Americans are hungry, gluttony is on the menu – Press Enterprise

Americans have a gluttony problem. Much has been written about our addictions to online shopping, video games, social media scrolling, and porn. Chief among our vices is the very thing keeping us alive: food. As post-pandemic food insecurity and financial anxiety threaten middle Americans, food has turned into a status symbol. And in the face of America’s great modern push against the obesity epidemic, health foods reign supreme. One store has found success at the intersection of these coalescing desires: Erewhon.

The luxury, health-forward grocery store in Los Angeles has seen a surge in popularity and internet notoriety, largely thanks to celebrity smoothie collabs and viral health products like Sea Moss Gel making their rounds on TikTok. But Erewhon’s main gimmick is their pricing. A single strawberry sells for $19, and a jar of organic pistachio spread costs $45.99. Yet these price tags are not a deterrent for customers — they’re part of the allure, as evidenced by the big ticket items’ ability to sell out so quickly.

Erewhon’s success is climbing while a cost of living crisis rages in the background. Many Americans have entered into a vicious consumption cycle: responding to future financial hopelessness by consuming impermanent wealth signifiers, thus robbing their financial futures. To address the converging crises of obesity, inflation, and debt, we must learn not only to consume differently, but to consume less.

The shoppers at Erewhon are not exclusively the rich and famous. They’re often middle class Americans — out of town visitors eager to try Hailey Bieber’s iconic skincare smoothie. These wanderers seek proximity to wealth and an accessible entry point to luxury.

Some might even belong to the ranks of Americans struggling to afford a normal trip to the grocery store. 18 million American households are facing food insecurity. Americans, regardless of income level, are seeing more of their budget eaten up by what they eat. Since January of 2022 food prices have risen 17.2%, and grocery store trips for a family of four typically run north of $1,000 a month.

2022 also marks the apparent surge in Erewhon’s popularity. Despite growing cost concerns, or perhaps because of them, Gen Z has turned grocery stores into “destinations” and high priced items into “culinary status symbols,” according to McKinsey.

So the question is: What’s causing both food prices and Erewhon’s mystique to rise in tandem? A compelling theory lies in our psychological reaction to economic downturns.

Whenever times are hard, we crave the false sense of security that luxury provides us. If we can’t do that through home ownership or buying a Rolex, we use small luxuries to tide us over. The Stanley Craze was emblematic of this. So are the rumored spikes in lipstick sales during recessionary periods, coined “The Lipstick Index” by Leonard Lauder. Even I have fallen victim to my own material vices when I’ve promised myself to stick to a stricter budget.

Those vices are often culinary. Our preoccupation with food is much more primal than the pull of a Sephora sale. Our ancestors hunted and gathered for meat and berries and embarked on treacherous overseas journeys for the promise of fertile land. While we have made large strides in the fight against food scarcity (although, these trends have slowed or reversed in recent years), we have not lost our food obsession. The motivations behind our excessive consumption habits are understandable if you imagine yourself as a caveman wandering through the grocery aisle.

In the context of 300,000 years roaming the planet in search of food, our worship of it makes sense. As does our obesity epidemic, which impacts over half of America’s adults.