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Same Soil, Same Hands: The Hidden History of Cannabis and the Organic Food Movement · Bite Me The Show About Edibles

• 1:18
  Margaret: Alright, friends, picture a garden in the hills of Northern California.
• 1:22
  Margaret: Sometime in the early 1970s.
• 1:25
  Margaret: Rows of tomatoes, beans climbing a fence made of scrap wood, a few chickens getting into things they shouldn't, and tucked in amongst the vegetables, not hidden behind a locked gate, not treated as some separate illicit thing.
• 1:39
  Margaret: Cannabis.
• 1:40
  Margaret: Same soil, same watering can, same person tending both.
• 1:45
  Margaret: My own included.
• 1:53
  Margaret: What happens when you take a love of food, a passion for culture, and a deep knowledge of cannabis, and you toss them all into one bowl?
• 2:00
  Margaret: You get bite me.
• 2:01
  Margaret: The podcast that explores the intersection of food, culture, and cannabis and helps cooks make great edibles at home.
• 2:07
  Margaret: I'm your host, Margaret, a certified ganger and a TCI certified cannabis educator, and I believe your kitchen is the best dispensary that you'll ever have.
• 2:15
  Margaret: This is episode 369, and today I want to take you back to a moment when the person growing your dinner and the person growing your weed were very often the same person, working from the same set of beliefs.
• 2:29
  Margaret: Welcome, friends.
• 2:31
  Margaret: Let's get into it today.
• 2:33
  Margaret: Now, before we get into today's episode, I just want to quit take a quick minute and say thank you for being here.
• 2:39
  Margaret: If this is your first time, I appreciate it.
• 2:42
  Margaret: I would love to hear how you discovered the show.
• 2:44
  Margaret: And if you've been a longtime listener, thank you so much.
• 2:47
  Margaret: I appreciate you for being here because this show wouldn't exist without you, my dear listeners.
• 3:00
  Speaker: So before we get into the cannabis specifically today, I want to set the table, and yes, that pun was absolutely intended.
• 3:08
  Speaker: In 1962, a biologist named Rachel Carson published a book called Silent Spring.
• 3:15
  Speaker: It documented what pesticides like DDT were doing to the environment, and it landed on a country that had spent the previous couple of decades falling in love with industrial farming, chemical fertilizers, chemical pesticides, bigger yields, less labor.
• 3:31
  Speaker: Carson's book didn't kill that system, but it cracked something open.
• 3:36
  Speaker: People who had never once thought about how their food got to their plate started asking questions.
• 3:42
  Speaker: And a lot of those people were young.
• 3:44
  Speaker: The question, how did this actually get grown and who decided this was the way to grow it is the seed of the organic food movement as we know it.
• 3:55
  Speaker: It wasn't brand new.
• 3:57
  Speaker: A publisher named J.
• 3:59
  Speaker: Iro Dale had been preaching organic methods since the 1940s, mostly to farmers who thought he was crazy.
• 4:07
  Speaker: But it's the late 60s and early 70s where organic stops being a fringe hobby and starts being a movement where people are actually attached to it.
• 4:17
  Speaker: And a huge number of those people did something pretty dramatic.
• 4:20
  Speaker: They left the cities.
• 4:22
  Speaker: Historians call it the back to the land movement.
• 4:26
  Speaker: And between the mid-60s and mid-70s, thousands of young Americans packed up and moved to rural land to try growing their own food on their own terms, away from a system they'd stopped trusting.
• 4:38
  Speaker: This is what I think we need to think about for a second.
• 4:42
  Speaker: This wasn't a nostalgia trip.
• 4:45
  Speaker: It wasn't people romanticizing farm life because it looked nice in a magazine.
• 4:51
  Speaker: It was a political position, distrust of the industrial food system, distrust of the chemical companies, a belief that if you wanted to actually control what went into your body, you had to control the growing yourself.
• 5:03
  Speaker: Health food stores started popping up in college towns.
• 5:06
  Speaker: So did food co-ops, the kind where you bring your own jar and scoop your own grains out of a bulk bin, no packaging, no middleman, no brand telling you what's healthy.
• 5:17
  Speaker: I'm speaking mostly to the American side of this history right now because that's where the documentation is strongest and where this particular story is rooted.
• 5:26
  Speaker: If you're listening from Canada or elsewhere, some of this will rhyme with your own local food history, but the specific timeline I'm walking through here, Silent Spring, the back to the land migration, the early organic co-ops, that's a US story first.
• 5:41
  Speaker: So, distrust of industrial systems, a belief that growing it yourself is an act of control and care.
• 5:47
  Speaker: Does any of that sound familiar to anybody who has ever grown their own cannabis?
• 5:52
  Speaker: Seems as though many things haven't changed all that much, have they?
• 5:56
  Speaker: Here's where it gets interesting.
• 5:58
  Speaker: Those same back to the landers who are moving out to grow organic tomatoes were, in a huge number of cases, the same people growing cannabis.
• 6:06
  Speaker: The clearest example of this is a region you've probably heard me mention before if you've been around the show for a while.
• 6:13
  Speaker: Northern California, Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity counties.
• 6:18
  Speaker: What eventually got nicknamed the Emerald Triangle.
• 6:21
  Speaker: It's the late 60s.
• 6:22
  Speaker: 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.
• 6:31
  Speaker: They wanted to grow their own food.
• 6:32
  Speaker: 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.
• 6:43
  Speaker: It wasn't a separate operation with a fence around it and a different set of values attached.
• 6:49
  Speaker: It was the same homestead.
• 6:50
  Speaker: The same person who was composting for their vegetable beds was composting for their cannabis plant.
• 6:56
  Speaker: 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.
• 7:07
  Speaker: Grow it yourself.
• 7:09
  Speaker: Know exactly what went into it.
• 7:12
  Speaker: That was the whole ethos.
• 7:13
  Speaker: And it didn't distinguish between what ended up on your dinner plate and what ended up in your pipe.
• 7:18
  Speaker: And I think we need to be honest about something here because I think it matters.
• 7:22
  Speaker: A lot of those communities eventually leaned on cannabis as an actual income source, not just a personal use crop.
• 7:28
  Speaker: 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.
• 7:42
  Speaker: So this isn't a purely idealistic story where nobody thought about money.
• 7:46
  Speaker: 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.
• 7:57
  Speaker: I think that complexity is worth naming instead of just smoothing over.
• 8:01
  Speaker: 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.
• 8:09
  Speaker: Control what goes into your body.
• 8:11
  Speaker: Don't outsource that trust to a system you don't believe in.
• 8:16
  Speaker: Now let's bring this back to the kitchen because that's what this show is all about, of course.
• 8:22
  Speaker: If you go back to listen to episode 358, you'll remember we talked about the Alice B.
• 8:27
  Speaker: 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.
• 8:37
  Speaker: 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.
• 8:44
  Speaker: Information passed hand to hand outside of any official channel.
• 8:49
  Speaker: Organic growing knowledge in the 70s wasn't coming from a government pamphlet.
• 8:53
  Speaker: It was coming from newsletters typed up and mimeographed by people at the School of Living or at communities like Twin Oaks in Virginia.
• 9:02
  Speaker: It was coming from Rodales Magazine, which most of the agricultural establishment considered a joke.
• 9:08
  Speaker: 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.
• 9:17
  Speaker: Cannabis knowledge traveled exactly the same way for the exact same reason.
• 9:22
  Speaker: 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.
• 9:32
  Speaker: 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.
• 9:46
  Speaker: 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.
• 9:57
  Speaker: It wasn't separate.
• 9:58
  Speaker: 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.
• 10:07
  Speaker: I'll say the honest thing here, too, because I try not to romanticize this stuff more than the facts support.
• 10:13
  Speaker: 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.
• 10:26
  Speaker: And I think that's worth knowing, not to dismiss the movement, but because it's part of the real picture.
• 10:31
  Speaker: And I'd rather give you the real picture than a clean story that leaves out some of the uncomfortable parts.
• 10:36
  Speaker: So what happened to all of this?
• 10:40
  Speaker: Both of these movements eventually did the same thing.
• 10:42
  Speaker: They went mainstream and mainstream changed them.
• 10:45
  Speaker: 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.
• 10:59
  Speaker: That got formalized with the 1990 Organic Food Production Act and the USDA USDA organic seal that came after it.
• 11:08
  Speaker: Suddenly, organic wasn't a philosophy anymore, it was a regulatory category.
• 11:12
  Speaker: A can can be bought, a box can be checked, a product on a shelf next to the conventional version at a markup.
• 11:19
  Speaker: Cannabis is walking that same road right now, just a few decades behind.
• 11:24
  Speaker: 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.
• 11:43
  Speaker: I'm not here to tell you that it's all bad.
• 11:45
  Speaker: Regulation brought real consistency and safety benefits to both industries.
• 11:50
  Speaker: But I think it's worth naming attention honestly instead of pretending that it doesn't exist.
• 11:55
  Speaker: 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.
• 12:04
  Speaker: The organic movement's founders weren't trying to build a premium shelf tag.
• 12:09
  Speaker: They were trying to opt out of a system entirely.
• 12:11
  Speaker: Cannabis growers in those Northern California hills weren't trying to build a billion-dollar industry where they started.
• 12:17
  Speaker: They were trying to grow something themselves because they didn't trust anyone else to grow it for them.
• 12:22
  Speaker: 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.
• 12:33
  Speaker: You don't need the USDA seal or the government dispensary to reclaim a little piece of that original idea.
• 12:40
  Speaker: 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.
• 12:49
  Speaker: 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.
• 12:58
  Speaker: It totally makes sense.
• 12:59
  Speaker: It was a thrill to grow vegetables this year.
• 13:01
  Speaker: Not all of it was successful.
• 13:03
  Speaker: I definitely made some mistakes and had some learnings that makes me want to try again next year.
• 13:08
  Speaker: 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.
• 13:23
  Speaker: But the idea that I know the inputs.
• 13:28
  Speaker: 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.
• 13:48
  Speaker: 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.
• 14:02
  Speaker: A lot of my cannabis is going to end up as edibles, and there will be a lot of topicals made as well.
• 14:09
  Speaker: So here's what I want you to leave with today.
• 14:11
  Speaker: Cannabis was never its own separate little story, off in a corner by itself.
• 14:15
  Speaker: It grew up in the same soil, tended by the same hands as the entire American organic food movement.
• 14:21
  Speaker: 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.
• 14:32
  Speaker: 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.
• 14:44
  Speaker: And it's not just a personal preference.
• 14:46
  Speaker: You're standing in a much longer line than you might have realized.
• 14:50
  Speaker: And if this one landed for you, go back and listen to the episode on Alice B.
• 14:53
  Speaker: Tokles' cookbook.
• 14:54
  Speaker: They're a good pair.
• 14:56
  Speaker: If you haven't listened to that one already, of course.
• 14:58
  Speaker: 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.
• 15:06
  Speaker: Come talk history, trade techniques, growing techniques, and tell me what you're growing this season.
• 15:11
  Speaker: Thank you for spending this time with me today.
• 15:14
  Speaker: I really appreciate you.
• 15:15
  Speaker: Until next week, my friends, I am your host, Margaret.
• 15:19
  Speaker: Stay curious and stay high.