Sophia Roe

Counter Space is, at its most basic, a food news show. Climate, the environment, racism—every one of these things impacts the food that we eat. Each episode is different. We talk about protest food. We talk about regenerative farming and big tech. We talk about why fungus is so important. We have these conversations in a way that feels relatable and cool and often very funny, because I think that humor’s a really important way to grab people. 

We need to look at where we’re putting our resources. I think the future is mushrooms. We would just have a planet of dead shit if it wasn’t for fungus. Fungus are energy transformers. They take something that’s dead and they break down that plant material and make it into nothing again. Without fungus, when someone dies, they’d just stay there forever. Fungus inside the body is what helps rigor mortis. It’s what helps decomposition. We look at it like it’s this yucky thing, but fungus is how we have streets that aren’t lined with bodies. 

We have more than 200 different fungi on our hands at any given moment. Fungus is not a plant—it’s its own universe. As humans, we are so scared of death. Fungus can teach us that it’s not that scary: when you die, you just become something else. Fungus is proof that life continues. This fungus still exists on you, still feeds on you, still thrives and turns you into something totally different, which is fucking awesome. It’s proof of life after death. I could talk about fungus forever.

I’ve taken mushrooms 50 times in my life, easily. I have a lot of family trauma and microdosing is something that has really, really helped me. Especially when I was younger and had a lot of anger issues. Psilocybin is not the evil that a lot of people might think it is.

My rules are: make sure you can be outside, make sure you’re either with people who you love or you’re alone, and be prepared for more detail and more information than you normally get. Mushrooms really helped me develop a relationship with my younger self. They helped me mother myself as a kid. My little self relies on my big self, you know? 

I believe that a lot of realities can exist at once. It’s a little spacey and Interstellar of me, but I do believe there’s another reality in a different universe where time is set up differently and where young Soph is in the now. Let’s say that right now, it’s 10:41 on November 18th, 2020. I believe that in some other universe, it’s November 18th at 10:42 and it’s 1995.

Who says that I am the most conscious being and that right now is the most important now? I don’t fucking know. All I know is that the decisions that I make impact not just the future, but the past—and how I feel about it. If I can come to peace now with my childhood, then I am helping little Soph come to peace with it in her reality, too. The older that I get, the more mindful that I am about the decisions that I make, the way I treat people and the way that I treat myself, because I have to believe that it matters. 

Something’s wrong with my brain and cannabis just doesn’t work for me. But I have a partner who has chronic pain who is a completely different man when he has it. He needs it. That’s my personal tie to it and that is enough for me to say that I don’t understand what the big deal is. In every single way, I don’t understand. Prohibitionist laws waste billions of dollars criminalizing cannabis. Black and brown people are disproportionately arrested for cannabis. There are sick people who need access to it and they can’t have it. Prohibition fosters illegal cannabis markets that benefit from organized crime. It’s all a problem. 

But the biggest thing with cannabis for me is prison reform. That’s why I work with the Women’s Prison Association. I think about the times my mother was arrested. I don’t consider cannabis a drug. It’s a plant. My mom was using serious drugs and I still don’t believe that she deserved to be in prison. More than 80% of the women incarcerated are incarcerated for drug conviction. That’s outrageous. What an absolute waste of resources.

When you arrest a woman, you have to think about what you’re doing to that family. There are hardly any funds put towards reentry services when it comes to reintegrating that mother with her children. And that’s where cannabis and prison reform intersect. Some day, hopefully soon, cannabis is going to be legal everywhere. What about the people who spent years of their lives in prison for having less than an ounce of weed on them? What do they get? Is their felony gone? Do they get their record expunged? Are they going to be able to vote now? Are we going to write them a check? Is that really equivalent to a life lost?

When I think about cannabis, I think about money and industry. This is something that America can provide globally. We don’t grow any coffee. Almost 100% of the coffee in America is imported and all we do is bitch about how expensive it is. Sixty percent of the specialty foods we get in this country come from fucking somewhere else. Chocolate, wine, spices, quinoa, avocados, food, oh my god—40% of our food comes from fucking Mexico. People want to make America great? Then let’s start truly domesticating the farming experience. Integrate that shit. 

I want to feed the world so that people will have full bellies, because when you have a full belly, you can fully engage your imagination and then you can be revolutionary. We can’t have revolution without imagination, and we can’t have a fucking imagination if we don’t have a fucking full belly. I want to feed people so that they can use their imagination so that we can become these revolutionary beings that we’re supposed to be and can be as excellent as we were meant to be. That’s it. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Sophia Roe photographed by Meghan Marin in Brooklyn. If you like this Conversation, please feel free to share it with friends or enemies. Subscribe to our newsletter here.