13 May Just desserts: The Cookies and Cakes family genealogy
Why do people wait two hours in line to spend $70 on an eighth-ounce of weed—in the middle of a pandemic?
Easy: the Cookies strain of cannabis transcends mere genetics—it’s a lifestyle.
On November 4, cannabis brand Cookies’ new Apples and Bananas release drew several hundred young, heavy-THC smokers to Berners on Haight in San Francisco. In less than 90 minutes, guys in crisp, white sneakers and basketball shorts bought up all the pricey, designer weed.Browse the delicious Cookies and Cakes strain family
They Instagrammed the chic bags of chunky, fragrant, mega-potent bud, flexing on their friends. One group couldn’t wait to get home. They ripped bongloads out the side seats of a dusty, parked Hyundai with no hubcaps.
Cookies and Cakes strains of cannabis—including Sunset Sherbert, Gelato, Runtz, Wedding Cake, and GMO Cookies—comprise modern pot’s center of gravity. Thin Mint Cookies, Animal Cookies, Platinum Cookies, and on and on—they are the top-selling cultivars in legal stores today, and their genes appear in the lion’s share of hyped new weed varieties.
From 2007 to the present—and emanating out of the San Francisco Bay Area—Cookies’ hard-hitting, hybrid indica power, and its complex, sweet- scrumptious aroma has made fans of elite pot snobs, medical marijuana patients with PTSD, all-star rappers, and now almost everyone who partakes.
Cookies got this way because breeders like Jai “Jigga” Chang and Mario “Mr. Sherbinski” Guzman hybridized the best of the early 2000s OG Kushes to some truly exotic sativas. They carved up a wave of medical marijuana and adult-use legalization with rapper/business mogul Berner and wrote the playbook for viral weed marketing.
The Cookies story spans the recent histories of cannabis, weed law reform, San Francisco, and hip-hop. It’s a story of plant worship and profit-chasing, of the serendipity of city life, and the power of sharing gifts instead of hoarding them.
Grower Ghost at ABF Genetics, short for “Always Be Flowering,” and spreader of Forum Cut Cookies, said growing Cookies “is something that changed my life.”
“It became that thing,” he said. “I challenge people to say what since Cookies—or that was not derived through that whole gene pool—has really changed cannabis.”
Continue reading: Leafly