life-long chef builds on bourdain’s legacy with bud

AURORA RAE FOR MICHIGAN GREEN STATE

One life-long chef is combining his love of marijuana with his passion of cooking as he tries to educate the world about the benefits of cannabis all while following in the footsteps of the late, great Anthony Bourdain – celebrity chef, author, and travel documentarian. Rodney Lienhart has worked in restaurants for as long as he can remember. For him, food is a lifestyle, not a job. “As a chef, you’re searching for ingredients other people don’t know about,” he said. “You’re searching (for) ways to cook that other people haven’t even heard of, you’re looking to invent yourself. You want to find this one discovery out of like a wannabe Shakespearean theory where you throw 100 monkeys into a room with typewriters and one of them’s going to come up with something good. That’s the same ideology of a chef, per se.” Born in Lansing to his mom, Vickie, and dad, John, Lienhart moved around as a kid until settling in his mom’s hometown of Mackenzie, Tennessee. There, she owned a restaurant, called The Y, where a 5-year-old Lienhart learned to “buss… and wipe tables down.” He said his mother made an agreement with he and his brother to pay them the same amount as their babysitter, if they helped around the restaurant. Lienhart said he was manipulated into making money at a very young – illegal – age but still enjoyed the Pokemon cards his part-time job afforded him. Nonetheless, the restaurant replaced a life his friends grew up accustomed to. “I didn’t really get to go out and play a lot with friends,” he said. “Because I was always working.” Leinhart said the restaurant “eventually got broken into two or three times” by family members they knew. When he was 11, he and his family moved to Michigan so John could take care of Lienhart’s grandfather, who was sick at the time. “We got to Michigan there was no snow,” he said. “Literally, overnight, it was like eight inches.” Lienhart saw a whole new world in cooking upon moving north. He said he even noticed a different etiquette in Michigan that he took an interest in. “You couldn’t just slap it on a plate and sling it,” he said. “There was a finesse to cooking, there really was.” He said he started to take notice of that so much so it “kind of made me weird in a sense.” His infatuation with cooking grew quickly as he “wanted to learn more, wanted to learn more, wanted to learn more.” His culinary research led him to the man he is inspired by today. “When you look up weird shit in the culinary industry, you always fall back to Bourdain.” He said he understands Bourdain’s message in a way he thinks others do not. “(They’re) looking at the man versus what he is trying to say,” he said. “That’s why ultimately sometimes when you watch some of his episodes or read his stuff, you just shake your head because you’re like “Dude, you’re gone now, and this is just so far from the truth it’s not even funny.” Lienhart said he wants to pick up where he left off, not replace him. He said he sees too many people who used to praise him in his life, now “talk shit” about him in his absence. “If you understood who he was, that’s not the end of this,” he said about Bourdain’s death in June of 2018. Lienhart attend a technical high school, where he spent half of his time learning culinary skills. He attended a university for a short time after before dropping out due to financial issues. He continued working in the restaurant industry, where drugs and alcohol were a part of the culture. But the fast-paced lifestyle was nothing new to Lienhart, having been in it since middle school age. Around the time his second daughter was born, “a cold splash of reality hit me.” “I had this massive panic attack so much so that I was an hour and a half late for work and I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I blacked out.” He started to make changes in his life and work towards a healthier existence. “I figured out cutting out booze would not only save me money,” he said. “But make me feel better.” About five years ago, he obtained his own health insurance and went to a doctor for help. “I’d go back and forth with that doctor… for at least a good six months and it got to the point where I just couldn’t fucking sleep,” he said. “I would only really sleep four to five hours a night just because that’s the chef’s life.” He said he was on 10-15 medications throughout the six-month period he saw the doctor.

6 | www.MIGREENSTATE.com fall 2021| MIGreenState

“It looked like taking a pack of multivitamins almost every hour,” he said. Even though it helped him successfully quit drinking and smoking cigarettes, Lienhart said he still did not feel right. “I was not a good person,” he said. “The simplest smallest thing would set me off.” One day, he decided he was done with the pharmaceuticals. “I go into (the doctor’s) office, having a bad day, and I literally dump all of my medications down the floor around him and I’m like “I’m done taking these”,” he said. The doctor did not know what else to do for him and told him to “smoke a joint and calm down.” He pondered the doctor’s instructions until later that night, he obliged. His roommate, who had a medical card, was smoking outside with friends when Leinhart joined them and asked to buy some marijuana. His roommate kindly offered it to him for free. “It’s just like smoking any other joint,” he said. “But it’s different when you’re sober.” Unexpectedly, Lienhart said “everything relaxed.” “The world felt complacent for a moment,” he said. “The static calmed down and then the chaos did.” He got another joint from his friend, ate and then went to bed. He said he slept for 18 hours straight that night. “I remember that sleep,” he said. “That is the best sleep I’d ever fuckin gotten in my life.” He continued to use marijuana recreationally, and medicinally as he later discovered, while working as a chef until 2020. Lienhart said COVID “decimated” the world he had grown up in. “The whole culinary industry was absolutely eviscerated,” he said. “You’re watching everything that you love incinerate around you and fall to ashes. It wasn’t a pleasant time.” He picked up a liking for a hobby he had only ever practiced in school: writing. His late mother’s advice echoed in his head. “She always told me she goes “Listen, I don’t know why I’m saying this, but I’m telling you to write down what you’re thinking. Just write it down.” He said he didn’t believe her until he started to do it after she was gone. “It was terrible,” he said. He persisted with it though, noticing it improvements in his mental wellbeing. “The more that I noticed that I wrote, the more cathartic it became for me,” he said. “I noticed that my mental health wasn’t staggering. I got it out.” He started writing for “random cooking stories… just stuff about me” for a website called Cleaver and Blade “as a way to get free shit because that was pretty cool.” He said that experience gave him the courage to pursue writing in a more professional manner. “As soon as (Cleaver and Blade) published it, it made

Issue 4 | fall 2021

me like I could do this,” he said. “So, I started writing more.” He eventually stopped writing for them, choosing to focus on other publishing avenues. He wrote on his own, so much so, he decided to make it into a book, titled Y, after his mom’s restaurant “because why not,” he said. He started a podcast, too, per his peer’s suggestion, and found people in Detroit to work with. The deal unfortunately went south and Lienhart moved on, solo, “just really wanting to be the host of something.” He “changed the logo and… the concept” and created his own podcast, The Daily Chroniclez where he “spotlights the who’s who of the (cannabis) industry and why they’re there.” With almost 200 subscribers, he usually publishes videos every Friday but has not filmed in about a month as he is currently “rehabbing” the show including a “new intro sequence and new outro sequence.” The podcast was a step towards his goal, but not his end game. He had yet to create a cooking with cannabis show. One night, he had a nightmare “thinking back to what my mom said when she was alive.” Lienhart and his mom were watching Anthony Bourdain one time when she pointed to the TV and told him he should do that. After that memory, he worked tirelessly to make his and his moms vision a reality. After one year and about $50,000, he launched the pilot episode of his show, Deliciously Dope, in November called, A Journey into the World of Culinary Cannabis. “That show is where I Anthony Bourdain the fuck out of the culinary cannabis,” he said. “Not just that but looking at the lifestyle behind cannabis as well.” He said he pays attention to details that other cannabis cooks are unaware of. “Terpenes matter,” he said. “Terpenes enhance not only the flavor but the absorption of cannabinoids to our endocannabinoid system.” He said people may consider the terpene content of cannabis, but do not consider “putting weed into food that already has a terpene content.” He said that attention to detail is a barrier people like himself are currently trying to break down. “There’s a huge need for what I do and that’s interesting because 10 years ago, there wasn’t really a huge need for what I did.” He plans to release 12 more episodes of Deliciously Dope before they “go worldwide,” like Bourdain. “I feel we need someone like him,” he said. “I feel we need his presence.” Lienhart said he feels he is the right one to continue Bourdain’s legacy because he “understand the nihilistic nightmare that’s narcissistically nudging me into nothingness.” He said he, unlike most others, is not in it for money or recognition, but rather to preserve the importance and art of “combining food and cannabis in a Bourdanian way.”

Pictured above: Anthony Bourdain, celebrity chef, author and travel documentarian.