It's crunchy fascism. The very individualistic movement mutated in to the newage movement mutated in to self help mutated in to all the sigma grindset manifesting good vibes only i don't date people who aren't in therapy shit we have now.
At the root it's all about taking individual actions to try to escape the consequences of systemic problems. Both the material consequences, like death, and the, idk, spiritual consequences, like having to admit other people have an internal process.
The raw food - raw veg, raw water, raw milk, raw meat, it"s all part of a magical practice of ritual diet and ritual purity they believe will protect them from what they believe are illnesses and negative conditions caused by a profane, dirty, fallen society. They wouldn't phrase or understand it that way because they're not Anthropologists and therefore not privy to the deep wisdom, but that's whats really happening here; people see the effects of material conditions - poverty, illness, fear, stress - but are unwilling or unable to understand the big scale systemic causes of those effects and instead attempt to control them by controlling their own bodies through a variety of de-facto magical practices relating to diet, skin care, exercise, jelqing, and just being nasty little Cali-fascists.
The soundtrack for this post is California Uber Alles because California has been the main cultural incubator where this fungus grows for decades.
Addition - a big part of it is an individual rejection of modernity in search of a lost (fascist) golden age where things were bette .
They think, many explicitly, that food has somehow been contaminated by processing (like pasteurization) health andsafety inspection, and whatever other shit idk I'm not a granola fascist. They think that whatever weird ass fad diet they're on will somehow restore to them the vitality, strength, and spiritual cleanliness they associated with their made up lost golden age.
It's all anti-scientific garbage, often dressed up in sciency language freely mixed with new age mysticism. They whole thing at it's core is an attempt to negate the modern world by diving directly in to your own ass and hiding there. It's sort of an end-stage of American fascist hyper-individualism - they recognize in some ways that they are powerless in the face of the grinding of the machine and turn to individual magical practices that seek to deny modern reality because they don't know any alternatives - mass mobilization - are possible, they don't understand the actual material causes of their problems, and if they did understand what was happening and why, and what the solution is, they'd dismiss it as communism.
Excellent post, I had not put the pieces together to see that shared underlying belief that neatly explains the overlap between granola types and rabid conservatives. It perfectly demonstrates how deeply reactionary and individualistic the “hippie” movement is at its core despite all of the surface level posturing to pretend otherwise.
I used to wonder what the hell happened to make the “progressive” free love generation 180 into a bunch of miserable reactionaries but it seems that it wasn’t much of a pivot after all. A little strategic dismantling of any actually effective organizing (and assassination of key leaders) was all it took to let people lapse back into a comfortable, self serving position that upholds their class interests while still being nominally progressive.
You missed that one by millenia. Drinking cum and piss for various health properties has been a thing for a long time and remains a thing in some new age woo woo dietary/magical practices.