The Future Of “High Dining”

Pot pesto, hemp-smoked soft cheese, craft cocktails, pizza with marijuananara sauce, weed flour and even Hashish Fudge. Yes, we take a look at the future of “high dining” and the talented chefs leaving their jobs at esteemed restaurants to produce cutting-edge cannabis concoctions…

- Sal Plummer

The stereotypical stoner: some 30-yearold with a patchy beard, still living with their parents, blankly watching TV in a sea of crumbs and crisps bags and the remnants of last night’s McDonald’s run. Munchies are the ultimate stoner signifier, the punchline of every stoner movie. It makes sense. When you’re high, food is really tasty. And dipping your chips in your McFlurry is an exceptionally good idea as I discovered on my last late-night Macca’s run — trust me, try it. But times are a changing and stereotypes are boring.

With cannabis legalisation continuing to sweep across the world, and the U.S. in particular, we’re seeing the early stages of something really interesting — an emerging cannabis culinary culture. As weed entrepreneurs and luminaries come out of the woodwork and laws around food and cannabis consumption become more lenient, a landscape of social cannabis bars and restaurants is looming on the horizon. Far from the junk food of stoner stereotype’s past, this new era of high dining is actually haute cuisine. Fine dining chefs are leading the charges towards a world where the inextricable link between food and weed is taken seriously.

That link goes as far back as us humans do. Since cannabis debuted in modern taxonomic literature, in 1753, botanists and historians have rigorously debated its origins, evolution and taxonomy. Here’s what we know: originating somewhere in Asia during the early to middle Jurassic period in an arid upland habitat, cannabis was eventually spread across the world by early humans who used it for food, material, medicine, spiritual exploration and a good time.