In 1978, just as the trend for cooking cannabis started gaining more traction, an article appeared in High Times titled “Eat It!” The author, JF Burke, acknowledged that the concept hadn’t taken off in the Americas yet, but that “hundreds of millions of Hindus and Moslems eat grass as an item of diet”. Burke also discussed “an Arabian Nights experience that lasted three days” after eating some hashish candy, but the article presented cannabis as a healthy food option that could be eaten raw or cooked. Soups, stew, cereal, salad, pastries, brownies and majoun were mentioned too, but there wasn’t much on how to unlock the plant’s potential as a cooking agent. Instead, the general practice of tossing some ground-up plant material into a recipe is about as far as Burke went. He did, however, provide important insight into one aspect of how to improve the cooking process by mentioning that the plant’s psychoactive properties are not “water-soluble and won’t dissolve in most preparations”.

The need for a keener understanding of cannabis chemistry became more apparent as more people joined the cooking craze. Infusions such as soaking the inflorescences in olive oil at room temperature for a few weeks or sautéing cannabis in butter are not that difficult to prepare, and extracting cannabinoids with solvents had a long history by then. Nevertheless, these methods limited cooking options to the use of lipids and alcohol. Nano-emulsification eliminated this issue, and the creation of concentrated, water-soluble cannabis powders and liquids significantly reshaped the cooking process. Methods such as sous vide cooking (low-temperature, long-time cooking) and the isolation of terpene concentrates to enhance flavour capacities, elevate the senses and improve dish pairings also brought significant advancements. All this, combined with more awareness of the roles that decarboxylation and heat play in activating cannabinoids – as well as the taste value that comes from leaching the plant ingredient in water overnight before using it – significantly improved the consumer experience behind eating cooked cannabis.

By the 2010s a cannabis cooking revolution was underway. Amsterdam’s famous Cannabis Cup expanded into more cities, and use of the plant stretched far beyond the underground economies of the countercultural era. Cannabis dining clubs and elegant social gatherings such as la’s Cannabis Supper Club started surfacing, with specialised chefs who experimented with all sorts of culinary combinations in the hopes of exciting the palates of those interested in exploring the plant’s culinary potential. Cookbooks and cannabis guides continued flooding the market, and High Times expanded its culinary boundaries by introducing a popular column titled “Psychedelic Kitchen”. The march towards legitimacy and cultural acceptability is by no means complete or even fully secured today, but the expansion of cannabis consumption into these broader dimensions of high society has tipped the scales in favour of it eventually becoming so.

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The opulence that came with these developments, however, stands in stark contrast to the privation that still exists for racial minorities, those struggling with ptsd or other mentalhealth illnesses and economically disadvantaged people whose lives have been derailed by their consumption practices. In 2016, for example, thousands of people were still being arrested across the United States for merely possessing a preparation of the plant, yet the production company Viceland debuted a reality television series called Bong Appétit that depicted extravagant cannabis dinner parties taking place in the same country. The show aired for three seasons and contained dozens of episodes portraying carefree consumers enjoying the fine-dining experience of full-course meals at a home in Los Angeles, where everything they ate was infused with some part of the plant. Each episode began with the host showing off their massive cupboard full of enough cannabis products to send someone to prison for decades just a few states over in places like Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska and Wyoming.

A cookbook based on the show came out in 2018, in which the authors addressed this contrast by pointing out – rather bluntly – how “it’s incredibly fucked up that there are millions of people in prison for enjoying the kind of recreational activity you’re about to read an entire book on.” They also wanted their audience to “please know we’re sorry – and … we’re hoping that changes soon.” In the meantime, however, the proverbial show must go on, and indeed it did; quite literally in the real show, in fact, which the book described as a “cutting-edge” cannabis television series that “redefines luxury in many respects”. The combinations of terpenes and cannabinoids that the chefs experimented with reflect something similar to what Michael Pollan defined over two decades earlier as the rise of a “connoisseurship of cannabis – not just of its taste or aroma, but of the specific psychological texture of its high”. He wrote that comment in reference to the sea change in quality that cannabis endured back in the 1990s, but it just as easily applies to the cultural scene of cooking with the plant today.

Of course, where there’s connoisseurship, commercialisation often follows. Cannabis has been notoriously difficult to commercialise because of its botanical diversity and oscillating legal status, but entrepreneurially driven venture capitalists have been making strides. Some would call them setbacks; however, for they see commercialisation as a distraction from the plant’s natural medicine, exploiting vulnerable people for profit, prioritising quantity over quality and compromising the ability of craft cultivators to grow an extremely versatile, multifaceted and highly useful plant on their own.

Excerpted with permission from Cannabis: A Global History, Bradley J Borougerdi, Pan Macmillan India.