Setting an example, one rice cake at a time

Eleven years ago, the owners of Erewhon Natural Foods Market built the Taj Mahal of health food stores. Since 1968, the store had occupied the corner of Edinburgh and Beverly, and when it moved, the iconic weathered-redwood building left behind remained a hangout for granola heads -- first as the Nowhere Cafe, now as VP Discount Vitamins and Natural Foods.

But the new Erewhon, a few blocks west, was something else again. Tall and spacious, it defied the previous quasi-Maoist theory of health-food store merchandising -- there is chaos on the shelves and the situation is excellent -- by having an actual interior design.

There were carts and aisles wide enough to accommodate them. There were wine and crackers that didn’t taste like cardboard, coffee and a huge frozen food section. There were cases of prepared food, several kinds of freshly made soup, sushi and racks of those wheat-free, sugar-free cookies and muffins that still manage to weigh in at 200 calories.

People, especially diet- and/or image-conscious celebrities, came from all over Southern California to stock up on vegan and organic fare. Even as rice cakes found their way onto the shelves at Ralphs and Trader Joe’s hawked organic fruit, it was Erewhon that symbolized not only the upscaling of vegans and organics-only, but also a sleeker new image of Los Angeles.

Because in the imagination of this country, California, and especially Southern California, remains a dim and ill-organized health food store, full of odd people who do odd things like grill tofu and eschew eggs. Erewhon offered a veneer of sophistication to this image -- it was the health-food nuts’ gourmet store. Let New York wallow in Dean & DeLuca; BlissBars cost just as much as Belgian chocolate, and they’re better for you.

Now, of course, everyone’s a big fan of soy something; rice milk comes in six flavors; and a Whole Foods Market, the most successful of the latest version of high-end health, has opened within sunflower seed-spitting distance of Erewhon and VP, making a six block-radius of Fairfax and Beverly an evolutionary chart of the post-millennial image of L.A.

Amid the glinting workaday windows and pale blocks of storefronts, VP is a footprint from another age, preserved not in amber or shale but in redwood board and batting -- Marin County, circa 1968, ground zero for the vegan community in L.A. One step in the door and you are surrounded by that dark yellow funk of unbagged carrots and sacks of lentils, of wheat grass juice, of protein powder and soy. Eau de Health Food Store.

Here carts would be too bourgeoise and they wouldn’t take the corners anyway. No single product occupies more than a foot of shelf space, except vitamins and tinctures, which fill an entire room. Freshly prepared food, juices and smoothies come from a tiny counter in the back and the few tables set out front are occupied by people you expect to see at a health food store -- girls with pierced tongues, men with ZZ Topp beards. It is the kind of place where many of us saw our first organic apple, tasted our first hummus. At VP there may be only nine kinds of granola, but you can find a glazed spelt doughnut if you’ve got a hankering.

Up the street, Erewhon still has the smell, and the spelt, although the clientele are leaning a bit more toward Gucci, or at least Abercrombie & Fitch. Assistant store manager Alan Kawahara rolls his eyes a bit when asked how business is apres Whole Foods, which opened this spring. “We had a slow June,” he said. “We always have a slow June, but this was slower. Things are better now. It always picks up in September.”

Kawahara has worked at Erewhon off and on since the mid-’70s. He doesn’t want to talk about Whole Foods; he’s never been in the nearby one on 3rd Street, doesn’t plan to go anytime soon. “We serve the macrobiotic community,” he says pointedly. “We have customers who go there too, but the vegetarians really don’t need to; they stay here.”

Whole Foods smells nothing like a health food store. According to a card on the suggestions board, it recently stopped burning incense when customers complained of sinus trouble. It smells like lemons, cheese, seafood, cappuccino and marinara, depending on which aisle you’re in.

If Erewhon has more stuff than VP (17 types of granola), Whole Foods has more than God. More granola (19 kinds), more coated pretzels (peanut butter, chocolate, yogurt, raspberry yogurt), and more macaroni and cheese (22 types, most organic, none of them Kraft.)

As one customer of both markets put it, after perusing the Whole Foods hot and cold food bar -- Sonoma chicken salad, gaucho marinated flank steak -- the stuff at Erewhon looks like something Mother Teresa dished out in Calcutta.

The store anchors what used to be an inarguably scuzzy strip mall. But now the homeless can barely navigate their shopping carts through the parking lot so jammed is it with Jags and SUVs. Now, celebrities buy persimmons here; laptop-wielding hipsters balance their coffee and fruit-sweetened muffins while vying with well-coiffed retirees for space at the outside tables; infants in $40 caps from Fred Segal’s dangle from Baby Bjorns while Mom scrutinizes the organic strained squash.

Whole Foods is not trying to kid anyone -- its whole point is to wed the gourmet with the natural, and if the vegan can’t hack it, well, they can grab some mangoes on the way out. Because fruit and nuts have gone national and granola is so mainstream, you gotta add hemp just to stay current.

Which is exactly what’s happened to California, now the fifth largest economy in the world. As its largest urban center, Los Angeles can no longer be considered odd or fey or quirky or any of the pejorative endearments reserved for the habits of those outside the mainstream. More and more, the world is running on Pacific time, and like it or not, L.A. is the mainstream. What we wear, the world wears; what we watch, the world watches; what we eat, the world eats.

So let them eat Sonoma chicken salad, but also let them eat spelt.