Dust to Dust

When my first novel was released in 2017, I found myself depleted and exhausted. For an introverted writer, going on a book tour was a shock to the system. For the first time, I was speaking in public, fielding questions about writing, trying to put words to an intuitive endeavor. At times I was asked invasively personal questions. I felt wrung out. I don’t remember where I heard about ashwagandha, an evergreen nightshade native to India, Africa, and the Middle East, but I must have come across a list of its purported effects, its claims to relieve stress and anxiety.

Lacking any knowledge of Ayurvedic medicine, I ordered a jar of ashwagandha online from a brand called Sun Potion. I began stirring a half teaspoon into my morning coffee. It couldn’t hurt, I figured. After several months, my anxious, heart-racing feelings seemed to calm; my sleep was better. The shakiness I felt speaking in front of people abated. Whether it was that I got more accustomed to public speaking or it was the ashwagandha — it was impossible to say.

Then, feeling anxious at the start of the COVID pandemic, I replaced my morning coffee with matcha. A traditional Japanese tea, yes, but also a powdered beverage that was itself amenable to the addition of even more powders.

The Sun Potion website made provocative promises: Moringa, to “strengthen digestion.” Chaga, a “strong source of energy.” The website’s drop-down menu made it easy to shop for powders within categories: “Brain & Mood,” “Immunity & Longevity,” “Skin & Beauty,” “Body & Strength,” and, enticingly or eyebrow-raisingly, depending on who you are, “Transcendent Elixirs.” To my matcha, I added reishi, known as the “mushroom of immortality.” I added cordyceps, a fungus that grows on Chinese caterpillars, and which Sun Potion calls “a potent Yang tonic.” (Sun Potion promises no caterpillars are harmed in the manufacturing of its fungus.) Matcha tasted earthy to begin with, and I always stirred in a lot of honey, so my morning drink began to resemble a vegetal dessert.

Around then, I learned the word “adaptogen,” defined as a substance that helps the body deal with stress, and I started to see it everywhere. On TikTok and Instagram, influencers blended adaptogens and powdered algae or collagen into smoothies. Athletes showcased tubs of protein powders. The podcasts I listened to advertised mushroom powders and nutrition powders.

Global Market Insights reports that nutraceuticals, a marketing term for a food product that implies pharmaceutical effects, were a $423 billion global industry in 2022. This same report states that powders in particular “have gained large popularity amongst consumers due to their convenience, versatility, and ease of use.” Clearly, people besides me were feeling the need to self-administer mysterious dusts whose promises were abundant and not entirely proven.

My live-in skeptic wondered what the dusts were actually doing to me. Were they doing good? Were they causing harm? Were they simply a waste of money? Why, seemingly overnight, was everybody pounding powders?

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In the history of medicine, there is no distinction between medicine and plants. “Let thy food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food,” is a quote often ascribed to Hippocrates, who lived in 400 BCE, studied between 300 and 400 plants, and is considered the father of Western medicine. An ancient Egyptian scroll listing herbal remedies dates to 1500 BCE.

Indigenous cultures have worked with herbs spiritually and medicinally, in practices that persist today. In India, Ayurveda developed between 2500 BCE and 500 BCE. In 2700 BCE, Shen Nung, considered by many to be the father of Chinese medicine (and the originator of acupuncture), experimented on his own body by self-administering hundreds of plants. He recorded 113 different prescriptions, and allegedly died by consuming a poisonous yellow flower — an occupational hazard if there ever was one.

That plants have healing properties is indisputable. Many modern pharmaceutical drugs are synthesized versions of plants. Morphine and codeine are natural alkaloids contained in the opium poppy. Aspirin is linked to willow bark. Ephedrine, a medication akin to amphetamine that treats hypotension, is derived from the Ephedra shrub.

But human beings also have a history of ingesting powders of doubtful utility. In ancient China, alchemists concocted “longevity elixirs” that promised immortality and eternal youth but, because they often contained metals like mercury and arsenic, resulted in the opposite. During the Tang dynasty alone, five emperors died from these potions. Thomas Willis, a 17th-century physician, prescribed a concoction of powdered chocolate and human skull to treat apoplexy (hemorrhagic stroke). An English doctor named Robert James patented his “fever powder” in 1747, made from a compound of antimony and phosphate of lime, which was not only ineffective, but may have contributed to the death of Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith.

In Europe, into the 18th century, powdered human mummies were used as painkiller, cough suppressant, anti-inflammatory, and blood thinner. In the Victorian era, pharmacies sold powders of all kinds, which poor people would often resort to using instead of seeing a doctor. Despite great strides being made in medicine (anaesthesia was developed, germ theory was beginning to be understood), questionable “remedies” flourished, too.

Trying to trace the origins of our current pick-and-choose, mix-powders-into-a beverage mentality isn’t entirely straightforward. New agers and hippies have been eating macrobiotically for decades. A Lithuanian holistic health practitioner named Ann Wigmore began promoting wheatgrass in the 1940s. She popularized the idea of “detox,” a word that brands still use today. When blenders became more common in the 1950s, Wigmore endorsed green smoothies (greens mixed with fruit), inspired by chimpanzees who wrapped their fruit in green leaves. In 1988, she was sued by the Massachusetts Attorney General’s department for distributing a pamphlet that claimed it had a remedy for AIDS. For $400 (about $1,000 today) she offered instructions for an “energy enzyme soup” that would cure the disease. It feels like history repeating itself, or maybe never having gone away.

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If you’re a listener of popular podcasts, you’ve likely heard ads for AG1, formerly known as Athletic Greens. According to a podcast transcription and analytics service called Podscribe, AG1 is the third-largest podcast advertiser (by show count) behind Better Help, an online mental health provider, and Manscaped, a personal care company for men. It is a powdered greens supplement containing “75 vitamins, minerals, and whole-food sourced nutrients in one convenient daily serving.”

As research for this piece, I ordered a package of AG1. I was shocked by the price: $99 per bag, a one-month supply. The slick-yet-matte green bag arrived with a plastic water bottle and a metal scoop to dole out the correct dosage of green powder. AG1’s 75 ingredients included algae (spirulina, chlorella, kelp powder), fruits (apple powder, papaya fruit powder, pineapple fruit concentrate), vegetables (broccoli flower powder, carrot powder, spinach powder, pea protein, artichoke leaf extract), fungi (reishi, shiitake), probiotics (Lactobacillius acidophilus), and miscellaneous herbs, including ashwagandha. In the branded plastic water bottle, I combined the dark green powder with water, and shook. I took a swig. It tasted strongly of stevia, and also, I guess, 74 other things. I felt a powerful urge to vomit.

The foods contained in AG1 are ones I typically enjoy: seaweed, peas, broccoli, shiitake mushrooms, pineapples, papayas, apples. But ingesting all these ingredients at once, though exceptionally efficient from a nutritional standpoint, was completely unpalatable. AG1 struck me as not so much food as it was tech: a means to a nutritional end.

One of the major proponents of AG1 is the neurobiology professor and podcast host, Andrew Huberman. “I’ve been using AG1 since 2012 because it’s the simplest, most straightforward way for me to get my basis of important vitamins, minerals, and probiotics,” Huberman is quoted as saying on AG1’s website. His podcast, Huberman Lab, consistently ranks among the top five podcasts globally. Over 5 million people subscribe to his YouTube channel, which features video footage of the podcasts. Huberman Lab episodes are frequently hours long and exhaustively researched, covering health, science, and self-improvement. Recent episodes include discussions on “optimizing cognitive function” and “improving oral health.” Frequently, he mentions supplements relevant to the topic at hand.

There is a Chuck Norris-esque quality to everything one reads about Andrew Huberman. His daily routine is well documented: Huberman wakes up between 5:30 and 6:30 a.m. He does not use an alarm. The first order of the day is two glasses of water. (Andrew Huberman does not own a stove, oven or microwave, because revenge is a dish best served cold.) This is followed by yoga nidra, sun exposure, cold exposure, and a workout (supplements he recommends for working out include alpha-GPC, tyrosine, creatine, and another powder — grass-fed whey protein). Huberman was recently the subject of a profile alleging multiple infidelities, and even that struck me as requiring a superhuman commitment to deception.

Nonetheless, Huberman’s many followers are drawn to his apparent productivity, confidence, and control. In the comments section of a Huberman video titled “Master Your Sleep & Be More Alert When Awake,” one viewer describes turning to supplements to help sleep, after 10 years of a night shift and recent stressors, including “fighting with my sister about real estate and other bad stuff like playing games and watching movies until late at night.” They continue: “I am partially following certain sleep hygiene rules as much as I can and have now ordered and am waiting on apigenin, magnesium threonate, theanine and inositol to see if any one supplement or a combination of these will improve my situation.”

The title of the video is compelling: “Master your sleep.” As if it’s all up to us. Huberman often shares recommendations for better health — both behavioral changes and supplements. He shares many basic, free suggestions: getting a morning walk, doing deep, focused work, and yoga nidra, a type of meditation. But behavioral change is harder to implement than ordering supplements online, which can seem like a simpler path to success.

Brands like AG1 speak the language of optimization to an optimization culture. Four Sigmatic, a brand of mushroom powders and coffee replacements that also advertises frequently on podcasts, names its “true calling” as “delivering you mental performance and well-being.” The description for Superfood+ Adaptogen Blend from Navitas Organics says: “Add this adaptogen powder to any smoothie to help your body stay energized and resilient!”

Reading these descriptors, I linger over the “add to cart” button: I want to be energized, I want to be resilient. But what looks like exercising agency isn’t agency at all: It’s buying what we’ve been marketed, substances that claim to address problems themselves created and exacerbated by capitalism. It’s as predictable as the water cycle, a capitalist-solution-to-capitalist-problem pipeline.

After verifying that I could not stomach AG1 — the nausea was more powerful than my commitment to optimization — I wrote to AG1: “Hello, I ordered AG1 recently but unfortunately I find it to be undrinkable.” To their credit, they gave me an immediate refund, canceled my subscription, and said I didn’t need to return the product. (I gave the rest of the bag away on my local Buy Nothing group.)

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I couldn’t write a piece about powders without visiting Erewhon, the cultish Los Angeles-based grocery chain with a $200 annual membership. I met my friend Lucas at the Silverlake location.

“It’s normally better arranged than this,” Lucas said, gesturing to a refrigerated wall of juice that’s in some disarray — unready for Instagram.

I examined Erewhon’s organic tonic bar menu, which included Hailey Bieber’s Strawberry Glaze smoothie. (Olivia Rodrigo and Giselle Bündchen also have smoothies.) One-ounce wheatgrass shots were on offer (Ann Wigmore would be pleased). I ordered a “superfood tonic” called “Jing City” — $15 for a small cup — because its ingredients were the most mysterious to me: gynostemma tea, dandy blend, cistanche, cordyceps, eucommia, he shou wu, shilajit, deer antler, ant, goji & schisandra, vanilla stevia, toffee stevia, ghee, coconut oil. I sipped: It was powdery, earthy, and sickly stevia sweet, all at once. I tried another method: chugging. Also bad. It was disgusting, to put it mildly. Lucas took a sip and confirmed its repulsiveness. As we sat and talked, the coconut oil began to congeal, creating even more of a horror. “Jing City is a top 10 worst drinks for me,” Lucas texted later.

In contrast to AG1, brands like Erewhon, Moon Juice, and Sun Potion give herbs a celebrity- and influencer- approved sheen. If AG1’s primary customer hears about it on a podcast, these brands are inherently visual, made to be consumed on Instagram and TikTok. On tiny screens, influencers with charmed-seeming lives and athleisure sets display well-defined abs while blending collagen powder into their smoothies. Where AG1 markets to bros seeking mastery and efficiency, these dusts suggest effortless perfection — an “I woke up like this” glow — is achievable. These powders don’t just optimize the physiological possibilities of the body, but the aesthetic as well — promising improvements from spirit to skin.

Vital Collagen, a product of Vital Proteins, is one of the most visible brands on social media. Celebrities who consume powdered collagen include Jennifer Aniston, Kourtney Kardashian, Molly Shannon, and Rebecca Black. The celebrity endorsements suggest that ingestion of this powder goes hand in hand with beauty and success.

Wonho Frank Lee/Eater

Vital Proteins and Vital Collagen were founded not by a doctor or health professional, but by a NASA engineer. Yet despite this scientific veneer, its claims of improving hair, skin, and nails remain unproven. There is no doubt that collagen is an essential structural protein, but while small studies, largely funded by collagen purveyors themselves, support collagen’s purported benefits, large-scale trials do not exist. What’s more, collagen might not just be useless but harmful. The Clean Label project tested various collagen powder brands and found that consumers have an 86 percent chance of purchasing a collagen product contaminated with heavy metals. Is it possible that, like Chinese emperor Shen Nung, we are shortening our lives by attempting to prolong them? At minimum, we’re making our lives very strange.

So much of the wellness space is predicated on feelings of insufficiency, which keep us buying products in service of unreachable ideals, which are unreachable by design. Whether you are drawn to promises of optimization and mental fortitude, or drawn to the allure of celebrity-endorsed supplements, it’s the same end goal, cloaked in different language. What all these brands are selling is the idea that you can feel better than you do. That you might be improved. That you might look better, and live longer. That you have some control over your uncontrollable life.

What can we do when the world feels like it’s in chaos? We can call our representatives and take actions in our community, but it doesn’t feel like enough. Wanting to feel in control in a system that strips us of control, we’re turning to individualistic solutions to systemic problems: self-diagnosing and hoping to heal ourselves with various dusts.

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Over and over again, our healthcare system fails us. As a country, our outcomes don’t match the high cost of healthcare. I don’t even need to cite statistics here, because Americans are well aware. I recently had a video call with a doctor that was one measly minute long.

We are no longer under the illusion that our government or Big Pharma have our best interests in mind. The opioid epidemic is the most glaring proof. The Sackler family sought wealth at the expense of countless lives. Purdue’s denial that oxycontin was addictive is an echo of many supplement’s claims of greater health — optimistic and unverifiable.

Regulators have given us lots of reasons not to trust them. We’re at the mercy of companies whose bottom line is money. So picking and choosing what we ingest feels like some semblance of control.

I wanted to take a powder because it felt like things weren’t right. It’s a nagging sense I have almost every day: something isn’t right. But could it be the fact that we live in an untenable situation, with a broken healthcare system, in too-isolated communities, too in thrall to capitalism? Could that actually be the thing that’s wrong?

There’s an oft-shared quote: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” In trying to imagine an alternative to our current healthcare system, we still cannot imagine outside of the capitalist order of business: $38 of Moon Juice dust, or $37 “longevity oil” sold by biohacker-entrepreneur Bryan Johnson.

Is this who we want to be? Individually optimizing — fortressing ourselves against personal harm — instead of making sure that everyone has healthcare, food, and shelter? Instead of taking care of one another when we are sick? More and more, the technocrats, celebrities, and influencers seem to me the fearful ones: afraid of losing their power, afraid of death itself. What if the braver thing is the opposite of what the privileged class would have us believe: accepting our limits as people, as human bodies, coming to an acceptance of our dust-to-dust, ashes-to-ashes reality?

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I met Erin Masako Wilkins at a now-shuttered San Francisco herb shop called Scarlet Sage. She was teaching a class about moxibustion, the therapeutic East Asian practice of burning mugwort leaves over acupressure points. Wilkins is an acupuncturist and herbalist whose book Asian American Herbalism, published this past October, draws from her Japanese heritage, education in Traditional Chinese Medicine, and clinical practice in Sonoma County, California. Reading the book was a revelation: Asian American Herbalism gave context, provided recipes, shared history. It spoke to an ancestral knowledge I’d been raised with but had been lost to me, personally.

Growing up, my mother made herbal concoctions that I remember mightily resisting. She’d stew gnarled roots or sea cucumbers; she’d make a “dessert” of gelatinous birds’ nest soup (when I learned this actually meant bird saliva, my resistance was even fiercer). She’d take me to herb shops where they served samples of bitter ginseng tea in styrofoam cups. I have memories of these herbs but no knowledge of their names, or how to prepare them.

“The positive thing about herbal powders is the accessibility, whether that’s physically the ease of use, or accessibility as far as exposure, for people who didn’t necessarily grow up taking herbs,” Wilkins told me. “Another positive is that adding to your diet can be much healthier than restriction. It’s empowering to be able to add a few things and see if that increases energy and improves day-to-day life.”

I would not have known to take ashwagandha for the first time if not for Sun Potion’s description, which made it accessible. But brands like Sun Potion and Moon Juice are helmed by white men and women commodifying substances used in different culture’s herbal practices, and I wonder what is lost when cultural contexts are nodded to, but not elaborated on: what is lost when Haldi Doodh becomes “golden milk,” when herbal remedies from one culture are Vitamixed indiscriminately with the herbs of another.

If AG1 or powdered collagen makes you feel better, more power to you. I do believe the ashwagandha helped me. First-hand experience, observation, and self knowledge can be empowering — and empowerment seems the best-case scenario. But a blind ingestion of powders can lead to estrangement, not so dissimilar from what one feels while navigating the U.S. medical system. I’m interested in the empowerment side: more knowledge of cultural contexts, of one another, of ourselves.

“We can look up anything. We can Google anything, we can look up any plant. But we can’t learn more about ourselves from Google,” Wilkins said. “Being in community, taking classes, one-on-one clinics with folks. It allows you not to learn about the plants, it’ll teach you about yourself.” In our hyper-measured, data-driven world, there has been an increase in self-monitoring, whether ordering private bloodwork, on-demand MRIs, or using devices like the Apple Watch, Fitbit, or Oura Ring to track steps, runs, swims, sleep. Yet data about ourselves is not the same as knowledge about ourselves.

I wonder if the reason we are drawn to these powders is because we are missing our traditional herbal practices — missing slower ways of existing, a deeper kind of knowing. Maybe we’re craving healing via methods that are gentler than pharmaceuticals, and that we can incorporate into our daily rituals.

But my suspicion is that we can’t look for it within capitalism, via individual optimization. It will have to look more like caring for one another. By accepting our own limits, and being gentler with one another in the process. Seeking healthcare for all, patience over speed, and acceptance of our mortality.

At the end of 2023, I had a miscarriage. I was satisfied with the medical care I received, only because I knew not to expect very much. At my final visit, my OB showed me an ultrasound of my empty uterus and said she hoped she would see me when I got pregnant again. The facts were helpful, but they didn’t address how it felt: the weakness compounded by sadness, the obliterating feeling that things weren’t okay.

My healing didn’t happen at these few doctor’s visits. Instead, it happened day by day. A friend left a bag of groceries at my door. Another friend sent Korean porridges; another, a gift basket of fresh pasta, sauce, cheese; another, warm socks. My mother gave me herbs — dong quai, astragalus, Chinese licorice, goji berries — to boil in chicken soup. Feeling healthy again didn’t mean matcha lattes with carefully apportioned powders. It meant I ate breakfast, I took baths, I sipped broths, I started seeing an acupuncturist. It meant hearing from friends who had had miscarriages, and hearing from friends who hadn’t, but who were sorry, and who loved me. All of that was necessary to healing, too.

Several months ago, my acupuncturist encouraged me to try yi mu cao, also known as motherwort. I’ve been taking a tincture of it, and I don’t know if it’s the tincture or if it’s time, but my heart feels less broken. Letting my healing happen with time, in the community and care of others, in some cases with herbs: That’s what health looks like to me these days, not ordering powders online and trying, alone, to be immortal.

Rachel Khong is the author of the novel Real Americans, recently published by Knopf.
Jesse Zhang is an illustrator from Brooklyn, New York; making all the moods and feelings.