Hemp, Hemp, Hooray

San Francisco Chronicle

Santa Rosa Man Sells Food Derived from the Plant

Friday, February 23, 2001

Say the words “hemp” and “food” in the same sentence, and most people think either of midnight munchies or of Alice B. Toklas’ famous brownie recipe.But in fact there’s a whole world of hemp food out there, all derived from the seeds of industrial-grade marijuana and none of it psychoactive, and Santa Rosa-based HempNut Inc. is leading the charge in providing it.Within the next month, HempNut’s new blue corn chips, with 10 percent hemp seeds, will hit the stands. And in two or three months, HempNut will introduce the first hemp seed-oil margarine: vegan, organic, kosher, nonhydrogenated and nutritious — everything, in short, that most margarines are not.

HempNut owner Richard Rose came up with the margarine recipe, just as he developed the rest of the HempNut line, which includes cookies, energy bars, hemp-seed butter, HempNut cheese alternative and the inevitably punned HempehBurger.

“I really enjoy product development, so I do it a lot and always have,” Rose says with a shrug.

The 44-year-old began experimenting in 1980 with his first health-food venture, BrightSong Tofu. Before he and then-wife Sharon Rose moved BrightSong from Mendocino County to Petaluma and shut down tofu production to focus on TofuRella in 1986, Rose had developed 60 or 70 tofu products. But it was TofuRella, a soy cheese analog, that propelled the company to the Top 500 list of Inc. 500 in 1992. Out of a spare bedroom, the Roses managed to grow the company by more than 18 times its initial output over five years.

Rella’s success enabled Rose, a longtime hemp activist and vegan, to pursue the development of hemp-seed foods, to formally incorporate HempNut in 1997 and to get HempNut’s administrative office out of the bedroom and into a Smurf- blue Victorian on the edge of town. Success is no sure thing when it comes to hemp, though, which is why Rose split HempNut from Rella a few years ago.

“It made sense to put a firewall between the two,” says Rose. “But most of the controversy has been pro forma. Retailers and distributors are somewhat reticent to bring it in because they’re afraid. Inevitably, they bring it in and there’s no problem. The fear of the problem is the problem.”

The backlash that he and other hemp-food promoters worried about from shoppers hasn’t materialized.

“It’s been almost like an anti-backlash,” says Rose. “You have to remember that something like two-thirds of the adults in this country have used medicinal cannabis at some point in their lives. They think fondly of those days,” he says with a laugh. “So people are predisposed to want to try it and find out more about it.”

Information seekers can check out the HempNut Web site (www.thehempnut.com) and the HempNut cookbook, a hooray-for-hemp extravaganza of recipes, historical background and nutritional information. Scientific studies back up Rose’s claim that hemp seed has a higher protein content than any other, animal or vegetable, except soybeans, and its fatty-acid levels are higher than any source except egg whites. And the hulling process, for which HempNut has a patent pending, makes the hemp seed both more palatable and less, well, problematic. Unhulled hemp seed can be tainted with hemp resin, which contains traces of the intoxicant THC, even though industrial hemp has far less THC than your run-of-the-mill Maui Wowie. Remove the hull, and the THC is gone.

“You couldn’t flunk a drug test if you ate a ton of our products,” Rose says proudly.

Drug testing and general attitudes about drugs remain issues for HempNut and other producers. “It’s not always easy to get our products into stores,” admits Rose. “There are chains and independent health-food stores that won’t touch it with a 10-foot pole, even in this county.”

Rose is particularly indignant about the response of one of the nation’s largest natural-food chains. “(They) said we were promoting marijuana. At the same time, they’re selling snack chips with kava kava in them, with Saint- John’s-wort. They’re selling snack chips with drugs in them, but HempNut cheese alternative is somehow promoting marijuana.”

Rose is fairly open about his own stance on marijuana use, both industrial and “medicinal.” A photo that accompanied his interview with High Times magazine showed him holding a suspiciously fat cigarette. And among the strings of conference badges hanging from his wall are tags from the Cannabis Cup, the international pot party that High Times hosts in Amsterdam every year.

“I’m no elitist,” he says, smiling.

Rose still faces criticism from some hemp activists for not leveraging his products’ hemp origin more to support the larger issue of legalizing marijuana.

But he shrugs it off as having nothing to do with his hemp cheese or corn chips.

“I do want to see justice for this plant, whether it be the industrial hemp side or the medical end,” says Rose. “But I’m able to separate that from the professional side. I take off my activist hat and put on my food-professional hat. We’re talking food here, we’re not talking about smoking pot. Those are two different issues.

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-Hyping Hemp HempNut products are available at many stores in Marin, Sonoma and Napa counties, including Oliver’s, Fiesta Market, Community Market and Wild Oats. Visit the Web site at www.thehempnut.com, or call (877) 436-7688.

This article appeared on page NB – 11 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Move to Legalize Hemp Grows in Heartland

from the February 13, 2001 edition

Craig Savoye Special to The Christian Science Monitor

GODFREY, ILL.—

Steve Kohller looks out over the winter stubble on his 1,000-acre farm on the Illinois prairie. Several years of poverty prices for corn and soybeans have him dreaming of a new crop, one that would grow as tall as 14 feet and, he says, might someday rival soybeans in terms of cultivated acres throughout the Midwest.

“It’s not a savior,” he says, wearing only a thin denim jacket against the bitter February cold. “But it may be the answer we’ve been looking for.”

The crop he’s talking about is hemp, whose close ties to marijuana have long drawn a stern gaze from authorities. But in farm country, where something close to a depression reigns, the struggle to legitimize industrial hemp is serious business.

Some 27 states have either passed laws favoring hemp or are considering such legislation, according to the North American Industrial Hemp Council (NAIHC). Hemp production is illegal by federal statute, so states generally call on Washington to alter its policy or set up research plots, which are required to be fenced and guarded.

Here in Illinois, legislation that would allow hemp research at the University of Illinois has passed both the state House and Senate and is currently sitting on the governor’s desk, awaiting action.

“You aren’t going to solve the corn-, soybean-, and wheat-price problems so long as we’re producing far beyond our needs and the needs of the world,” says Bud Sholts, chairman of NAIHC. “What this country deeply needs – in terms of agricultural development and price stabilization – is an alternative crop of significant acreage that works well in the rotation, which industrial hemp does.”

Hemp proponents call it a miracle crop. Its fiber can be blended together to create a fiberglasslike material lighter and stronger than steel, which can be used to make a variety of products, including cars. Hemp can also be used in textiles, building materials, carpeting, even circuit boards.

As a replacement for petroleum-based products, hemp would lessen dependence on foreign oil and is a renewable resource. It is also biodegradable. Hemp car bodies could be shredded and dumped in landfills. More than 30 countries have legalized hemp growing, including Germany, Canada, England, Australia, and France

But in this country, hemp can’t shake its shady reputation. Although both sides in the debate acknowledge it’s impossible for someone to get high on hemp even if he or she smokes a boatload of it, suspicion lingers.

Drug Enforcement Agency spokeswoman Rogene Waite said a 1998 statement on industrial hemp that equates it with marijuana still represents the agency’s policy on the matter, but added the DEA is “currently in the process of reviewing some of the security and other issues surrounding the regulation of industrial hemp.”

Robert Weiner, a spokesman for the White House drug policy office, cites a litany of complaints about hemp. “From a plane, it’s very difficult to distinguish between marijuana and hemp, so the enforcement side of this would be extraordinarily difficult.”

But Paul Mahlberg, a professor of cell biology at Indiana University in Bloomington, says law enforcement in Europe has no trouble telling the two apart. He says hemp grows eight to 14 feet high, is unbranched, and is planted a few inches apart, like a

cornfield. Marijuana plants are typically three to four feet high, branch out like bushes, and need to be planted four feet apart.

Moreover, Professor Mahlberg maintains that planting the two species together would be ill-conceived: When hemp cross-pollinates with marijuana, it cuts the drug’s potency in half, making it useless for illicit purposes.

But White House officials also question hemp’s value to farmers. “Hemp is not necessarily economically viable,” says Mr. Weiner, citing an Agriculture Department report that says US markets for hemp products in 1999 could have been produced on less than 5,000 acres of land.

Jeff Gain, former chair of the USDA’s Alternative Agriculture Research and Commercialization Corp., scoffs at the comment.

“Of course, there’s no market if they won’t let us grow the stuff,” he says. “We’ve told the DEA and the others: Go to Detroit and talk to them, and they’ll tell you how important they believe these kinds of fibers are to the future of the automobile industry. It’s no secret.”

Hemp proponents contend that widespread public misunderstanding about hemp has created an atmosphere in Washington in which potential supporters are silenced out of fear they’ll be labeled “soft on drugs,” a political kiss of death. Mr. Gain says the same is true of corporations that would benefit from hemp products.

But things may be changing. Mr. Kohller and 37 other farmers here in Illinois have pooled their resources and become minor investors in a hemp-processing plant in Canada, to learn about manufacturing techniques. Their ultimate goal is to build a plant locally, at a cost of as much as $5 million, as soon as hemp is legal again in the US.

And some say that day may not be far off. Gain says sources tell him the draft DEA regulations now circulating in Washington are sympathetic to hemp growers. “I’m very optimistic that some time in the next year or so hemp will be legalized on the federal level,” he says. “I truly believe that this crop will rival the soybean industry in about 15 to 20 years.”

(c) Copyright 2001. The Christian Science Publishing Society