One of Erewhon's featured drinks over the past year is not another raw vegan concoction named after a supermodel: it's a "raw, animal-based" drink created by one of America's most famous male "meatfluencers". For $19, you can drink a smoothie made with powdered beef organs and unpasteurized milk, as part of the influencer Paul Saladino's attempt to introduce Angelenos to his much-touted "carnivore diet".
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Saladino, who once called himself "CarnivoreMD", rose to prominence alongside Jordan Peterson and other meat diet influencers. On his website, Saladino warns his followers against eating plants, saying they are likely to be harmful, and calling vegetables from kale and broccoli to tomatoes and soybeans "bullshit foods" that may do more harm than good. (Saladino did not respond to a request for comment.)
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The smoothie's ingredients include a supplement powder made from uncooked, freeze-dried beef liver, heart, kidney, spleen and pancreas, blended with more typical smoothie ingredients, including blueberries, banana and honey. It's topped with whipped coconut cream blended with powdered cow colostrum, the nutrient-rich milk cows produce after giving birth.
"The name is giving cruelty. Like, should I call Peta?" one aspiring TikTok influencer quipped, dubbing it "the most un-LA smoothie ever". [...] "Dr Paul's Raw Animal Smoothie" has gone minorly viral on TikTok.
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Erewhon (a rearrangement of the word "nowhere") has been a gathering place for devotees of countercultural diet trends since its founding in Boston in the 1960s, where it reportedly survived an early raid by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Today, it is a California grocery store so luxurious it has inspired a Louis Vuitton fragrance and a collaboration with Balenciaga.
The grocery store has long sold raw milk, a controversial product with passionate defenders, particularly in California, where it can be sold legally in retail stores. Wellness entrepreneurs including Gwyneth Paltrow have endorsed it, even as parents whose children have become seriously ill after drinking raw milk campaign against it. Twenty other states prohibit the sale of raw milk within state borders, though a handful of them are now moving to legalize it for commercial sale.
CW dairy, gastrointestinal disease
One of the main things that made me go vegan besides the bullying from comrades on here and my growing fascination with oat milk and other alternatives to an exploitative, speciecist diet was getting a fortunately mild lysteria infection from eating one too many of these runny French raw milk cheeses that are just pure ammonia bombs. Or in that case, a very impure ammonia bomb. This is a reminder that up to one in ten of these cheeses is contaminated with lysteria and i doubt it's any better when the milk doesn't get processed at all. But i guess that the raw meat crowd already has a pronounced addiction to kinetic diarrhea, adding the grossest stomach discomfort imaginable on top of that is probably a plus in their book.