The Tastemakers (7 page)

“I don't think that will be a problem,” Brock said, grabbing the rice. The two had played this game before.

Roberts and Brock had been collaborating for a number of years, working to bring back, grow, and cook antebellum southern grains that were on the verge of extinction. Those ingredients formed the core of Brock's cooking, and much of what he did with them unfolded in the restaurant's immaculate kitchen laboratory, stacked to the ceiling with shelves of precisely labeled food containers and where he worked with Josh Fratoni, his “fermentation guru.” On a large chalkboard was a list of sixty-odd vinegars,
misos, and fermentation experiments currently going on with local grains, most of them supplied by Anson Mills. Brock handed around several plastic vials of liquid fermented from Sea Island red beans, which we dropped onto our tongues and unleashed its unique flavor, something like a sweeter, milder soy sauce. Next, the chef grabbed plastic spoons and scooped red pea and faro shoyu paste from a tub. It was tangy and sweet but also tasted like porridge, thanks to the natural sugars brought out through a yearlong lactic fermentation, which Brock still wasn't sure was long enough. He took out another tub and passed around spoons with its contents. “Tell me what you think this is,” Brock said as I took a taste. Buttery and salty but somewhat sweet, it was incredibly familiar, like a richer version of something I'd eaten all my life. “It's popcorn,” Brock said, with the slightest hint of the magician's smile. “A miso made from whole popcorn and popcorn stock. Actually, from Glenn's own Appalachian heirloom sweet flint corn.”

Miso paste is typically made by fermenting rice or soybeans. When mixed with stock it becomes the soup often served at Japanese restaurants. Brock had not only created a stock with popcorn but also found a way to ferment popcorn kernels. I shut my eyes and took another lick, transported instantly to a movie theater's sticky seats.

We tasted more misos, including one made from benne seeds (“It's like peanut butter on sex,” said Roberts), and one that was actually a fermented peanut butter (“like peanut butter with MSG on top” countered Brock, with great pride). “I've got an idea,” Roberts said, turning to Brock quickly with a flick of his hair. “Because with that rice, when you cook it, the dregs taste like black cherries. I mean, think about that,” he said, motioning to the popcorn miso, then, looking at the bag of rice on the counter, “and wow!”

I
n the world of
Sex and the City
–themed cupcake tours, it is tempting to think of food trends as 10 percent creativity, 90 percent fashion fad, with the herd flocking toward the latest taste of the week. Even though the great cupcake boom took years to reach
its maddening apex, it was fundamentally a relatively simple thing. Someone decided to bake a cupcake in New York, those cupcakes became popular, and that popularity spread around the world, inspiring others to bake their own cupcakes. Yes, it took tears, long hours, and enough butter to fill the Grand Canyon to make the cupcake into a trend, but no one had to paddle a canoe into alligator- and snake-infested waters at the crack of dawn to hand-harvest cupcakes with a scythe in hand, as Glenn Roberts has regularly done with certain types of rice. Never had there been a year when cupcakes simply weren't available because a hurricane, flood, or insects decimated tray after tray of cupcakes in one fell swoop before they could even be iced. No one ever lost the original DNA for a cupcake, setting the entire industry back years before another cupcake could be eaten. For Glenn Roberts, these regular catastrophes are the acceptable, everyday risks he weathers in order to bring his grains into the world.

To start a food trend from agriculture is one of the riskiest, most ballsy things an entrepreneur can do. Yet every day there are countless farmers, scientists, and gardening dreamers with a trowel in their hand, digging in the dirt and planting the seed that they hope will one day change the way we eat. Agriculture's tastemakers are arguably the most potent trendsetters in the food world and have been for all of human civilization. Ten millennia ago someone in the plains of the Fertile Crescent had the thought to take the seeds from the strands of wild emmer and Einkorn wheat growing in the fields (grains that Roberts has lately revived) and plant them in a controlled area, which they could water, protect, and harvest on their own. At the same time, in China, farmers in wet lowlands were using the heartiest varieties of wild rice they collected, known as Oryza sativa, and planting them in paddies that they shaped to retain water (Roberts uses similar techniques). These innovations, which are some of the earliest forms of agriculture, not only led to better food supplies for these enterprising farmers, they also completely shifted humanity's way of life from mobile hunter-gathering tribes to geographically rooted agricultural societies. We built our towns and cities not because we liked an area but because it was
where our wheat and rice were growing, and we had to stay nearby to guard and tend to it. With a predictable source of grain, humans were able to domesticate animals by feeding them, leading to a tremendous increase in protein, which allowed more of us to survive and procreate, and a form of labor, which allowed us to farm larger areas of land more efficiently and to travel greater distances.

The excess food from these crops formed the backbone of what would become the financial system, as farmers in one village exchanged grains and surplus foods with others. A new crop or a better variety of a staple crop provided a substantial advantage for trading with others and led the tribes and groups who developed them to sources of power. In his best-selling book
Guns, Germs, and Steel
, author Jared Diamond argued that the rise in Eurasian civilization and its continued dominance over civilizations in the southern hemisphere can all be traced back to what essentially were the food trends that came out of the early days of agriculture. Those who developed better grains for cultivation grew bigger and stronger; were able to devote more free time to specialized tasks, such as developing education, technology, and political alliances; and could use domesticated animals to acquire power through trade and warfare. Each subsequent agricultural innovation, from the ability to make oil and ferment dairy for cheeses and yogurt to the invention of preservation techniques, which facilitated travel, fundamentally altered the world. Each new agricultural trend, whether it was a new spice or variety of vegetable or a better breed of animal, pushed our interconnectivity and civilization along.

As it evolved, the business of agriculture focused increasingly on efficiency. Agricultural faculties at universities allowed the greater study of plant and animal breeds, and the emerging fields of agricultural science focused the study of breeding and selection to find newer, more profitable plant and animal breeds. Chemistry opened up our understanding of plant physiology and made possible the introduction of pesticides and fertilizers. The Agricultural Revolution in England, led by these advances, opened the door for the Industrial Revolution, which in turn provided the machines that made modern high-yield farming possible. Though this trend has had dramatic
social and political consequences, ranging from a decline in global famines to the shrinking of rural communities and environmental degradation, industrial agriculture has allowed many in the industry to focus their energy on innovation around new products, ranging from new conventional breeds of fruits, vegetables, and animals to genetically modified strands of rice with bits of fish DNA in them in order to make them more drought and pest resistant. By the twentieth century, concerns over soil erosion and pesticide use led to the development of organic farming, a trend started by the British couple Albert and Gabrielle Howard, who based their ideas on the traditional farming practices they had observed in India. Though it remained a niche trend for many decades, organic farming grew rapidly from the 1990s onward and today represents one of the fastest-growing segments of the agriculture industry, driven largely by consumer food trends that have embraced organic products as healthier and their agricultural practices more environmentally sustainable.

Today's agricultural food trends range greatly in their scope. They can be industry-altering shifts, such as the introduction of genetically modified seeds by agrobusiness giants such as Monsanto, or the development of animal breeds that grow fatter, quicker, and with less propensity for disease than their predecessors. They can involve specific farming practices with political undertones, like the emergence in the 1970s and onward of more natural and “humane” methods of raising meat and dairy animals, from free-range farming for cattle and chickens to codes of conduct for aquaculture and fishing that ensures the sustainability of ocean life. Agricultural trends are also focused on bringing more variety and flavor to our plates. Each trip to the produce section of the grocery store brings us into contact with the latest innovation in plant breeding. One season there is one type of kale, and the next thing you know there's kale in five different sizes and three colors. Each new fall brings in whole new varieties of apples from growers around the world, many created by university agriculture labs and farmers, such as Wisconsin's Honeycrisp or the Red Prince (which you'll meet in a later chapter). This type of work takes years, often decades, to bear fruit (so to speak). Breeding plants or animals is a grueling process of trial and
error, requiring thousands of experiments, with results taking shape over many seasons until an edible prototype is available. That's why agricultural tastemakers tend to be exceedingly driven, often obsessive individuals whose devotion to the trend they're working to establish borders on the maniacal and cannot be dismissed as flights of fancy. They are a mixture of alchemist and entrepreneur, with a warrior's passion. Basically, the opposite of a cupcake baker.

Glenn Roberts fits precisely into this category, and his influence as an agricultural tastemaker falls somewhere between the political and culinary. The company he founded, Anson Mills, has emerged over the past decade as the preeminent cultivator and supplier of gourmet grains in the United States, if not globally, selling hundreds of varieties of heritage wheat, rice, corn, and other grains to customers and restaurant chefs around the world. He is one of the leaders in organic and sustainable grain production in America, using traditional, environmentally friendly methods of planting, harvesting, and milling at every step of the process. Roberts has done more to revive lost or neglected species of American grains than any single individual in the country and has been a key player in the resurgence of the South's historical food culture, centered around the low-country cuisine of South Carolina's coastal plains, known as the Carolina Rice Kitchen.

“The oldest intact cuisine in the United States was based on Carolina rice,” said Roberts, who has worked with historians over the years to discover everything he could about food and agriculture in the area. We were back in his car, driving out of the city's historic center, along its inner harbor. Charleston had been a major trading port since the British founded it in 1670, and a great variety of cultural influences shaped its food culture over the centuries. As we drove to the outskirts of the city, past barbecue joints owned by Klansmen and high-end bike shops that also sold guns, Roberts painted an enthusiastic picture of a global mixing pot of flavors and cuisines unlike any that had existed before. Venetians originally brought rice to the area in the 1670s, planting half a dozen varieties at the edges of bays where the tides would irrigate them, and designing the coastal rice canals the industry grew around.
The British colonists brought their influence with other staple crops along with the flavors of outposts in India, Jamaica, and other faraway places. Sephardic Jews (the city's Jewish population was once greater than New York's) introduced Mediterranean rice dishes, including rice breads, and French settlers made casserole cooking the core of Charleston's kitchen culture. The Irish, German, Scottish, and Spanish populations who settled in the city lent it their flavor, too, along with those of nearby Native American Cherokee and Creek tribes, who worked in the rice fields.

Charleston was also the principal destination for the human cargo of the African slave trade, and their influence in the development of the Carolina Rice Kitchen cannot be understated. African slaves who had worked on rice plantations in other British colonies were put to work establishing Carolina's plantations with their knowledge and forced labor. Every kitchen in the city's grand houses, hotels, and restaurants was staffed by black cooks, first as slaves and later as freed servants. They were the ones who pulled together the disparate influences from the city's global population, creating the cuisine of the Carolina Rice Kitchen. “It was a full wrap cuisine,” Roberts said with longing, existing today only as scattered recipes and fading memories. At the high point, prior to the Civil War, there were over a hundred varieties of rice grown in the region, ranging from commodity varieties, which were exported to Europe (the region was once a main source of the global rice supply); multiple varieties of bay rice, which used the Italian methods of planting along the edges of bays; and so-called secret rice, grown by black farmers in hidden plots and used as sacramental offerings for traditional African religious practices.