American and New American mode, as dreamed up in Erewhon’s origin novel, aka Beauty, so there are underlying health issues motivating their commitment to clean living. You never know. . Nala Smith is both idolized and ridiculed, but the peaceful serenity she conveys in each video is eerily effective. She, like all great gurus, manages to be vulnerable and precious, translucent and yet completely opaque. “Do as I do, but you can’t do it, because you are you and I am the embodiment of pure luxury” might be her slogan. I just want to try that lifestyle, slow down, buy a mortar and pestle, marry a devout model, and that way of life will help me fall in love, become a teenager again, and drink sugar-free homemade soda. I just want to see if it’s similar to whitewashed doo-wop sharing. Meanwhile, the Cold War and the raging wars are growing overseas.
Spiritual illness is rampant in the West, and so-called luxuries in all areas of life seem to be alleviating its symptoms. When it comes to food, we buy it like our lives depend on it, but more for the false safety of organic, nonchalant, in a sophisticated and seductive microclimate. The thrill you feel when paying for something seems to swell your spirits with optimism. Non-GMO, Seed Oil Free, Narasmith Certified Groceries. My mother was a widow, but she was loyal to the lifestyle market, as if it would protect her from the alienation that comes with raising children, and she was coming up with something. This is where elites go to surrender and redeem themselves, where near-elites feel they may never become, and to claim a lifestyle that is currently out of their reach. It’s the place to go. Who can blame them?
