In America, the fastest way to introduce something new and spur diffusion and acceptance is through that one-eyed monster, TV. To normalize Cannabis a generation ago, the easiest path was by using marijuana’s red-haired stepchild, hemp. Ironically, hemp has proven to be the sharp point of the Cannabis legalization spear. And especially food, as it implies higher acceptance despite higher risk (see Proximity Pyramid); the way to people’s hearts and minds is through their stomachs. Food is primal, comforting, nurturing, and inspires family, connection, and conviviality. Hemp feeds their stomachs as well as their conscience.
Making hemp foods in 1994 gave us the chance to put a big neon-green hemp leaf and the word HEMP on thousands of store shelves in the U.S. and Canada. That in turn generated thousands of newspaper articles and hundreds of radio and TV stories, not in the lifestyle section but in the food and business pages. Legitimizing Cannabis, one bite at a time. Two years later California voters passed Prop 215, the first medical Cannabis law in the country. I don’t think the two are unrelated.
In the late-90s The Tonight Show with Jay Leno did three jokes or skits about me and my hemp foods, and I appeared on The Roseanne Show with Roseanne Barr, Lastly, our hemp foods were on CBS This Morning. Here’s the transcription of all those:
There’s This Pizza Parlor in LA…
From the NBC Studios in Burbank, it’s the Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
Here’s a rather strange story, they’ve come up with a way, you know they’re trying to find all these uses for hemp. You know this is a big thing now, I know you’re very big on it. I can think of one, Jay. Woody Harrelson is into all this. Now they’re making hemp cheese they’re making hemp it’s essentially cheese made out of the byproduct of marijuana. And I’m not making this up, a local pizza parlor here in LA is using that cheese to make hemp pizza. In fact, do we have footage can we show them. Here’s the guy now watch you see how they make it. There’s the hemp cheese. He’s putting it on now. Notice how they make the pizza just a little bit different.
See it at: https://youtu.be/2yfmjpf0zc8
HempRella Cheese: On and On and On…
Well here’s another one of those only in Los Angeles stories. Listen to this. There’s a pizza parlor here in LA that has started offering hemp cheese to its customers. Kevin you know what this is? No, tell me more. A big interest in Italian food. No this is true, the cheese is made out of crushed marijuana seeds. Well you know that’s pretty ingenious. Think about it I mean how rich is this guy who came up with this idea going to be? I mean think about how this works you order a pizza, you eat it then you get the munchies and you got to order another one. It just keeps going on and on and on. It doesn’t stop!
See it at: https://youtu.be/tqjw34pnsck
HempNut Chocolate on National TV with Tommy Chong
You know last week I told you about a company that was making cheese out of hemp which of course is you know marijuana, we were talking about this, Kevin. Well now they’re out again they’re marketing another product called HempNut chocolate bar. It’s like marijuana in a chocolate bar and the research and development people are, actually they came up with this accidentally and they released this video tape of how they invented the product:“Hey you got your chocolate in my stash, man. You got your stash in my chocolate. Wow now you can get high and cure the munchies at the same time!”
See it at: https://youtu.be/f3qub0tv7rg
Roseanne and Richard Make HempNut Potato Salad
for 3 Million
And starting off my show, Richard Rose is going to show us everything we can possibly do with hemp! Okay here to tell us everything we need to know about hemp is Richard Rose so please welcome him. Alright thanks for being on here. Thanks for having me.
So we want you to tell us what is the difference between hemp and marijuana and why is hemp illegal. Well the first one’s easy, the difference is that hemp is the low octane cousin to marijuana. We can’t get high, could smoke an acre of it you won’t get a buzz. It makes great clothes, it makes great food. Now this whole outfit I have on including the shoes the whole is made out of hemp. I’ll come out here. This whole thing it’s made of hemp. So tell us why that’s so damn cool. Look at my shoes. That’s very cool because half of the pesticides and herbicides used in this country we use on the cotton crop so you’ve saved a few pounds of pesticides right off the bat. Hemp is great for paper. It makes a wonderful paper, great for corrugated boxes, writing paper and the like and it saves trees. Our trees and our forests are kind of in danger aren’t they? We only have about 4% of the trees left that we had when this country started. We’re cutting them fast just to make things like toilet paper and writing paper and envelopes for us to throw away in our junk mail.
What’s that going to do up to our total balance of our whole universe. To grow hemp instead of trees? Well in 90 days you could have fiber for making your paper instead of the trees – waiting 20 years for the trees. It’s great for clothes, we can make paper. Popular Science about 50 years ago said there are 25,000 items that can be made from hemp. But wasn’t it big business that kind of drove hemp out of business? It was. We think so. There’s a lot of evidence that DuPont just came out with nylon a few years earlier, no one wanted to buy it. Hemp was its main competitor for sails, for canvases, for fibers for ropes and has been for millennia. One of the first fibers man has used for these things. The word canvas that the masters painted on is from the word cannabis, which hemp is.
And you can make food out of hemp – right that’s what you’re here to show us. I am. We can make food out of the seed, the seed is very nutritious, it’s about… Is this is the seed? It is, this is the dehulled seed. We take the coat off you know that that’s sort of dark colored coat, take that off the inside… Well this is it, it tastes like sunflower and it looks like sesame. Can I try it? It doesn’t taste bad, kinda nutty. And it’s one-third protein and one-third essential fatty acids. This is the most nutritious thing on the shelf today. Wow. Because of the hempseed, it’s a hundred percent hempseed. I just can’t believe that it’s so useful and for like environment, economy you know everything and yet we can’t I just can’t figure that out. Like I said it’s being grown everywhere including Canada. This year our farmers will see the incredible returns that the farmers in Canada are getting from this crop. Well we want our farmers to make money. Yeah well they talked about it, they want to grow it in Kentucky where they’re growing a lot of tobacco now and they want to do it. There’s a Kentucky Hemp Growers Cooperative that has been around about 60 or 70 years and they’re back in business and they want to grow it. Well how come it’s legal to grow tobacco that you know killed about three billion people a day and not hemp, it doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t, I agree.
Feed me! Feed ya. Tell me what’s good. I’d love to. We have a chocolate… Bite me it says. That’s good. Bite Me bar. That’s the most nutritious chocolate made because of addition of the hempseed. That’s pretty good, we should pass them out. Rice Krispies? Granola bar. Granola bar, that’s really good. Hempseed in it. I like that! We have… What’s this? Those are corn chips. Are those made out of hemp? Corn chips. Made out of hempseed. What’s this stuff? It’s French onion dip. Is this made out of it? Sorry, but it could be, could have been quite easily. What’s that made out of? I don’t wanna eat that. Yeah don’t eat that. But this you could’ve added the hemp oil to. That’s really good. They are good. Really good. What’s that? We have Hempeh Burger, a veggie burger with HempRella our cheese. We make the cheese and the burger veggie burger and the chocolate. That’s good! Veggie burger. Veggie burger. That’s good. What’s this? Potato salad. That’s so good! That’s good! We’re going to make that. And what is this made out of? That’s your basic salad but we added the hempseed salad dressing to it. That is so good! It is good. And it makes you healthy. Makes you healthy. Very healthy. All right! So you can have twice your helpings. You can eat twice as much? Did you hear what he said, he said you can have twice as much of it!
What are you going to make? We’re going to make a potato salad. Is it like that? It’s exactly like that. Well I already ate it. Yeah well… No that’s really good, show us how you made it. First we start with potatoes. You take a half pound of potatoes, white or red potatoes. Okay that’s what’s there, ones red ones white. Throw them in the bowl. First we start with our potatoes, 1/2 pound. Add 1/2 cup of regular yogurt. Oh that’s good yogurt. This could be made from hempseed. You can make yogurt from hempseed? You can take this and turn it into milk like a soymilk. How do you do that? Water and blend it up with water. Oh Really? You can do everything, it’s amazing. And half a cup of green onions. Looks good. This is the HempNut that’s been toasted. You can toast it on a pan, keep it from burning and add some spices if you want but this has just been toasted no spices. The same HempNut and we will pour it in there like so. I like the yogurt thing that’s healthy. Quarter teaspoon to 1/2 teaspoon of garlic salt. You like garlic? Oh yeah. Here you go. Stuck in there though. Uh oh. It’s melted. Here I know how to do it, let me show you. Thank you. And half a teaspoon of oregano, yes oregano not to be confused with hemp. Right. And that’s hempseed oil we will add that, like thus. You want to help? Toss it. Toss it. This was really good. We’re gonna give the audience some of this. Yeah.
This is so good, thank you very much I hope that something positive happens for all of us. Yeah I think it will. Thank you.
See it at: https://youtu.be/PxnJxrWg9ys
Hemp Foods on CBS This Morning
18 after the hour. Fashion trends come and go with styles all over the place from long to short, grunge to glamorous. Well these days one of the hottest fads is clothing made from hemp. Yes it comes from a plant that’s related to the one that produces marijuana. I don’t think that when I’m buying hemp that I’m buying marijuana. I’m looking for the way to marry ecology and economics and looks like this shoe maybe it. The jeans look just like Levi’s and they wear just like Levi so that’s what I like about it. I like comfort. Our store carries probably over 100 products made from hemp, from paper to clothing to bags and accessories wallets and products made out of the hempseed, hempseed oil, hempseed food.
Ken Friedman opened Seattle’s American Hemp Mercantile less than two years ago. Since then sales have skyrocketed past the million-dollar mark. The primary reason we market hemp is for the environmental advantages over the alternatives the synthetic fibers and the cotton. Hemp can be grown with very little fertilizer and no pesticides. So for an industry that has a lot of environmental impact, hemp is a great alternative. While hemp’s become vogue for the ‘90s it’s been used for thousands of years. Van Gogh painted on it and the Declaration of Independence was drafted on it. Hemp was a major cash crop for American farmers until it became illegal to grow in 1937 when the government deemed it too similar to its narcotic-carrying cousin, marijuana. Hemp however is bred differently and contains only traces of the hallucinogenic chemical THC.
I’m witness to the fact that my father had 500 acres of hemp and there wasn’t any crazies running around and people showed up for work regularly and worked all day and they didn’t act foolish. And therefore I can prove you can raise a non-narcotic industrial hemp fiber. Fourth-generation farmer Jacob Graves has joined forces with other Kentucky farmers like Gale Glenn on their state’s hemp fiber task force to push for hemp legalization.
It is becoming a popular fiber. Ralph Lauren is advertising his hemp sheets and Bloomies is selling hemp sneakers and Macy’s is selling Hempeh Burgers. But when you think that all of the hemp products that are sold in this country now are imported from other countries it hardly makes sense. We’re losing the game to foreign competition because our government won’t get off the stick and support the local entrepreneurs. According to the Institute for Hemp the legalization of industrial hemp could mean billions for both retailers and farmers. But the Drug Enforcement Agency which refused to provide a spokesman for this story says it intends to keep the crop illegal. Still importers promised hemp will remain hip.
We’ve been going to fabric shows in New York and other places and showing it to the top designers of the world. We’ve sold hemp to the converse company and Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein and Land’s End and Levi’s.
It’s the 21st century I think you know. I mean that movie The Graduate that guy said uh “don’t forget the word plastics.” I bet you now it’s “don’t forget the word hemp.” We’ll see. And we’ve got a selection of hemp products here for you to look at, these are the Converse and Adida’s is coming out with a shoe.
Is this all American-made stuff or this is from all over the place. Yeah but the hemp is imported because you can’t grow it here. So it depends on where the company is that makes it whether they’re American or not. Because they grew it all over the place I remember during the war. Cuz then it was used for rope and for uniforms. Yeah. But see part of the criticism is that it is playing toward the young person’s fascination with marijuana. If you look at the button on here there’s a marijuana leaf and so by calling it hemp you know are you trying to legitimize the drug culture. So there are high school kids all of America thinking they can smoke their ties. But it has only a tiny bit of THC, you have a smoke a bale and then you just get a headache. Yeah and also it does have a nutritional value in it so we’ve got a hemp burger and some hemp cheese if you want to try some here. I don’t know if I’ll join you, but… I’ve eaten a cockroach on the show why shouldn’t I eat hemp burger. Oh we’re out of time. Oh gee. Smells delicious.
See it at: https://youtu.be/k5cs39q3cpc