Judith Shulevitz sees echoes of religious observance in the juice cleanse craze:
These new cleanses are “religion without theology,” my friend Ruby quipped. But now that I’ve read Junger’s Clean, the best-selling text of the cleansing movement, I’ve decided I don’t agree. Clean is theology all the way down. As in many a devotional text, fasting is presented as a way to embody a purer social order. We live in an age of what William James called “medical materialism,” so instead of fretting about a fallen world, we speak of a poisoned one. … Distrustful of our surroundings, we try to close ourselves off to malign influences and to purge them. It is no accident that Clean dwells obsessively on defecation and elimination. Junger wants us to flush out shit, “toxic waste,” even mucus, which he says has “a dense and sticky quality; it resonates with and attracts dense, toxic thoughts and emotions.”
The Dish 