Food history: How cooked cannabis and cannabis-infused dishes became popular around the world

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...

Read more