Even in its earliest days, Erewhon commanded a buzzy following. In the late 1960s, founders Aveline Yokohama and Michio Kushi settled in Brookline, Massachusetts, where their home was eternally full of young people studying the Kushi way of healthful eating. “He would start out a lecture by talking about the position of galaxies and he ended up talking about the reason you had the number of teeth that you do,” recalls Bill Tara, an early Erewhon acolyte, of Michio.

Michio offered “consultations” for a price, in which he could tell you just what foods you needed to restore your yin and yang to balance. The diet was broadly prescient, and much of it would later be validated by science: fermented foods, low sugar, brown rice, vegetables. But as Michio was giving consultations, there in his rumpled three-piece suit, he was invariably smoking. Smoking, he said, was okay, so long as you kept the rest of your diet in balance.

Read more from @kerryhowley about the strange history of Erewhon, the L.A. cult grocer, at the link in bio.

Photo-Illustration: @joedarrow; Photo: Courtesy of the Kushi family