“All human beings are practicing historians. We live our lives; we tell our stories. It is as natural as breathing.”
— Gerda Lerner
Food as activism? You’d better believe it.
One needn’t care a solitary jot about psychoactive drugs like marijuana (it isn’t this beer-centric correspondent’s cup of hallucinogenic-infused tea, you know) to be fascinated by the history of its use, and by extension, those who have championed its cause.
As, for instance, Mary Jane Rathbun (1922 – 1999), the woman who came to be known and praised as Brownie Mary. Born in Chicago and raised in Minneapolis, Rathbun moved to San Francisco during World War II.
She already had displayed a predilection for activism.
At the age of 13, she was involved in an altercation with a nun who tried to cane her, but Rathbun fought back … as a teenager, she moved out of her home and found a job as a waitress; she worked as a waitress for most of her adult life. Social activism appealed to her from a young age; she traveled from Chicago to Wisconsin to campaign for the right of miners to form unions. In the late 1940s, she worked as an activist promoting abortion rights for women in Minneapolis.
As early as the 1970s, Rathbun was baking the goods in the city by the bay, a locale integral to her story. After all, where else but San Francisco?
Indianapolis or Dallas? The mind boggles at the mere thought.
In the early ’70s, she started selling brownies augmented with marijuana to make extra money. Though Rathbun was an early adopter of the edible, chocolate and marijuana have a long history together, going back to the notorious “hashish fudge” of writer Alice B. Toklas. But Rathbun took her brownie baking public, advertising for customers with printed flyers. Eventually she attracted law enforcement’s notice.
One thing led to another, with Rathbun eventually greeting her destiny at a pivotal moment in history.
The same year that the CDC first used the term AIDS, Rathbun was arrested for bringing brownies to a cancer patient. She’d become a regular volunteer at San Francisco General Hospital, and she noticed that her treats had a mysterious effect. For AIDS and cancer patients wracked by nausea, her brownies could ease discomfort and induce hunger, well-known attributes of marijuana. She began baking pot brownies by the score in 1984—at her peak, one fellow cannabis activist estimated she...Read more
