Hemp Day

While most people are familiar with the 4/20 holiday less people are familiar with the 4/21 Hemp Day Holiday. Hemp is a superfood that comes in many edible forms –  seeds, hemp hearts, oil, butter, protein powder, milk and flour. There’s now hemp beer, hemp granola and a plethora of other healthy (and not so healthy) hemp snacks on the market these days. Yet hemp has a lot of other practical uses in many other industries. The same plot of hemp that you can make a variety of foods from can also be used to make lotions and soaps; the fibers can be used for textiles, insulation, bio-composites, rope; and the dust can even be used as a byproduct to soak up oil spills or compressed into a pellet and sold to coal companies as an energy source for carbon offsets. Additional products that can be made from hemp include: paper, carpeting, paints, ethanol/biofuel, diesel fuel, animal bedding and animal feed, mulch, flour, solvents and lubricants. Why do I know or care about all this hempy goodness? My roommate from grad school is a hemp-obsessed Fulbright Scholar that know more about hemp than anyone else I’ve ever met! So for hemp day we used some of these ingredients to make some tasty hemp food, all while enjoying hemp beer!

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