Black chefs cooking with cannabis are reclaiming the traditions of medicinal cooking
by
chef Megon Dee-Cave moved to Portland, Oregon, with her family in 2016,
she did it with the goal of learning more about cannabis. Five years
earlier, when she owned her own bakery in Baltimore, customers began
inquiring about edibles, which led her to experiment with combining
cannabis and food for the first time. Once in Portland, she immersed
herself in the recreational industry, only to find she was one of a
small number of black people involved. “A lot of times I was the only
female brown face in the room, making me hyper-[visible],” she says to
Eater via email, referring to her first job as a chef at one of the
largest cannabis corporations in the state.
“When [black women] fail, it
is personified a little bit louder than the applause for when we
achieve.”
After a couple years developing other companies’ edibles
menus, Dee-Cave decided to branch out on her own. Last year she founded
her own brand of edibles, Oracle Infused. Dee-Cave is still one of few
black women in Oregon’s legal cannabis industry — catering to a customer
base that is predominantly people of color.
Despite their scarcity, black people and other people of
color can offer the industry a unique perspective on cannabis’s
potential to heal or to harm in American society: Put plainly, even in
states where cannabis use is legal, people of color are still the main
targets of enforcement. Unlike many hailed in glossy magazines as
pioneers of the legal weed industry, Dee-Cave was only able to build her
career as a cannabis chef after going through the process of having
cannabis prohibition-related charges expunged from her record in
Maryland. “As a war on drugs veteran, I suffered from PTSD in dealing
with law enforcement,” she writes, adding that she won the expungement
“using my own resources and knowledge which was trivial and frustrating
at times.”
As a black chef working with cannabis, Dee-Cave’s
experience stands at the intersection of the industry’s promising future
and the legacy of prohibition that bolsters it. According to the ACLU,
black people across the country are nearly four times as likely
to be arrested for marijuana possession as their white counterparts,
despite both races using the drug at similar rates. Last year a Drug Policy Alliance report
found that in the three years after Colorado legalized recreational
cannabis in 2012, arrests for possession decreased 51 percent for white
people but only 25 percent for black people.
In Washington, which
legalized recreational cannabis that same year, black users are now
arrested at double the rate of everyone else.
Making this even more egregious, people with previous
marijuana possession charges, as Dee-Cave once had, are legally barred
from many branches of the industry. The 2018 Farm Bill
includes language banning anyone with a controlled substance felony
from participating in the newly legal hemp industry (responsible for the
explosion of CBD products in states without legal recreational
cannabis) for 10 years after conviction. Only a handful of states offer
expungement programs like the one Dee-Cave went through in Maryland.
“Unlike many,” she says, “I was granted the ability to have a second
chance at life with a clean slate
In recent years, edibles have enjoyed a conspicuous
rebranding from buttery brownies traded among burnouts to culinarily
elevated go-tos sold with a “wellness” halo. The creeping availability
of medical cannabis (legal in 23 states, plus Colorado, Washington,
Oregon, California, Nevada, Michigan, Vermont, Massachusetts, Alaska,
Maine, and Washington, D.C., where recreational cannabis is also legal)
has meant more people than ever
are turning to cannabis-infused foods, from prepackaged snacks to
full-on meals. It’s no wonder, then, that cannabis foods and cooking
have melded so easily with mainstream cooking culture. In 2016, Viceland
started airing Bong Appétit, a show about gourmet cannabis cooking. Last year, Netflix followed suit with its own cannabis cooking competition show, Cooking on High.
Anyone looking for a cannabis cookbook nice enough for the kitchen
shelf have dozens of books to choose from. And a new tier of
aspirational, luxury cannabis culture has emerged: High-end retailer
Barneys opened its own cannabis edible and accessory shop in its Beverly Hills location in March, offering items like a $950 designer bong.
In its new social legitimacy, the field of cannabis cooking is, perhaps unsurprisingly, overwhelmingly white and draped in apolitical fascination. A 2017 New Yorker profile about chef Laurie Wolf,
“The Martha Stewart of Marijuana Edibles,” focuses on the high-end
polish of her business, but makes no mention of how Wolf’s whiteness
facilitates that achievement. The real Martha Stewart, meanwhile, has
famously made brownies with cannabis enthusiast Snoop Dogg, joking all
the while about making them “green.” She recently announced
she’d consult with a Canadian cannabis company to develop human- and
pet-friendly products, cleverly playing with her straight-laced public
persona while attaching herself to a brand that was acquired for $353 million in 2015.
But we’ve never seen Stewart ask Snoop, a black man,
about how he’s likely seen members of his community arrested and
imprisoned for possessing marijuana. In her hands, it’s a novel
ingredient.
In a black person’s hands, it’s a “controlled substance.”
Cannabis prohibition has always been rooted in racism. As author Eric Schlosser recounts in his 2003 book Reefer Madness, cannabis,
unregulated and commonly used medicinally in the 19th century, was only
demonized after Mexican and West Indian immigrants and black musicians
popularized smoking it recreationally in the 1910s. By 1937, the drug
was illegal, and in 1970, Nixon administration Attorney General John
Mitchell categorized it as a Schedule I controlled substance.
Its association with black and brown people played a large part in the
racialized enforcement of marijuana laws during Ronald Reagan’s mass
incarceration-fueling drug war of the 1980s.
In the 1990s, cannabis enjoyed more positive attention as media outlets increasingly focused on its medicinal benefits. And as immigration law and policy expert Steven W. Bender explains in “The Colors of Cannabis: Race and Marijuana,”
medicinal benefits and economic opportunity became centerpieces of
state legalization campaigns. “Anecdotally, a Washington advocate for
marijuana legalization told me that racial profiling arguments won’t win
legalization campaigns and instead will alienate voters,” Bender
writes. “Rather than a desire to dismantle laws with disproportionate
impact on users of color, more evident in the campaigns for legalizing
recreational marijuana was disdain for feathering the nest of the
illicit drug cartels, widely assumed to be operatives of color.”
With recreational legalization first occurring in Alaska,
Washington, Oregon, and Colorado, states with smaller populations of
people of color, and the high amount of bootstrapping required in many
marijuana businesses, legal cannabis use took on an overwhelmingly white
face early on, he continues. The result is a newly sanctioned industry
that reinforces cultural stigma against cannabis users of color.
For Los Angeles chef Matt Stockard, fighting against the
perception of cannabis food as a means of getting intoxicated, rather
than a means of getting well, is a constant battle. Dispelling that
stigma is part of what inspired him to develop medicated items like
salt, pepper, milk, and cream. “In the black community you’re considered
uneducated if you deal with cannabis,” he says. “And until the stigma
is brought off of it, you’re going to have a lot of people who are just
going to continue [to have that stigma] because of smokers.” He hopes
that the brand of cannabis cooking oils he is developing — a legal
cannabis product under California’s strict edibles regulations — can
help legitimize medicated cooking for the masses.
Black chefs cooking with cannabis, then, are more than
just vanguards: Their work represents a reclaimed self-determinism of
medicinal cooking.
“It’s an easily accessible medication that I think every
community should take advantage of, especially the black community,“
Maryland chef Gwenelle Parks says, citing black communities’ historic
distrust of medical institutions. “We’ve been [self-medicating with
cannabis] for a long time... but if you actually need it as medicine,
there’s different ways to go about it.” For Parks, cooking with cannabis
was a natural extension of her Virgin Islander family’s herbalist
traditions.
“No matter what it is, I try to put [Caribbean flavors and
herbs] in there and make it a medicinal meal,” she says, citing lemon
balm as one ingredient she likes to use in dishes for its calming
effect.
However, growing up in Baltimore County with a forensic
scientist and a correctional officer for parents, cannabis was naturally
taboo. It wasn’t until adulthood, after Parks tried cannabis casually
at parties, that she started to learn about the racist history of its
prohibition and its potential as a medicinal herb. “I sat back and I
realized when I was doing it recreationally, I was actually medicating,”
she says.
Parks and her husband, Will, who is white, already owned
condiment company Saucier Willy when they started shopping their
cannabis-infused simple syrup to dispensaries in their area in 2017.
(Under Maryland law, cannabis foods are still illegal, while items like
tinctures and drinks are not.)
The owner of one dispensary asked the
professional chefs if they would teach a cannabis cooking class to his
patients. Since then, the two have been providing the lessons to
interested self-healers in classes across Maryland. There, by law, only
the Parkses can touch and ingest their cannabis, but that doesn’t
prevent them from imparting their knowledge along with non-medicated
samples and detailed, take-home instructions. They also provide free
recipes on the Saucier Willy website.
“For [me and Will], it’s just
imperative to bring the knowledge that you can do this yourself,” says
Parks. “You don’t have to go to the store and spend $25 for 100
milligrams of something.”
Across the country, accessibility is also a driving
concern for Seattle chef Unika Noiel. Coming from a family of soul food
chefs and restaurateurs, she had already started catering and gone to
culinary school before she beginning to experiment with cannabis-infused
foods in 2009. Inspired by a positive first edible experience, courtesy
of the burgeoning Washington medical marijuana industry (the state legalized recreational marijuana in 2012),
she began researching the health benefits of eating cannabis,
developing her own recipes and perfecting their dosages. After a few
years, Noiel developed her own product: cannabis-infused pound cake
bites she could proudly present to dispensaries and her wary family
alike. “I tell people one of the greatest days of my life was the day
that my grandmother looked at me and said, ‘You got any marijuana?’”
Noiel was proud to be able to offer her grandmother something to ease
her discomfort as she suffered from cancer. “This Southern woman, this
preacher’s wife: I never could have imagined either of us having this
conversation. It was quite life affirming.”
Still, for Noiel, the legacy of prohibition didn’t stop
at generational stigma. In summer 2017, under her company Luvn Kitchn,
she held her first Fellowship Dinner, a community event based on
Southern Sunday dinners at which she served cannabis-infused soul food.
Noiel and her dinners attracted media attention,
and she became one of few visible black entrepreneurs in Washington’s
cannabis-adjacent industry. However, Seattle’s Department of Finance
also took notice and, by the year’s end, served Noiel a notice to cease
and desist. “I signed an agreement stating that Luvn Kitchn would not
conduct any cannabis-infused Fellowship Dinners until it obtained a
cannabis business license,” she said. The only problem: As of yet, no
such license exists for chefs, and the state is currently not even
accepting new applications for retail or producer licenses.
As a result, Noiel can no longer offer dinners to the
public (though she can still offer infused dinners as a hired chef for
private events). Though she charged barely more than what the dinners
cost her, she says she lost the chance to build them into the successful
event series she imagined. What was initially her foot into
Washington’s lucrative and overwhelmingly white legal cannabis industry —
one where a cap on the number of retail store licenses issued, closed
license applications, and criminal history restrictions limit how many entrepreneurs can become growers, processors, and sellers — has since become an example of one of the ways it remains inaccessible.
“The system is currently set up for inequity to
continue,” she says. “It forced me to accept the fact that as a black
woman and entrepreneur here in Washington state, I would not be allowed
to ‘receive any sort of gain from cannabis’ — a direct quote from a city
official.” Noiel says that when people from her predominantly white
former customer base ask why she isn’t selling more products and doing
more dinners, she doesn’t hesitate to share her opinions on how race and
racism factor into who can and can’t take part in the industry.
And while U.S. systems of legalization and commercialism have often considered black people as an afterthought, chefs like Parks, Dee-Cave, Noiel, and Stockard are forging a new tradition of healing through food.
No comments:
Post a Comment