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.
Now that more than half the states in the United States allow cannabis for medical use and 24 have legalized it for sheer fun, food is an increasingly prominent aspect of April 20. For the past several years, snack makers and restaurants have been riding in the back of the 4/20 bus, communicating in winks and smirks. This year, the businesses taking part are bigger, and their pitches are more overt.
Many of the promotions on websites and social media accounts make heavy use of weed wordplay that would make your high school principal wince. On Saturday, in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Venice Beach, KFC is staging a pop-up “dispensary” that will take the chain’s latest product, Saucy Nuggets, “to a ‘higher’ level,” according to a KFC press release.
At participating Jimmy John’s locations, online customers will be able to order a Deliciously Dope Dime Bag, containing a sandwich made from “smoked ham, jalapeño ranch, crispy jalapeños and, of course, extra herbs.”
And yet, as this celebration of cannabis nears the end of its long, strange trip from the high school parking lot to the boardrooms of global brands, the less likely you are to find cannabis at the observances.
A glance at Jimmy John’s website confirms that the herbs in the Deliciously Dope Dime Bag are oregano and basil. The THC in that sandwich from Ike’s stands for turkey, honey and Cheetos. Wingstop, which itself is promoting wings with “a new strain of THC,” claims the initials mean The Hot Chili. To eliminate doubt, a press release explains that Wingstop’s THC contains “no cannabis, THC or cannabis derivatives.”
TikTok influencers helping KFC spread the word about its dispensary are careful to point out that, as one of them put it, “real Mary Jane will not be at the event.”
You might ask whether people who throw a 4/20 event without “real Mary Jane” have simply lost the plot or are, in fact, trying to rewrite the story to serve their own purposes. It’s a question that could also be put to the law enforcement officers of one town in Pennsylvania, which has not yet legalized recreational use of cannabis. Last April 20, the police in New Cumberland offered a one-day-only reward to any locals willing to turn in their dealer: a family-size bag of Doritos.
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