An LA grocery called Erewhon sells a "raw, animal-based" smoothie made with powdered beef organs & a unpasteurized milk drink created by a famous male "meatfluencer". It's $19. [CW: contents]
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.
Fruit smoothies are already sweet and delicious, why would you voluntarily consume such a crime against god? I thought a lot of this "meat only" nonsense came from some RETVRN fantasy where they believe our ancestors hunted deer all day and ate them raw, but like... this is so far even from that.
Bill Hicks had the standup line "I ain't no doctor - but I seen one on the teevee." Updated it becomes: "I ain't no doctor - but I see meatfluences on Tiktok and Youtube." I seriously don't want to google phrases like "TiktokMD" or "Doctube" because I assume they actually exist.
"I got stomach cancer. Stage 3. The doctors said my treatment was gonna be surgery and lots of expensive drugs and lots of chemo. I was gonna feel sick all the time. It was gonna hurt. And it was gonna be real expensive too! I didn't want that. So I watched Doctube and TiktokMD instead. The meat and supplements I use use only cost me $2,000 a year. That sounds like a lot but it's a bargain. And I can feel the cancer going away..."
Once had a guy tell me his mom beat cancer by switching to an organic diet. Didn't really delve into it or ask if it was a cancer that can go into remission on its own.
Hippies love raw milk here. It's illegal to sell commercially so they exploit a loophole meant for milking your homestead cow. Industrial dairies will sell shares of a cow and then give you a certain amount of raw milk per week.
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.
You can't make it five years without this diet annihilating your health, incredible lmao. BJJ gyms around the country in shambles. Next we will learn that seed oils prevent cancer or some shit.
Pauly Salads is so traumatized from being made fun of in 5th grade for his last name he still refuses to touch a vegetable even after almost dying over it.
Raw milk can carry dangerous germs such as Salmonella, E. coli, Listeria, Campylobacter, and others that cause foodborne illness, often called “food poisoning.” These germs can seriously injure the health of anyone who drinks raw milk or eats products made from raw milk.
What the CDC has to say about this new potential "bonus" health worry.
There is concern that consumption of unpasteurized milk and products made from unpasteurized milk contaminated with HPAI A(H5N1) virus could transmit HPAI A(H5N1) virus to people; however, the risk of human infection is unknown at this time.
Not actually joking, I'm a bit of a weirdo on this topic. Not in the "food is magic" way, just that for a long time there wasn't industrial agriculture and humans were able to produce food that didn't immediately kill themselves.
I'm not a fan of mass distribution of raw milk through third parties. There's just too much that can go wrong and it always seems like its "just a matter of time" before the pressure to meet demand or cut corners to keep the bills paid winds up causing a bunch of people to get sick.
I, personally, have less of an issue with direct sales between the producer and end customer where everybody can actually see what is going on whenever they want. My preference would be extremely local producer/customer interactions with a pretty low volume of customers/milk produced/minimal equipment used.
But all of the previous statements are just "in general" the bird flu thing its pretty bad.