The Witches Are Coming

by Lindy West

  Lunch one day called for “Beet Greens Soup.” I didn’t read the recipe all the way through, so I didn’t realize until the soup was almost done that it was a blended soup.

  I knew that you aren’t supposed to blend boiling hot liquids, but it was 2:00 p.m., and all I’d eaten that day was kale juice and erasers. I had to risk it. I poured half the soup into the blender and started slow. A few pulses. Everything seemed fine. I was emboldened. “Liquefy.”

  I dumped soup all over the floor.

  “It’s okay,” I reasoned. “I’ll just pour the half-blended soup back into the pot and call it ‘Semi-Blended Beet Greens Soup.’ It’ll be good. It’s all good.”

  I twisted the blender to disengage it. Instead of coming off intact, the glass pitcher unscrewed from its base, sending soup gooshing out the bottom. I screwed it back tight as fast as I could. There was soup in my shoe. I was so hungry.

  I dropped the blender onto my foot.

  “FINE. I’ll just pick up the whole thing and pour it back into the pot with the base attached.”

  The base fell off. Onto my foot. I cried.

  The soup hot pink leaf water was actually pretty good.

  I set the chicken on fire.

  I was basically delirious by the time dinner (“Barbecued Chicken, Spanish Style”) rolled around. The rub smelled so good I could have eaten the chicken raw. Gwyneth didn’t even tell me to take the skin off! I threw it on the grill, closed the lid, and turned the heat “down.”

  Five minutes later, my then boyfriend, now husband broke the news to me: “Baby, the chicken’s gone.” I teared up and asked him what he meant.

  “You set it on fire. You must have turned the heat up instead of down.”

  I was genuinely sobbing at that point. “Is any of it edible? Is it at least cooked all the way through?”

  “I have no idea,” he said, laughing. “I don’t know how long you’re supposed to cook chicken at a million degrees.”

  I never got around to making the asparagus.

  I was going to be late for Aqua Zumba. I had to shovel some semicremated, semiraw chicken down with my fingers and run.

  I burned about a quarter of the roasted beets/butternut squash/shallots for my quinoa salad, a true tragedy because that was the best thing I ate all week.

  Update: This recipe is so good, and I still make it.

  I accurately followed Gwyneth’s recipe for avocado smoothies.

  Avocado, raw cacao powder, ground hemp seeds, almond milk, coconut water, raw honey. I couldn’t find ground hemp seeds, even at the hippie grocery store, so I tried to pulverize them myself using a mortar and pestle. The result was chunky.

  As I recall it, this mixture could give diarrhea an existential crisis. Gwyneth described the flavor as “beautiful.”

  I couldn’t find a bass.

  Me: “Excuse me, where’s your bass?”

  Brusque fishmonger: “NO BASS.”

  My salt was too big.

  The salt I bought to bake my “[Not a Bass] Roasted in Salt, Thai Style” in turned out to be more like the kind of salt you use to deice a driveway. Inevitably, a few boulders found their way into each bite of fish, making it more like “Roasted Salt, Fish Style.”

  I hit a fish with a hammer.

  Gwyneth Paltrow told me to break through the salt crust with a mallet, which it turns out is French for “fish exploder.”

  I injured my neck from too much chopping.

  With the exception of the wet almonds and the shit shake, I have to say that every recipe I tried was actually great and to be perfectly honest this cookbook will rock your mouth and you should buy it. But in order to cook two full meals from scratch every day, I had to take hours out of the middle of my workday to chop, essentially, one of every vegetable, and then clean my entire kitchen three times a day. If I hadn’t worked from home, had a flexible, nonphysically-exhausting job, had the money to afford kitchen gadgets such as juicers and blenders, and had a supportive partner willing to run backup, I would have been shit out of luck. Not to mention the disposable income needed for groceries alone. This is a meal plan for people with a housekeeper and a chef. In other words, people with Clear Quartz bracelets.

  The extremely problematic class implications of making wealth a prerequisite of “wellness” would come up exactly zero times at In Goop Health.

  Now, I don’t personally believe that my proximity to crystals (or lack thereof) has any effect on my well-being, but I don’t think it is interesting or sophisticated to mock people who do. The women in the hangar and in line for the shaman with me were having fun. They were sitting on pillows and connecting with one another. They were having the kind of spontaneously intimate conversation that happens among women all the time, dressed up in the language of magic and, sure, monetized.

  Maybe some of those were even the roots of the kinds of conversations we so desperately need to have: Oh, that happened to you? Me too.

  As long as you are not promising miracles and swapping carnelian for childhood vaccines, organizing your inner life around crystals doesn’t seem that much different from organizing it around Fitbits or “bullet journaling.” There is a line, of course, between having fun with rocks and exploiting people’s fears for profit, and I approached that line soon enough.

  A few hours into my Goop fest lock-in, I looked up and there she was, gliding through the Bulletproof Coffee line like our priestess. Here is just a true fact: Gwyneth Paltrow glows like a radioactive swan. She emits light. She would be great in a power outage.

  Though the FAQ for In Goop Health specifically directed attendees to wear athleisure (with a link to the Goop store’s athleisure page—just to be helpful!), Paltrow appeared to be wearing a sirocco of flower petals. She led us, her flock, into the auditorium, and the real show began.

  After a brief history of Goop (“I started to wonder: Why do we all not feel well? Why is there so much cancer? Why are we all so tired?”), Paltrow introduced her personal physician, Dr. Habib Sadeghi. He spoke for an hour about “cosmic flow”; his left testicle; the “magnificence” of Paltrow (“I’ve been down and I’ve touched her feet … and I’ll do it again”); and his belief that “consciousness precedes phenotypic expression,” which means, I guess, that all ailments are on some level psychosomatic and your ovarian cysts are really just little nodules of emotion.

  The next panel, on gut health, countered Sadeghi’s consciousness theory with the assertion that all human illnesses are actually caused by antibiotics, ibuprofen, cesarean sections, and legumes. The human gut is a rich rain forest, the panel members told us. Antibiotics are “napalm,” and taking one ibuprofen is “like swallowing a hand grenade.” Someone related an anecdote about a marathon runner who had to get a fecal transplant from her fat niece, and, tragically, it made the marathon runner fat. In mice, fecal transplants have been found to make fat mice thin and anxious mice calm. Oh, my God, I remember thinking. That’s the final phase of Goop. Gwyneth is going to start selling her own shit.

  Dr. Steven Gundry, the author of The Plant Paradox, revealed that from January to June, he consumes all his calories between 6:00 and 8:00 p.m., because “we evolved to search for food all day and then fast.” It’s funny how our understanding of human evolution—of the point at which we were once our truest selves—can shift according to which restrictive diet is on trend that day. Next to each of our chairs was a complimentary bottle of hot pink, watermelon-flavored water, sickly sweet with stevia. You know, just like the cavemen used to drink.

  Gundry argued that human beings weren’t meant to eat any plants native to North America, because we are native to “Africa, Europe, and Asia.” (Just Africa, Steve! Just Africa!) At one point, a physician named Amy Myers casually distinguished between the gut bacteria Asian people need (because “they” eat a lot of seaweed) and the gut bacteria that “we” need. You didn’t need to glance around the room to know who “we” was referring to.

  In Goop Health was shockingly white�
��even to me, a blond white person who had gone in expecting whiteness. Obviously, this is anecdotal—I didn’t conduct a postfest census—but I don’t recall seeing more than ten people of color among the hundreds of attendees, and that’s a generous estimate. The panelists were almost exclusively white. I did wonder if anyone at Goop had brought up the lack of diversity in their speakers during the planning stages. But to acknowledge it would be to acknowledge politics, and In Goop Health stayed as far away from politics as it could get.

  However, an event supposedly focused “on being and achieving the optimal versions of ourselves,” as Paltrow put it during her welcome address, cannot truly be depoliticized. You can’t honestly address “wellness”—the things people need to be well—without addressing poverty and systemic racism, disability access and affordable health care, paid family leave and food insecurity, contraception and abortion, sex work and the war against drugs and mass incarceration. Unless, of course, you are talking only about the wellness of people whose lives are untouched by all of those forces. That is, the wellness of people who are disproportionately well already.

  Toward the end of his speech, Sadeghi told a story about an epiphany he’d had in the anatomy lab. He said he had discovered that the first valve of the heart flows straight back into the heart: “Selfish little organ there! No, no, not selfish—self-honoring. Wooo! What a difference! I could never give anything to anybody—ask my beloved wife—until I take care of me. Until my needs are met. Right? Right? When you fly down, the first thing that they tell you is that before you put the mask on anybody else, put it on yourself.”

  I heard that idea repeated over and over again at the Goop conference: take care of yourself so you can take care of others. Put your mask on first. Hold space for yourself. Be entitled. Take. At a certain point, it began to feel less like self-care and more like rationalization. I didn’t know anything about the personal lives of the women at In Goop Health—where they donated their money, what hardships they had endured, why they were drawn to this event—and every person I interacted with was smart and kind and self-aware. But it is self-evident and measurable that white people in the United States, in general, are assiduous about the first part of that equation (caring for ourselves) and less than attentive to the second (caring for others).

  It is okay to love skin cream and crystals. It is normal and forgivable to be afraid of dying, afraid of cancer, afraid of losing your youth and beauty and the currency they confer. We have no other currency for women.

  I understand why people spend their lives searching for that one magic supplement, that one bit of lore that will turn their “lifestyle” around and make them small and perfect and valuable forever. I also understand, especially at this moment in history, why people long to step outside politics for a day and eat kale-flavored ice cream (real, not satire, actually good) in a warehouse full of Galadriels. But the idea that anything is apolitical is an illusion accessible only to a very few. And the absolute least the Galadriel in chief ought to do is acknowledge that.

  At 4:05 p.m., after many hours of wandering, listening, and not having my aura photographed, I dashed outside for my shaman appointment, only to be told they were running about an hour behind. “Should I come back in an hour?” I asked. “I mean, you could try,” the woman said in a way that meant “No” or probably “Not with that bracelet.”

  For her keynote to close the day, Paltrow promised to dissect the complexities and woes of being a working mother with a panel of famous gal pals: Cameron Diaz, Tory Burch, Nicole Richie, and Miranda Kerr. How do they do it? How do they have it all?

  The women delivered a bounty of platitudes about ambition, female friendship, self-care, their mothers, and sticking to one’s “practice.” They were charming and humble and, of course, beautiful. Richie was funny. But at no point did any of them say the words “I HAVE LOTS AND LOTS OF MONEY AND A STAFF.” In the context of a conversation about the challenges facing working mothers, the omission was, frankly, bizarre. It is a basic responsibility of the privileged to refrain from taking credit for our own good fortune.

  They might as well have been reading from Ivanka Trump’s 2017 book, Women Who Work, a hot choice if you’re seeking life advice from someone who is more a logo than a person, a scarecrow stuffed with branding, an heiress turned model turned multimillionaire’s wife playacting as an authority on the challenges facing working women so that she could, at one time, sell more pastel sheath dresses.

  In that book, Ivanka wrote, “My father has always said, if you love what you do, and work really, really hard, you will succeed.”

  Love and hard work. That’s all it takes! That’s all Ivanka ever had going for her. Just a big fat work ethic and a whole lotta love. Nothing else. No, sir. “This is a fundamental principle of creating and perpetuating a culture of success, and also a guiding light for me personally.”

  She went on to say, “I also believe that passion, combined with perseverance, is a great equalizer, more important than education or experience.”

  Ah, yes, passion, that great “equalizer”—the passion to manage an entire household staff, the passion to have been born with the right bracelet. It might seem small, this lie by omission, but its roots worm and wend all the way down to America’s original sin, our fundamental delusion: the bootstrap ethos, the notion that the comfortable deserve their place, that capitalism is an opportunity for the exploited to prove themselves, that success is a proportional reflection of hard work, that the rich are rich because they are good and smart. This deliberate spackling over of structural inequality—the death of luck—is the only thing that gives Donald Trump any authority. Well, he must know what he’s talking about. Look how many ties he has!

  There was one moment from the Goop conference that I still think about now, years later. Near the end of the keynote, Kerr casually mentioned that she had once tried leech therapy as part of her wellness practice. “One was on my coccyx because it’s really good to, like, detox the body, rejuvenate the body,” she said. “I had a leech facial as well. And I kept the leeches. They’re in my koi pond.”

  I am fat. I was the fattest person at the Goop expo.

  Strangers regularly contact me to tell me that I’m unhealthy and I’m going to die. A sampler from my emails:

  “Being obese is NOT OK. It is associated with many health risks including: diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and premature death. Go lose some weight you fat slob, and do it before you go on disability so we don’t have to pay for you.”

  “I don’t know what sort of message you are trying to send out to young girls/women, but that it is OK to be obese, and it is some sort of feminist sin to want to keep to a natural healthy shape can’t be a good one.”

  Kerr’s body is almost certainly what those people mean when they say “a natural healthy shape,” because our society conflates conventional beauty with health.

  But I don’t know—I might be fat, but I’ve never felt as though I needed to get an IV drip on a patio in Culver City or put leeches on my butt to suck out toxins, and I’m grateful for that.

  I guess Goop did make me feel well after all.

  A Giant Douche Is a Good Thing if You’re a Giant 1

  Did you know that South Park is still on? South Park came out when I was a freshman in high school, and it was very outrageous for the day, what with the anal probing of children and forcing Scott Tenorman to eat his own parents and things. My mother-in-law is a wild, wild lady, and when my husband was growing up, their house was a rule-free 25/7 indoor water balloon fight, but one directive never wavered: he was NOT ALLOWED TO WATCH SOUTH PARK. They did own a battered VHS tape of David Cronenberg’s body horror classic “Videodrome,” and that was fair game—James Woods ripping a ragged vulva in his alt-right abs was primo grade school content, but a racist ten-year-old farting fire was too far, too much, too soon. That’s how freaked out our parents were by that cartoon. In the 1990s, South Park was BY BAD BOYS FOR BAD BOYS.r />
  When South Park premiered, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone were naughty young twentysomethings on the edge, and I was in my last year of trick-or-treating. Of course it seemed dangerously spicy! Bad boys too bad for good girls! But now, in 2019, I am thirty-seven human years old—truly a kind of old person!—which makes Matt and Trey bona fide full old. These are dads, you guys. White millionaire dads! So isn’t it a little strange that we still treat South Park like the daring vanguard of counterculture, when its creators, at this point, have more in common with Mitt Romney than [the coolest young person of whatever month you’re reading this]? And, even more significantly, that their ideology appears not to have perceptibly shifted in the intervening twenty years, which means that the Mitt Romney was coming from inside the house all along? It was always there. We just gave them the benefit of the doubt because white men get to be their own myth-makers.

  For decades—hahaha twenty-two seasons!—Matt and Trey have been telling us that they alone are the Reasonable Men, they alone stand against the indoctrination of both Right and Left, they alone know the truth, and the truth is that “both sides” are equally stupid, equally worthy of mockery, so the only rational response to any political argument is to snicker. And what is our mechanism, as an audience, for questioning that narrative, when South Park has been just as relentless in its insistence that criticism is censorship, that if you disagree with any of the show’s choices you must be a moral scold, a damp-handed weepy little bitch, a boring person? It is so, so frightening, especially when you are young, to seem uncool. Taking a side against anything that happens on South Park would mean taking a side, and, as we’ve learned, both sides are equally stupid. The only safe space is nihilism.

  It’s a neat trap, which certainly does not sound like indoctrination at all.

  But.

  My friends.

  Both sides, inasmuch as there are two “sides,” are not equally stupid or equally bad. The notion that they are is human-extinction-level dangerous.