Hemp, Hemp, Hooray

SANTA ROSA MAN SELLS FOOD DERIVED FROM THE PLANT

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.

HempHempNut 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.