A while ago, I wrote about
buying hemp pants. When you go looking for sustainable fibers for clothing, the answers are always the same (hemp, linen, bamboo, and organic cotton), and the clothing is almost always hard to find and/or expensive.
The response I got to that diary led me to read more about the history and uses of hemp. One great use for hemp is...eating it.
Now, there's more than one way to eat it. Before you start envisioning brownies, I am going to kill your fun by saying that I'd like to talk about eating hempseeds and hemp oil. You can't get high from hempseeds and hemp oil.
Hemp Foods & Health
If you go to the grocery store - or more likely, to your local coop - you will find a few foods (such as granola bars, cereal, or waffles) made with hempseeds.
I've tried hemp waffles before, and they tasted good, although I'm not a huge waffle fan. The hemp waffles didn't taste any better or worse than the buckwheat waffles or the flax waffles I tried. They tasted like frozen waffles. I just got the warm and fuzzy feeling of knowing I was eating something extremely healthy. Kind of ironic, given that it was drenched in maple syrup.
Hemp foods are marketed to health conscious consumers. I'm in this market segment. We are called LOHAS - Lifestyles of Health & Sustainability. We like to find all of the trendy health foods - flax, hemp, acai, and spelt, to name a few - and then we use them as litmus tests when deciding which food products to buy. Just like me and my waffles.
Hemp foods contain an ideal ratio of Omega-6 to Omega-3 essential fatty acids (about 3:1). I touched on this when talking about salmon, but the long story short is that you need Omega-3, Omega-6, and Omega-9 essential fatty acids, or EFAs, to live ("essential" refers to the fact that these fatty acids are essential for life AND our bodies cannot produce them alone - we need to eat them).
There is more to love in hemp foods than just EFAs, but the aspect of hemp that I like is that you can use every part of the plant (and it's easy to grow - they don't call it "weed" for nothing). We can eat the seeds and the oil, but we can use the fiber to make paper, clothing, rope, or carpet backing. Also, you might not be aware of this, but you can use parts of the Cannabis sativa plant for recreational or medicinal purposes.
Hempseeds and hemp oil are not the only healthy foods out there - any balanced plant-based diet full of whole foods is going to be good for you - but no other food can provide so many different products to meet so many different human needs in such an environmentally friendly way.
Before moving on, I want to say that one thing I do not like about some of the hemp food products out there is that they are quite processed. Just because something contains hemp does not make it worthy of eating. Many of the products I've seen advertise their high omega-3 content, charge a premium for it, and in reality they are not much better for you than any of the other millions of processed foods out there. Like my waffles.
The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937
The story of how hemp went from a popular fiber used in making paper, clothing, and other products to illegal would have been hard to believe, except the tactics used are all too familiar. It's an exciting story involving media consolidation, an irresponsible MSM, corporate greed, politicians who are entirely bought and paid for, an overly zealous Ashcroft-like nutjob named Anslinger, and American citizens who never knew what hit them until it was all over.
Flash back to the 1930's. Americans knew the plant in question as cannabis or hemp. It was legal. It was even an accepted medicine. Hemp was a popular material for everything from paint to parachutes. Two new technological developments occurred around that time. DuPont invented synthetic materials that could replace hemp, and hemp farmers were on the verge of mechanizing their production method so that they could be much more cost efficient.
DuPont bought and paid for several members of the United States Congress. Fancy that happening. Shocking that our representatives were not fully committed to doing the people's business. DuPont knew they were up for a fight to gain dominance in several different markets, and they figured out exactly how to win it. Of course, they couldn't do it alone.
The stars lined up in DuPont's favor. William Randolph Hearst and racism were right there to help. Hearst, who owned newspapers all over the country, had been spewing propaganda for a few decades at this point. He had a bug up his butt against Mexicans, and he was sensationalizing their use of "marijuana" and linking it with crime. He was clever in choosing an obscure Sonoran slang term for cannabis that most Americans never even linked to the medication they took or the fabric they wore.
As Hearst was building his case against marijuana and brown people, the predominently white audience of his newspapers took it to heart. Remember, Jim Crow laws and KKK membership were on the rise during this same time period. Hearst's motives stemmed from his timber and paper interests and his anger at Pancho Villa's army for taking 800,000 acres of his Mexican timber land.
Just to make a few comparisons, what if we replaced DuPont with Halliburton, Hearst with Judith Miller, and the tie between "Mexicans raping white women" and "marijuana" with "Iraq" and "9/11" in Bush's speeches? Things haven't changed much in 70 years.
The last nail in the coffin came in the form of Harry J. Anslinger. His future uncle-in-law Andrew Mellon was Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury, but he was also owner of the Mellon bank. The Mellon bank financed DuPont. Anslinger, a racist, had been Assistant Prohibition Commissioner in the Bureau of Prohibition. After Prohibition ended, Mellon appointed Anslinger head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN, predecessor to the DEA). He held that role from 1931 until 1962.
With all of the groundwork laid, DuPont & co. went to work. The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 aimed to make the cost of hemp prohibitively high. To speed up the legislative process, the bill was taken straight to the Ways and Means committee, which was headed by DuPont ally Rep. Doughton. Only days before the hearings, the AMA realized that marijuana was the same plant as cannabis, and they testified for marijuana (i.e. against the Tax Act).
Most witnesses called were for the Tax Act. Anslinger spoke in the hearings, reading Hearst's articles as his testimony. The articles were racist and outrageous, but then, so was Anslinger. According to Biomassive.org, Anslinger is quoted as saying:
Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men.
(By the way, the Biomassive.org site is an excellent, in depth description of how marijuana became illegal.)
Needless to say, the Tax Act passed easily.
If It's So Good, Then Why Is It Still Illegal?
Because it gets you high and it's a dangerous drug, silly! No, I'm kidding. That's not the reason.
The cannabis plant has the inconvenient - or very convenient - trait that it doesn't grow the parts of the plant that do NOT get you high (the fiber, seeds, and oil) without growing the parts that DO get you high too. We puritanical Americans proclaim that it must be all or nothing then. If a farm were to grow hemp for paper or clothing, then, inevitably, someone would find a way to illegally smoke it - and we can't have that. Even if they were to cultivate a strain that had such low THC content that it did not get you high, it would make it easy to hide some of the "good stuff" out there in the field with the benign non-drug plants.
So long as the public is against marijuana, the drug, the government can keep the entire rest of the plant illegal too. Whether American voters are against the drug is another question. In 1996, according to The Emporer Wears No Clothes by Jack Herer, more Californians voted for medical marijuana than voted for Bill Clinton (p. 44). However, remember the Supreme Court decision of a year ago that gave the feds the power to bust people for pot even if their state laws allowed them to have it. The American people are not yet to a point where we can influence our leaders to decriminalize marijuana or form any sort of sensible policies on it, and it looks to me like we need to accomplish that on a national level.
Going back to the idea that part of the cannabis plant produces a drug so the entire plant is illegal, let's look at who gains from that policy (an easy way to figure that out is to look at who gives money to anti-marijuana groups... Big Pharma and tobacco and alcohol companies). DuPont and other manufacturers of products that would compete with hemp gain. Pharmaceutical companies who would compete with medical marijuana (that patients can grow themselves) gain. The cotton industry, centered in Texas (Lubbock is "the cottonest city in the world"), gains. And because they gain, our politicians gain. The rich elite has a lot to lose if we decriminalized pot.
I would argue that they have a lot to lose if we DON'T decriminalize pot too - they breathe the air and they drink the water and they eat the food that was grown in the soil, so bad environmental policy hurts us all - but they obviously don't see that.
In particular, the Bushes have ties to the pharmaceutical industry. In 1977, Daddy Bush was made director of Eli Lilly by Dan Quayle's family. Over the years, the Bush family has also had large amounts of stock in Lilly, Abbott, Bristol, and Pfizer.
In that case, why don't the Democrats do the right thing? I am not so naive to think that our Democrats are saints. Surely, they have some financial interests preventing them from decriminalizing marijuana too. However, the other reason I've read is that they are afraid to look soft on crime and soft on drugs. If you ask me, the shoe fits.
What Should We Do Now?
I think we do not nearly do as much as we should on the issue of sensible marijuana policy and the promotion of hemp products. Think about the environmental impact of all of the extra manufacturing we do and pesticides we use and trees we cut down that we could avoid by using hemp. Think about the amount of money we waste each year chasing down and locking up potheads. Think about the lives ruined by the harsh punishments for marijuana that do not fit the crime.
Just as an example, if you live in Illinois and you are caught with 35g of marijuana, that is a felony. Illinois will lock you up for 1-3 years and fine you $25,000. That's not a hypothetical scenario I am giving you. I know a guy - an honor student, no less - who was arrested in Illinois with 35g of weed. Because he comes from an upper middle class family, he got a good lawyer who got him off with a lesser felony, no jail time, a smaller fine, community service, and random drug tests. Additionally, his school kicked him out for two years (he went to community college and lived with his parents before going back and finishing college at his university) and he had to pay the lawyer's fees on top of the fine to the state.
Can you solve all of that by buying hemp foods or other hemp products? Well, no, not directly. We need to kick and scream and yell - join NORML and organize ballot initiatives and write our candidates, etc. - to make political headways on the issue. But if money is keeping hemp illegal, then let's make hemp products more profitable. As soon as corporations realizes they can make a buck off of it, they will become very effective advocates of sensible marijuana policies.
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Recipes
I'm in Ann Arbor at the moment, but I went to the Ann Arbor farmer's market with Maybeeso in Michigan this weekend! All kinds of berries are in season here now - strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, gooseberries, sweet and tart cherries, and red currants. Summer squash was also a big item this week, and this was about the third week I saw beets for sale. I'm living out of a hotel room, so I got a bunch of foods that I don't need to cook - sugar snap peas, cherry tomatoes, and blueberries. My usual.
Here are a few recipes I made before I left home.
Guacamole
I received 2 avocados in my fruit box a few weeks ago, so I made guacamole. Avocados have about 30g fat each, but it's the "good" fat. I went on a 28mi bike ride that week, so I figured I was entitled to treat myself to as much avocado as I wanted to eat.
Ingredients
- 2 avocados
- Juice of 1/2 lime
- 1 tomato, diced
- Red onion, diced (optional - I used garlic scapes instead)
- 1 tsp. cumin
- Salt, to taste
- 1/4 c. cilantro, minced
Mix together avocado, lime, cumin, and salt. Then mix in the tomato, onion, and cilantro. You can use a blender for the first part if you want, but do not use a blender for the second part. To add an exciting twist to your guac, add some diced mango!
Mexicali Sandwich
Ingredients
- 2 slices whole wheat bread, toasted
- 1/4 or 1/2 avocado
- Salsa
- Fat free refried beans
- Cilantro
Toast the bread. Spread avocado on one slice of bread, and spread salsa on top of the avocado. Add cilantro on top of the salsa. On the other slice of bread, spread the refried beans (you might want to heat the beans up first). Put the two slices of bread together to make a delicious sandwich!