‘Playing Russian roulette with your health’: my encounter with LA’s raw milk and meat powder smoothie

IIn Los Angeles, where a $20 smoothie from Erewhon Market has become a major fashion accessory, many wellness drinks are unashamedly girly. There’s Hailey Bieber’s Strawberry Skin smoothie and Kendall Jenner’s Peaches and Cream smoothie. In addition to launching her second album, Guts, Olivia Rodrigo debuted a kombucha smoothie called Good 4 Ur Guts.

But at Erewhon, a celebrity-endorsed grocer that’s half health food store and half runway, male wellness influencers are also getting their chance in the spotlight.

One of Erewhon’s recommended drinks from the past year isn’t yet another raw vegan concoction named after a supermodel: it’s a “raw, animal“drink created by one of America’s most famous men”meat influencers”.

For $19, you can drink a smoothie made with powdered beef organs and unpasteurized milk, as part of influencer Paul Saladino’s effort to introduce Angelenos to his acclaimed “carnivore diet.”

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 is topped with whipped coconut cream mixed with powdered cow colostrum, the nutrient-rich milk that cows produce after giving birth.

“The name radiates cruelty. Should I call Peta? an ambitious TikTok joked influencercalling it “the most un-LA smoothie ever”.

Although “Dr Paul’s Raw Animal Smoothie” has gone somewhat viral on TikTok, not everyone is a fan. American scientists publish new warnings against drinking “raw” milk as bird flu spreads among America’s dairy cows — raising concerns that unpasteurized milk products could literally go viral.

Michael Payne, a researcher and outreach coordinator at the Western Institute of Food Safety and Security, said the contents of Erewhon’s Raw Animal Smoothie left him baffled.

“People who consume this are playing Russian roulette with their health,” he said.

The risks of raw milk

Erewhon (a recast of the word “nowhere”) has been a gathering place for enthusiasts of countercultural food trends since its inception. founded in Boston in the 1960s, where it reportedly survived an early raid by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Today it is a California supermarket so luxurious that it has inspired one Louis Vuitton fragrance and a collaboration with Balenciaga.

The supermarket has long been selling raw milk, a controversial product with passionate defenders, especially in California where it can be legally sold in stores. Wellbeing entrepreneurs, including Gwyneth Paltrow, have done just that has endorsed iteven if parents whose children have become seriously ill after drinking raw milk campaign against it. Twenty other states ban the sale of raw milk within state lines, although a handful of those are now moving there legalize it for commercial sale.

Most milk now consumed in the US is heated briefly to kill harmful bacteria or other microbes before it is sold. This process of pasteurization has remained “the single most important food safety barrier in history,” Payne said.

Without pasteurization, milk can contain “listeria or salmonella or kidney-killing E coli,” he said. “Those things happen almost every year due to the consumption of raw dairy products.” (Raw milk consumption is linked to at least 2,645 illnesses and 228 hospital admissions in the US over the past two decades, according to the Food and Drug Administration.)

Now there’s a new potential risk: Three people in the US have tested positive for bird flu, the most recent a farm worker who appeared to have contracted the virus directly from an infected cow. The risk to humans from drinking infected milk is still theoretical, but recent research on farm cats in Texas who had died after drinking raw milk from cows infected with the H5N1 virus raised concerns about interspecies transmission.

In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a warning that “high concentrations of A(H5N1) virus have been found in unpasteurized (raw) milk”. The CDC noted that while the risk of infection from people drinking raw milk with live H5N1 virus was still “unknown,” the CDC and FDA “recommend against the consumption of raw milk or raw milk products.”

But Californians who embrace raw milk don’t trust the FDA, says Mark McAfee, the Fresno, California-based founder of Raw Farm, which supplies the fermented milk drink for Erewhon’s smoothie.

Some of its customers are even looking to raw milk to protect against a range of emerging viruses, including the H5N1 flu, McAfee said. He said he should have told some customers who were proactively interested in H5N1 milk that, unlike cows in other states, the H5N1 virus has not yet been detected in dairy cows in California.

Raw Farm works closely with health officials in California keep an eye on his cows for the H5N1 virus, McAfee said, a measure he believes has reassured the 500 stores that sell Raw Farm products.

Raw farm milk provided a 2023 salmonella outbreak in California, and this year the company voluntarily recalled one of its raw milk cheeses concerns about an E coli outbreakwhich resulted, according to the CDC 11 illnesses and five hospital admissions in five states. While direct testing of the company’s products did not reveal any E.coli contamination, the said CDC“epidemiological evidence” suggested that Raw Farms Cheddar “is the likely source of this outbreak.”

The company, that pleaded guilty in 2008 Unpleasant sticking “pet food” stickers of its raw milk to sell it illegally across state lines for human consumption, still battle with federal prosecutors due to the marketing and distribution of raw cheese.

In response to questions about the health risks of the Raw Animal smoothie, an Erewhon spokesperson wrote: “Due to company policy, we cannot provide specific information about this specific product at this time.”

Does it taste like organs?

Saladino, who once called himself “CarnivoreMD,” rose to prominence alongside Jordan Peterson and others influencers of the meat diet.

On his website, Saladino warns his followers against eating plants. He says they’re probably harmful, calling vegetables from kale and broccoli to tomatoes and soybeans “crap foods” that do more harm than good. (Saladino did not respond to a request for comment.)

“Are the vegans being triggered?” he asked an Erewhon employee inside one YouTube video at his smoothie launch in Los Angeles last summer.

For Angelenos, who use often $20 Smoothie Tastings As fodder for building their social media following, the Raw Animal smoothie’s gross-out factor appears to be no small part of its appeal.

But many videos about the drink don’t mention health concerns with “raw” milk.

On TikTok, Spencer Pratt, a former reality star from Los Angeles, alone read the ingredients out loud and said “mmm”.

When I went to an Erewhon to sample Saladino’s smoothie, the cashier assured me that chunks of raw beef liver didn’t go straight into the blender: “It looks like a powder,” she said. The smoothie was actually one of her favorites: “It has such a sweetness – you can’t really taste the organs.”

The smoothie looked innocent, but it cost $22.80, including tip.

A sticker on the cup warned, in very small letters, that unpasteurized milk products “may contain disease-causing microorganisms” and that infants, elderly customers and people with weakened immune systems were among those most at risk.

I took what I thought would be my first and last Russian Roulette sip, and was shocked: it was tart, creamy and delicious, with an innocent blueberry flavor. I took another sip, searching for undercurrents of liver powder, but tasted only the banana.

Wondering whether a more refined palate might detect more meaty flavor, I emailed Guardian food writer Felicity Cloake, who had tasted the smoothie on a recent trip to Los Angeles, and called the offal-but-not-terrible.

“My tasting note consisted of forest yogurt fruits with a faint but unmistakable background note of liver,” she wrote. “The sweet earthiness of the offal actually worked quite well with the berries, but I found the concept and aftertaste a bit disturbing.”