FOOD CITY
National issues seen through the lens of San Francisco's restaurants
Cannabis Cuisine
by cathrin jacob
the controversy behind
It was a nice sunny afternoon sometime in March,
and in the midst of the chaos of the day I found myself lost on an unfamiliar street in San Francisco. Glancing between my phone GPS and the sidewalk, something odd caught my eye. So odd, I paused and retraced my last few steps to take another look. Had I read that right? A simple menu on the side of a dark building (of what appeared to be an open concept kitchen space) with the food item, “Cannabis Infused Lobster” written in a simple sans serif font.
I laughed having realized that no, my eyes were not deceiving me, and yes, there was in fact a menu fusing two of the most unlikely of things – five star cuisine and a drug often associated with poverty and communities of color. I didn’t give the thing much more thought, quickly distracted with the next errand on hand and the flashing Google Map instructions demanding my attention.
Weeks pass, and I find myself having a conversation with one of my Trader Joe’s co-workers, Lindsey, on her husband’s cannabis business. Eric, her husband, and a man of color, had started growing cannabis in their small apartment – the goal in mind to be able to one day sell legally and via formal channels to veterans, such as himself, suffering from PTSD and other anxiety disorders resulting from their time served abroad.
For now, Eric was just selling to friends and acquaintances; Lindsey serving as “the plug” at Trader Joe’s for all of my co-worker and I’s budding desires (pun intended).
Having spoken to Eric and Lindsey a few days later in their home, I came to find that their business was actually not as successful as it seemed. They were paying rent for an extra bedroom in their apartment (not a cheap feat in San Francisco), dedicated solely to the growth of their cannabis plants, and they were paying more than triple what someone usually would for electricity – on account of the fans and heaters that needed to constantly be running in order to cultivate the cannabis. “Some days, we actually lose money,” Eric tells me. “Now that cannabis is legal recreationally, it’s become more difficult to sell.”
Eric’s story is not unique to him. Selling marijuana has historically been a way of life for many disenfranchised and impoverished communities, something that has been highly taboo and criminalized since the Reagan administration’s “War on Drugs,” ironically effecting the lives of veterans such as Eric.
En route from Lindsey and Eric’s home, the image of the poster resurfaces in my head: Cannabis Cuisine. How has marijuana emerged as artisanal while also being so heinously aggressive to the marginalized community from which its popularity stems? Why now, in the contemporary moment?
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When initially researching cannabis cuisine, I was under the impression it was a new concept, to find that the only new thing about cannabis cuisine was its recent popularity and loss of controversy. For one, every article I found about cannabis cuisine seemed to be in favor of the dining experience.
For another, I found that there was increased demand for the communal, underground dinner parties that cannabis cuisine offered. In the Bay Area, these dinner parties range around a few hundred dollars a person.
More interestingly, the most successful of the cannabis chefs were Michelin star, white, upper class men. Yet, nobody seemed to really take into account how these privileged individuals were profiting off of a market that has contributed to the arrests of seven million people from the years 2001 to 2010, most of whom were individuals from communities of color – despite equal usage rates to their white counterparts – according to ACLU research.
Larry Donald Duke a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole in 1989 for non-violent drug possession and intent to sell marijuana. Like Eric, Larry, too, suffers from PTSD resulting from his two tours of duty with the United States military. In 1989, he was caught in a sting operation by undercover police and remained in prison until his compassionate release in 2015, after having served twenty six years of his life sentence.
The Chefs
Michael Magallanes, the founder of Opulent Chef, left the restaurant industry – where he had been training and working for high end, gourmet, Michelin Star restaurants – just this past summer in pursuit of cannabis cuisine. Magallanes is known as the chef who helped bring Mouradits Michelin Stars. He now successfully hosts workshops, pop up dinners, and private catering throughout San Francisco.
Another one of Green State’s “Top 10 Cannabis Chefs” is Coreen Carroll. Carroll began the cannoisseur series in 2015, with her then fiancé, Ryan Bush. She attended the San Francisco Cooking School and was one of the cofounders for Madame Munchie, a French macaron edible company. She now caters pop up dinners and private events – the cost of her most recent four-course pop up tickets selling for $180 a person. Her website boasts, “We started this event series in 2015 with a dinner because there was really nothing like this out there.”
Nothing like this out there? How true is that?
While fact checking this claim, a man named Payton Curry surfaced – whom I eventually spoke with over the phone. Curry tells me he’s been infusing marijuana in his cooking for the last twenty years.
Payton Curry has worked in the food industry from as young as age 14, when he first began working in kitchens. By age 19, he was selling edibles to his peers. He studied at the Culinary Institute of America and was quickly directed towards the Michelin Star restaurant industry.
After a bout of incarceration and years of alcoholism, Curry turned to marijuana for medical purposes. He currently owns Flourish, a company dedicated to making lab-tested and locally sourced edibles. However, Curry’s edibles tend to come in the form of honeys or jams, as oppose to the usual trope of cookies and brownies. Curry also teaches cannabis cuisine cooking workshops all over the country, hosts canna-cuisine dinner parties (sometimes for his Mormon neighbors) and contributes to the website Marijuana Recipes.
Curry tells me over and over again his goal is to show others the health benefits and teach them how to cook with this “vegetable” (referring to the cannabis). He mentions accessibility.
But how could something with such contradictory binary of condemnation be accessible? On the one hand, white upper-class Michelin Star chefs and their clients are having elaborate “underground” dinners, but on the other we have men and women serving lifetimes in jail for the same drug. Could marginalized communities have the same success?
I decided more research needed to be done on cannabis cuisine, and for some reason, I felt like there was a longer and larger history than what was being talked about.
The History
One of the first things I found was that ancient civilizations (primarily that of China and India) had been infusing cannabis into their tea for ages, and that cannabis was often used as a prized spice throughout the region of Northern Africa and the Middle East. Looking at specifically United States history, I found that cannabis cuisine long surpasses Payton Curry’s twenty years.
The inception of modern day edibles began sometime in 1954, after an elderly lesbian woman by the name of Alice B. Toklas (interestingly enough, the life partner of famous poet Gertrude Stein) published a cookbook. The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook included a recipe for “Haschich Fudge,” (a recipe gifted from a friend) as follows:
And thus, the edible brownie was born!
Years later, in 1988, the editor of HIGH TIMES magazine contacted his old high school friend, Jim Wilson – famously known as “Chef Ra.” Chef Ra wrote a column in the HIGH TIMES infused foods column titled, “Psychedelic Kitchen.” His column continued for 15 years and he enjoyed spans of intense media coverage (like when he ran against Ronald Reagan in 1984 for President.) Now, while Chef Ra was able to live a comfortable life resulting from his appearances on HIGH TIMES, cannabis infused cuisine brought him (and marijuana, for that matter) no more social acceptance or mainstream popularity.
Like beer – once a working class relief – cannabis, too, has become artisanal; slowly pricing out the community from which it was originally appreciated, even in times of adversity. The problem, then, with cannabis cuisine is not the “controversy” of marijuana as a drug, but the appropriation of this mode of recreation for upper class consumption.