Blog-IT-o ergo sum

	1/10/2006

Buy hemp seed in Greensboro - legally?

Some background: It's hard to believe my wife of 19 years would have been able to keep this secret from me so long. Here's how I found out...

Our family has been enjoying a hilarious Japanese anime show Yakitate Japan (Fresh baked Japan). It is the story of how a young Japanese boy with amazing "solar hands" is going to create for the world the first ever Japan Bread. (The French and Italians have theirs but not the Japanese).

In our latest episode, having defeated France in the semifinals of the Monaco World Baking Tournament, Team Japan now faces Team USA in the the championship round. (You gotta love the social insights of Japanese anime writers). To take home the gold for Japan, solar hands boy must defeat the captain of Team USA mano-a-mano in a bakeoff.

Not an easy task. The US captain has just pulled out of the oven the quintessentially American born and bred bread: the New York Bagel. This championship contending bagel has been made with an obscure but prized grade of Japanese rice. The American baker has won his appeal to the judges to fight the Japanese with their own native rice on the grounds that the appearance of the rice in his entry is only as an ingredient in the 100% American conceived and American processed product known as Rice Dream Milk.

It looks bleak for the Japanese. But wait, our solar hands hero has just pulled his entry out of the oven. It looks an awful lot like a baked donut. Now he is sprinkling some mysterious powder on it as he prepares to drop it into the frying oil. Japanese partisans are regaining their confidence. We are informed that the sparkling powder settling onto the worthy entry is asanomi - one of the seven taste elixirs present in the wildly used Japanese seasoning shichimi to garashi.

Across my years of blissful marriage I have myself often enjoyed sprinkling shichimi to garashi onto udon, yakisoba and other Japanese dishes for that extra taste explosion. Imagine my surprise then in seeing the subtitle at the bottom of the anime screen informing me that the asanomi component of this seasoning is "marijuana seed."

My immediate thought was that this had to be part of the anime humor or the personal whimsy of the freelancers providing the subtitles. But, no my wife tells me, asanomi, hemp seed, has a long tradition in Japanese cuisine and is freely available for purchase in their happy chain of islands. With a license from the local authorities, Japanese farmers like their counterparts in Canada are indeed free to grow and harvest hemp for marketing its derivatives, including selling the hemp seed itself. (Why should I be surprised by a society in which you can buy beer and sake out of street corner vending machines?)

While in many cases shichimi to garashi contains crushed or ground hemp seed, some brands do apparently include the entire seed. We are now in the process of confirming if this is the case for the imported shichimi to garashi that you can buy in the oriental food markets of Greensboro. With all the existing and still growing government laws concerning what we are allowed to put into our bodies, I would be shocked if this one got by the FDA and DEA. But, perhaps the inscrutable Japanese have pulled yet another one here over our regulators.

12:14:35 PM

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