Critic’s Notebook
The stoner celebration is becoming a national food holiday, thanks in part to marketing initiatives from Jimmy John’s, KFC, Wingstop and others.
This weekend, Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas across the country, temporarily renamed Alamo Dankhouse, are mixing Chex cereal, cheese balls and ranch seasoning with buttered popcorn. The snack is the first of three courses in a special menu that will be served during screenings of stoner classics like “Inherent Vice” and “The Beach Bum.”
Ike’s Love & Sandwiches, a chain with locations stretching from San Francisco to Houston, will be selling a sandwich called the THC for $14.20 this month and next. (Rewards members get a $4.20 discount.)
The celebration of weed observed each year on April 20 is not a legal or a religious holiday. But with restaurants across the country offering special meals this weekend inspired by cannabis culture generally and the number 420 specifically, April 20 is looking more and more like a national food holiday.
Some food holidays are ordained from above, like Passover and Thanksgiving, both of which culminate in a big meal fraught with meaning. Others, like Halloween and Valentine’s Day, have no official status but have been associated with eating for so long that they inspire recipes and tasting menus. Super Bowl Sunday was only a night of sports programming for years before it gradually began to be associated with chicken wings, chili and corn chips.
One side effect of cannabis use is slower reaction time. So maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that April 20 bopped around in the culture for decades before picking up a tradition of eating and drinking. It began as a private code shared by high school stoners in the early 1970s, spread to Deadheads and readers of High Times magazine in the ’90s, and was taken up at music festivals, outdoor film screenings and other places where attendants would light up.
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