Feature Story
Setting“ The Bar” For Cannabis Consumption Space Options
Editorial and Photography by Clayton Stallings, The EVOLUTION Magazine
This month, Missouri is celebrating its sixth annual April 4 / 20 tradition of cannabis freedom since its liberation from cannabis prohibition in November 2018. We launched our first issue of The EVOLUTION Magazine just two months after Missouri’ s first April cannabis legalization celebrations in June 2019.
Long before helping launch The EVOLUTION Magazine and becoming the Director of Marketing and Content Development, one of my previous jobs out of many different career runs was as an“ Entertainer.” I was a dueling piano player / singer at a bar called Willy D’ s in Arkansas, and I put entertainer in quotation marks because, in reality, my job was to sell alcohol.
My current job over the past five 420s has been to continue to help break the stigma of cannabis through the health and wellness information the magazine offers while providing a marketing space in a publication that will always remain neutral about controversial issues within our state’ s cannabis industry. This can be challenging as our content is for both the legacy and new state-licensed markets. We also feature event coverage seeking to bring the two markets together to celebrate the newfound access to cannabis freedom.
My celebratory styles, methods,“ social lubricants,” and locations I choose to use them in have evolved and matured with time, and my social lubricant has shifted from primarily alcohol to primarily cannabis. I’ ll never say cannabis and alcohol shouldn’ t go together because I don’ t think it’ s about one or the other for the experienced user of both. However, I noticed in my own life that one of the two has mostly negative outcomes with overconsumption, with the only other biggest difference between the two being my daily use of cannabis as part of
Alexandria Snavely, sous chef and business partner( on left), with Kandi Kerns, owner of Fuego Events & Cantina.
my mental and physical well-being, like many others in the industry outside of its celebratory use.
Are we letting our surroundings“ Set the Bar” for our cannabis consumption space celebratory options?
Our options of ways and places to celebrate cannabis freedom through cannabis consumption thankfully have a silver lining on the horizon, thanks to companies like VIBE, Kansas City Cannabis, and Robust. They support events like local culinary creative, chemist, and female entrepreneur Kandi Kerns with her Kush & Cook cannabis and food pairing events at Fuego Events & Cantina— an offshoot of Kerns’ Spanish tapas restaurant, Trago Bar & Tapas, which opened in 2016.
This culinary cannabis pairing experience at the Fuego event space, curated by VIBE and Kerns for cannabis industry professionals, will hopefully evolve the way we think about future consumption spaces, events, and the options we do or don’ t have available to us compared to our traditional local watering holes.
Kerns enthusiastically explains it,“ The thing that really works with both the cannabis and food industries is the chemistry of it all. My background education is in chemistry, so when a unique opportunity arises, and I get to create a menu pairing to the terpene properties of cannabis, this is really a special thing.”
I initially met Kerns as she was trying to navigate the waters of hosting infused cannabis dinners in her separate event space attached to Fuego in the early years of cannabis legalization and before our current licensees got up and running. Back then, she was trying to navigate the sharky waters of doing private infused cannabis dinners amidst threats from insurance companies. Like most other
28 April 2025