Well, if you’re anything like me, you’ve been wondering where all the new jobs are going to be coming from, once AI is perfected and robots and algorithms take over most of what we all do for work.
But new jobs emerge all the time, and one of the latest is cannabis sommelier.
This job may not be a keeper. After all, it’s just a matter of time before a robot equipped with an olfactory sensor and the right vocabulary will be able to take over. But for now, a few of those displaced by technology may be able secure gainful employment as a sommelier of a different sort.
Cannabis sommelier is only one of the new jobs that the legalization of pot is opening up.
A by no means exhaustive list would include:
…hiking guides, wedding planners, lawyers, painting teachers, doctors, yoga instructors, marketers, and masseuses (Source: Boston Globe)
Some of these I get – lawyers help you set up your business, doctors prescribe medical MJ, marketers do what marketers do. I guess a wedding planner could come up with a pot-friendly venue and special party favors.
But what do hiking guides in this niche do? Or yoga instructors? Or masseuses? Do they work under the influence, or work with those who’re stoned? Same goes for painting teachers, although here I can see where a puff or two might free a would-be artist of some inhibitions and get the creative juices limbered up.
But back to the cannabis sommelier.
At a recent dinner party in – where else? – Cambridge, John Maden did his thing for party guests. For three hours,
…he directed the guests to smoke certain types of marijuana — with piney, citrusy, or earthy undertones — that he had picked to complement the five gourmet-chef-prepared courses.
Back in the day, folks didn’t need gourmet-chef-prepared courses when they got the munchies. Why, they just went to the nearest Stop & Shop, bought a box of Sara Lee frozen brownies, and ate them frozen. Or so I’ve been told.
But back in the day, there wasn’t such great variety. Piney? Citrusy? Earthy? Mostly there was bad or good. With seeds or without. I am, of course, exaggerating. In addition to bad weed and good weed, there was also Acapulco Gold…And there were certainly pot snobs.
Still, it seems as if pot has branched out since then. And the Cambridge palate has apparently gotten a lot more sophisticated along the way, too. Or not:
“We’re here to really enjoy some bud,” [Maden] said.
The dinner avec bud experience costs $165 per person. Which actually seems pretty reasonable. That is, if you want to toke up with a different variant of bud for each course. I’d probably have fallen asleep by the time the “first course, a watermelon-and-habanero red snapper crudo, with an earthy marijuana strain called “Black Cherry.” was finishing up.
Which – forget about the herb – would mean I’d have missed out on what sounded like some pretty good eats.
Maden is out to dispel the hippie image of pot smokers:
“The Cheech and Chong stereotype of the average cannabis consumer is not accurate in 2019,” Maden said. “But it’s still the perception that a lot of people have in Boston.”
Maden has an interesting resume that doesn’t seem Cheech and Chongish at all. It includes an MPA from Rutgers, a stint in the Peace Corps, and experience in marketing and product management. (Boston being Boston, I found on LinkedIn that we have a connection in common.)
He pairs the marijuana samples with the food not just on taste, “but also for the effect of the cannabis.”
He wanted the guests to experience a bell curve of a high, starting out slow with a strain of pot that would relax them and make them hungrier, then slowly increasing the energy level and headiness, before returning to the lower-vibe feeling.
So maybe I wouldn’t fall asleep with my nose in the snapper crudo.
The dinners, by the way, are run by Dinners at Mary’s, which is run by a woman named Sam Kanter. (Boston being Boston, I have two connections to here.)
Connections aside, I have to admit I’m a bit Canna Curious. Not to mention hungry.
Dinner at Mary’s to celebrate my 70th?
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