Cereals, snack bars, and other foods made with a seed that’s full of concentrated nutrients for your heart and skin are in danger of being pulled from the food supply forever. Hemp seeds rival soy in protein content and are a potent source of essential fatty acids (EFAs), vitamin E, and antioxidants. But nutrition buffs aren’t the only ones noticing hemp — legal circles are buzzing, too.

Some food-savvy environmentalists say that if you can afford to buy only one organic food item, it should be culinary oils. They base their assertions on several things, but at the top of the list is the fact that heavy metals (which can show up in sewage sludge used to treat some non-organic farms) and industrial chemicals such as pesticides tend to stick to fats.

That the hemp plant (Cannabis sativa) is used as food initially surprises and confuses most people. The public information system has largely restricted knowledge of hemp to its use for obtaining marijuana (Cannabis sativa), with its leaf content of the psychoactive substance delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), rope and cloth from the fiber of the plant, and paper from the plant stalk. Yet both the oldest Chinese agricultural treatise, the Xia Xiao Zheng, written in the 16th century BC, and other Chinese records discuss hemp as one of the major grain crops grown in ancient China.