Same Soil, Same Hands: The Hidden History of Cannabis and the Organic Food Movement bölümünün tam dökümü

00:06:21.279 What eventually got nicknamed the Emerald Triangle. 00:06:21.279 --> 00:06:22.879 It's the late 60s. 00:06:22.879 --> 00:06:31.279 People were leaving San Francisco's hate, Ashbury, and heading north into those hills looking for cheap land and a chance to live outside the mainstream. 00:06:31.279 --> 00:06:32.879 They wanted to grow their own food. 00:06:32.879 --> 00:06:43.920 They wanted to build their own shelter, and a lot of them wanted to smoke the cannabis they'd gotten used to in the city, which meant they started growing that too, right alongside everything else in the garden. 00:06:43.920 --> 00:06:49.040 It wasn't a separate operation with a fence around it and a different set of values attached. 00:06:49.040 --> 00:06:50.560 It was the same homestead. 00:06:50.560 --> 00:06:56.319 The same person who was composting for their vegetable beds was composting for their cannabis plant. 00:06:56.319 --> 00:07:07.920 The same reason that made someone distrust a pesticide-soaked grocery store tomato made them distrust the idea of buying weed from someone whose growing practices they had no visibility into. 00:07:07.920 --> 00:07:09.920 Grow it yourself. 00:07:09.920 --> 00:07:12.160 Know exactly what went into it. 00:07:12.160 --> 00:07:13.759 That was the whole ethos. 00:07:13.759 --> 00:07:18.800 And it didn't distinguish between what ended up on your dinner plate and what ended up in your pipe. 00:07:18.800 --> 00:07:22.399 And I think we need to be honest about something here because I think it matters. 00:07:22.399 --> 00:07:28.319 A lot of those communities eventually leaned on cannabis as an actual income source, not just a personal use crop. 00:07:28.319 --> 00:07:42.000 As logging declined in that region and the local economy needed something to replace it, cannabis became a significant part of it, eventually worth an estimated billion dollars a year at its peak in that region alone. 00:07:42.000 --> 00:07:46.399 So this isn't a purely idealistic story where nobody thought about money. 00:07:46.399 --> 00:07:57.120 It's a more complicated one where the same philosophy that started as self-sufficiency and distrust of corporate systems also became over decades an actual regional economy. 00:07:57.120 --> 00:08:01.120 I think that complexity is worth naming instead of just smoothing over. 00:08:01.120 --> 00:08:09.759 But the starting point, the reason cannabis ended up growing in that soil at all, was the same instinct that built the organic farming movement. 00:08:09.759 --> 00:08:11.680 Control what goes into your body. 00:08:11.680 --> 00:08:16.240 Don't outsource that trust to a system you don't believe in. 00:08:16.240 --> 00:08:22.240 Now let's bring this back to the kitchen because that's what this show is all about, of course. 00:08:22.240 --> 00:08:27.519 If you go back to listen to episode 358, you'll remember we talked about the Alice B. 00:08:27.519 --> 00:08:37.680 Tokless cookbook and how a hash fudge recipe ended up on a mainstream cookbook almost by accident, decades before anyone was having this conversation openly. 00:08:37.680 --> 00:08:44.639 I want you to hold on to that story for a second because the food movement I'm describing today ran on a very similar mechanism. 00:08:44.639 --> 00:08:49.680 Information passed hand to hand outside of any official channel. 00:08:49.680 --> 00:08:53.920 Organic growing knowledge in the 70s wasn't coming from a government pamphlet. 00:08:53.920 --> 00:09:02.480 It was coming from newsletters typed up and mimeographed by people at the School of Living or at communities like Twin Oaks in Virginia. 00:09:02.480 --> 00:09:08.240 It was coming from Rodales Magazine, which most of the agricultural establishment considered a joke. 00:09:08.240 --> 00:09:17.839 It was word of mouth at the co-op, a recipe scrawled on an index card, a technique someone learned from the person down the road who passed on to the next new arrival. 00:09:17.839 --> 00:09:22.559 Cannabis knowledge traveled exactly the same way for the exact same reason. 00:09:22.559 --> 00:09:32.879 There's no legal channel to learn from, no agricultural extension office that was going to teach you how to make canab butter or how to tell you if your plant was ready to harvest. 00:09:32.879 --> 00:09:46.559 So that knowledge moved through community instead, kitchen to kitchen, garden to garden, the same underground network carrying both the organic tomato technique and the cannabis infusion technique, often through the same people. 00:09:46.559 --> 00:09:57.519 And that's the piece that I think that gets lost when people tell cannabis history as its own isolated timeline, separate from everything else that was happening in food culture at the same moment. 00:09:57.519 --> 00:09:58.960 It wasn't separate. 00:09:58.960 --> 00:10:07.440 It was one movement with two crops built on the same conviction that you shouldn't need a corporation's permission to know how your food and your medicines were made. 00:10:07.440 --> 00:10:13.359 I'll say the honest thing here, too, because I try not to romanticize this stuff more than the facts support. 00:10:13.359 --> 00:10:26.240 Some academic work on the Back to the Land movement has pointed out that it was overwhelmingly white and middle class and that it sometimes borrowed selectively from indigenous land practices without really reckoning with that. 00:10:26.240 --> 00:10:31.359 And I think that's worth knowing, not to dismiss the movement, but because it's part of the real picture. 00:10:31.359 --> 00:10:36.880 And I'd rather give you the real picture than a clean story that leaves out some of the uncomfortable parts. 00:10:36.880 --> 00:10:40.000 So what happened to all of this? 00:10:40.000 --> 00:10:42.480 Both of these movements eventually did the same thing. 00:10:42.480 --> 00:10:45.680 They went mainstream and mainstream changed them. 00:10:45.680 --> 00:10:59.680 Organic food spent the 80s and early 90s as a

patchwork of state rules and private certifications, basically the Wild West, where an organic label in California might mean something completely different than the one in Maine. 00:10:59.680 --> 00:11:08.079 That got formalized with the 1990 Organic Food Production Act and the USDA USDA organic seal that came after it. 00:11:08.079 --> 00:11:12.559 Suddenly, organic wasn't a philosophy anymore, it was a regulatory category. 00:11:12.559 --> 00:11:19.759 A can can be bought, a box can be checked, a product on a shelf next to the conventional version at a markup. 00:11:19.759 --> 00:11:24.160 Cannabis is walking that same road right now, just a few decades behind. 00:11:24.160 --> 00:11:43.920 What started as a plant grown quietly alongside vegetables by people who didn't trust corporate systems is in places where it's legal, increasingly write a regulated commercial product with its own version of a USDA seal, its own packaging requirements, its own shelf presence next to the conventional version at a markup. 00:11:43.920 --> 00:11:45.920 I'm not here to tell you that it's all bad. 00:11:45.920 --> 00:11:50.640 Regulation brought real consistency and safety benefits to both industries. 00:11:50.640 --> 00:11:55.279 But I think it's worth naming attention honestly instead of pretending that it doesn't exist. 00:11:55.279 --> 00:12:04.880 Something does get lost when a movement that started as an act of resistance against corporate food and corporate medicines becomes eventually its own corporate category. 00:12:04.880 --> 00:12:09.119 The organic movement's founders weren't trying to build a premium shelf tag. 00:12:09.119 --> 00:12:11.599 They were trying to opt out of a system entirely. 00:12:11.599 --> 00:12:17.680 Cannabis growers in those Northern California hills weren't trying to build a billion-dollar industry where they started. 00:12:17.680 --> 00:12:22.960 They were trying to grow something themselves because they didn't trust anyone else to grow it for them. 00:12:22.960 --> 00:12:33.920 That instinct, the one that started both of these movements, is still available to you right now in your own kitchen, in your own garden, however small that garden might be. 00:12:33.920 --> 00:12:40.000 You don't need the USDA seal or the government dispensary to reclaim a little piece of that original idea. 00:12:40.000 --> 00:12:49.119 Every time you make your own infused butter instead of buying a product off the shelf, you're pulling that same thread that ran through that Humboldt Hillside 50 years ago. 00:12:49.119 --> 00:12:58.559 I do find that interesting as someone who grew vegetables for the first time in a very long time because I found myself at a place where the conditions were good for growing. 00:12:58.559 --> 00:12:59.759 It totally makes sense. 00:12:59.759 --> 00:13:01.920 It was a thrill to grow vegetables this year. 00:13:01.920 --> 00:13:03.440 Not all of it was successful. 00:13:03.440 --> 00:13:08.160 I definitely made some mistakes and had some learnings that makes me want to try again next year. 00:13:08.160 --> 00:13:23.759 But as part of my vegetable garden was were my cannabis plants, that some of which I've already harvested at the time of this recording, some of which I'm hoping the weather will cooperate until I do harvest in a bit of time. 00:13:23.759 --> 00:13:28.400 But the idea that I know the inputs. 00:13:28.400 --> 00:13:48.799 I started worm farming as well, so I'll have more inputs, organic inputs for my soil for next year, all of these things feel a little bit like an act of resistance sometimes, especially with some of the things that have come out recently in the news about the farming practices of some of these huge corporations that sell us their food. 00:13:48.799 --> 00:14:02.240 There is a huge amount of satisfaction that comes with enjoying that fresh tomato, curing your own cannabis, and then using that cannabis to make something that's going to make you feel good. 00:14:02.240 --> 00:14:09.039 A lot of my cannabis is going to end up as edibles, and there will be a lot of topicals made as well. 00:14:09.039 --> 00:14:11.119 So here's what I want you to leave with today. 00:14:11.119 --> 00:14:15.359 Cannabis was never its own separate little story, off in a corner by itself. 00:14:15.359 --> 00:14:21.759 It grew up in the same soil, tended by the same hands as the entire American organic food movement. 00:14:21.759 --> 00:14:32.319 Same distrust of the system, same instinct to grow yourself and know exactly what you're putting in your body, same underground network of hand-to-hand knowledge that eventually became something big enough to regulate. 00:14:32.319 --> 00:14:44.319 And if you've ever felt a little bit of that back to the land spirit when you're making your own edibles at home, when you're choosing your own cannabis material and controlling your own dose instead of grabbing something off a dispensary shelf, it's not a coincidence. 00:14:44.319 --> 00:14:46.480 And it's not just a personal preference. 00:14:46.480 --> 00:14:50.160 You're standing in a much longer line than you might have realized. 00:14:50.160 --> 00:14:53.359 And if this one landed for you, go back and listen to the episode on Alice B. 00:14:53.359 --> 00:14:54.880 Tokles' cookbook. 00:14:54.880 --> 00:14:56.559 They're a good pair. 00:14:56.559 --> 00:14:58.880 If you haven't listened to that one already, of course. 00:14:58.880 --> 00:15:06.400 And if you want to keep pulling on this thread with people who understand it, that's exactly what the Bite Me Cannabis Club is for. 00:15:06.400 --> 00:15:11.920 Come talk history, trade techniques, growing techniques, and tell me what you're growing this season. 00:15:11.920 --> 00:15:14.160 Thank you for spending this time with me today. 00:15:14.160 --> 00:15:15.759 I really appreciate you. 00:15:15.759 --> 00:15:19.200 Until next week, my friends, I am your host, Margaret. 00:15:19.200 --> 00:15:21.279 Stay curious and stay high.