Stephanie Burt 00:00

Hi all, these are generally conversations between adults after the children have left the table. The language can be spicy, and the subjects can get saucy. So if you're ready, this is the Southern fork, unscripted kitchen chat, and also studio chats with some of the most interesting voices in the culinary south. I'm Stephanie Burt, a food and beverage writer who travels with her fork to write for a variety of publications from magazines you might have on your coffee table to the website you love to visit for your favorite recipes. And I'm inviting you to come behind the scenes with me to get to know the people who make this southern culinary landscape so special. I'm always hungry for the next bite thirsty for that next sip and ready for the next conversation. Let's dig in. The Southern Fork is proud to say that once again, the presenting sponsor for season eight is Townsend automotive and Tuscaloosa, Alabama. First off, thanks to so many of you listeners out there who not only decided to purchase a vehicle from this family owned business in the last two years, but also shared with them that it was directly because of their support of this show. That's what community even and our virtual format is all about. Second, Townsend automotive celebrating 49 years serving West Alabama has been extending its reach so that you don't even have to be in the Tuscaloosa area to purchase a car from them. Nationwide vehicle delivery service is available for southern fork listeners. And it's something that makes buying just the right new or certified pre owned vehicle even easier. Visit Townsend honda.com For current inventory. Or of course, if you're in West Alabama, stop in towns and automotive always salutes local entrepreneurs from restaurant tours to podcasters. And they welcome you to be part of a community that does the same.

INTRO
Why are historical foodstuffs important? And what might they have to offer to us living now about some of the biggest issues we're facing? Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills and AM Research and Columbia South Carolina is on a journey to address those questions through interacting with the foods themselves, finding the seeds, growing them out and working with his team and a host of others around the world to test and apply the results and climates that are rapidly changing. I spoke with Glenn a few years ago along with Dr. David shields about the Carolina gold rice Foundation. And many of you will associate Glenn with that iconic southern grain. But he's now applying creative thinking to the companion plants and the eco systems of the rice. And it's leading him to new questions about salt tolerance, growing cycles, and even which parts of the plant we harvest for food. Now, I'm intellectually flying by the seat of my pants in this conversation. But there's lots of good humor amid the scientific ideas. And Glenn provides us hope for the future of food by looking to the past. Welcome again to the Southern Fork Glenn Roberts.

Glenn Roberts 04:01

Well, I'm absolutely thrilled to be in your presence.

Stephanie Burt 04:04

Well, I am absolutely thrilled to be in yours so we are we are having that moment, I believe but this is actually a direct request of listeners. We've spoken many times over the years. But they wanted an update. They wanted better sound. Yeah, I used to not know how to do any of this but did it anyway. And they wanted to hear what was going on now beyond Carolina gold rice and we've really gone a long way since then. So every time I pop into a conversation with you, I call you about grain or I ask you a question about who should I speak to hear bread I get so much information and today I'd like to start anchoring this conversation by talking about the name of this seed, the name of a grain that you're working on. Now, let's anchor it right there. And then we can build from there.

Glenn Roberts 05:07

Okay, so I think the best representation would be sorghum,

Stephanie Burt

sorghum. That is an old, old thing, especially in the South. So, sorghum was used as a sugar substitute right during the pre colonial all the way to right now. Thank you for that. Yes, that's a something that people don't think about very often, at all that sorghum is still very much in use in the US, even though we think about it in a small moment of like sorghum syrup put put on, Sean Brock's biscuits or sorghum butter at Rob McDaniel's place and Helen. Right, exactly. So talk about why sorghum is a great place to anchor this.

Glenn Roberts

Well there is life beyond sorghum better, but it's hard to prove. Sorghum is emblematic of everything that we're working on planet wide. And that's it sounds like a dumb broad statement. And in a lot of ways, it may be but you can go down any rabbit hole. And I must say that in South Carolina, we cheat because in South Carolina, we have have the world's foremost number one sorghum researcher, which is Dr. Steven Crespitch. Why do I even bring this up now? Because we all go immediately to what is sweet about sorghum? And I'm wondering how many people know that sorghum is also a green vegetable?

Stephanie Burt 06:54

Oh, well, I mean, I I buy sorghum from Bob's Red Mill, you know, in my big box grocery store. I like to cook sorghum more so than I quinoa. Yeah, to me, I think it's just got more tooth, like a farro or something like that. So, you know, I get in the mood now buy a bag of sorghum and use it for a few months, you know, but I never thought about as a green vegetable.

Glenn Roberts 07:21

So a faster check on the plant itself, which is where we're living all the time. Now. The not new, anything that we're doing because this is as we both know, the sun cycle, and it's the oldest farming system in the world. So why are we even talking about this? And the answer is, every plant has catastrophic famine, culinary use, something that we don't talk about a whole lot. But when you think about sorghum, no one's making syrup from sorghum, I'm using firewood when they can pull the seed and eat it as a green vegetable. But in order to make sorghum syrup, you've got to top the cane at one point because otherwise the seed keeps pulling all the bricks up into the seat. All the energy goes up to the seed head. Right. So I've recent discussion noodling around and believe it or not, Israel, with my buddy Mitchell Davis, on some stuff.

Stephanie Burt 08:19

Yeah, macho. That name and ya Mitchell. Yeah.

Glenn Roberts 08:22

Well, he's, he's working in Israel. That's why. And he's not being super vocal about it either. Like, he was in India, and he met a very noted chef. And because I'm old and senile, I don't remember how to pronounce his name, because I just found out about this chef, two weeks ago, even though I should have known him. I haven't been to his place yet, but I'm going next week. He is looking for sorghum as a green vegetable. So it's bright mo green, looks like green peas. That's the seed when you cut it very, very early. And he cannot find a source in the United States. Isn't that interesting? And he's been looking now for a year.

Stephanie Burt 09:01

That is interesting. It's interesting for Glenn and I because we nerd out on grain and know that the US is a huge grower of sorghum so to only have it available as a mature seed head used for sugar substitute is a really interesting wrinkle in that food system. And also, Southern Fork listeners looks like a big ..., it looks like a sugar cane in a way. It's a it's a grass with a little crown on top.

Glenn Roberts 09:31

That's full of seed

Stephanie Burt 09:32

right

Glenn Roberts 09:32

unlike sugar cane which won't have that. But yeah, you're spot on and we can be indicted as Anson Mills because we do this as a hobby. We grow all kinds of different sorghums due to the work of David shields and others digging in hard to the antebellum records. And when I say antebellum I guess we should take that thing away and say the records before 1850 which we have to admit right off the bat are very patriarchal. All right, one of the things this involves and so here's where Nagoya protocol, which is, where did it come from? And who deserves the credit? And how does attribution work in landrace culture, we usually don't think that far. If we find something that's really tasty, and it's in a seed bank, we just go for it. And we've been doing that for a quarter century of Anson mills. Right. But what we're required to do with say, sorghum now is to find out where it came from, who brought it here, why it's here, and who really was doing it. So you're creating

Stephanie Burt 10:34

stories, you're creating a history of a seed, right, of a crop,

Glenn Roberts 10:40

but the seed in a catastrophic environment, which we have over and over again, in the locale of Georgia, Carolina, going back prior to 1800, and forward to now. And

Stephanie Burt 10:55

What does catastrophic environment mean?

Glenn Roberts 10:59

It means if you have a field full of sorghum, and you've got a hurricane coming, are you going to leave it there? Because it won't be there after the hurricane leaves? Right. And that is the saga have everything on the Sea Islands and coast since first contact, and certainly in native communities before then I think they did a much better job over the Catawba actually taught catastrophic storm management to the settlers, and was nice of them. So

Stephanie Burt 11:27

we're dealing with this changing climate. And we actually are during your research finding knowledge of how to deal with it when it comes to sorghum or other crops. Right. Exactly.

Glenn Roberts 11:43

And I'm wondering, the challenge would be how well have we documented in the literature since African diaspora and maroon culture was not allowed to publish or write? How well have we documented sorghum culture from its inception here? How far back does it go, and who belongs to it but more of contemporary concern and to celebrate at the same time, oh, it's not really the end of the world because there's an entire cuisine circulating around the early harvest of crops you would not expect to provide keratin and or chlorophyll and or you just keep naming it all the way through. And the the mission then becomes in where we're working. Now, how many tolerances do these plants have? Sorghum has them all. It's drought, water, salt, acid, on and on and on. That's what sorghum does. Plus it's a nematode suppressor in the field, which means it keeps armyworms from coming in eating all your rice. So it's an allied crop in rice. And it's in the sun cycle, which is the oldest farming system known to mankind. And the sun cycle has sorghum as a key element, which is why we ever started growing it not for the syrup. But so the rice would be better. So what's happened since the last time you and I discuss things is all of the other crops that we grew? We grew field peas for tilth, which is leguminous for eight years before we ever released them as a culinary crop, because we had to grow them to do natural tilth rice. So now we actually spend more time on the ancillary crops to support rice horticulture than we do on the rice itself.

Stephanie Burt 13:34

Right. Okay,

Glenn Roberts 13:36

did you follow that? I did. I did.

Stephanie Burt 13:40

Okay, theoretically. I get it. So. So what you're talking about is growing crops as an as a interconnected eco system whose centerpiece is a rice. Yes. Right. And so then, at the beginning of your journey, your your focus was that centerpiece. But now you're looking at all the other pieces of the eco system that were part of natural farming knowledge, pre 1850. And we've lost that we have so I did follow. You did? Okay, there you go. I understood what you said he didn't understand what I'm having ever asked you this question. And in quite this way. I feel like a lot of my generation our generations work at this time and food is a reclamation of things that are lost. Understanding where food comes from, who it should be attributed to, how to grow it, how to care for the planet while growing it. In few words, how did we lose it so badly?

Glenn Roberts 14:56

We tend to

Stephanie Burt 14:57

as our race it's not just the US, you're working worldwide on

Glenn Roberts 15:03

what? Two facets? That's a good question. The first one is cultural on the creative side, which is, we tend to be aggressively in the quest for new stuff. We're a user society here in this country, we still are, even though our better sensibilities tell us not to be because of that. We have the most food waste of any place in the world. Because

Stephanie Burt 15:30

as you focus on stuff, you leave stuff back, you told me that years ago, right,

Glenn Roberts 15:34

taste things, and then you go on to the next one. And what you had leftover maybe doesn't get used. And so here's the key element not to talk about what we do, but to talk about what we do at the same time. We have no waste in our system, we don't sell feed, we feed the habitat, because if we don't they eat our food crops. And so that becomes another whole exercise and what are the birds one? What as well, hogwash, you keep going, what are the deer one because otherwise, they're eating your crops. So we do more farming for the habitat than we do for people. And I don't even know that they have a word for that. And it's called Food block food plot husbandry, which is the largest staple acreage of land race presence in the United States. And I don't think anybody knows it. And it's for wild animals. It's not for us, and they have all the good stuff. If you if you look at the seed they put out for wild animals, you have the sun cycle, because it hasn't changed. They wanted to eat the same things we always want to be right

Stephanie Burt 15:43

 so we are part of the ecosystem,

Glenn Roberts 16:47

we're just like the deer in the Gators and everything else right. So the very interesting lead of this is if you look at the original plant types with you know, somebody said the other day, do you have a degree in botany and I current hell no degree in mathematics, topology and some German lit useless. Kleist has not told me anything about how to farm. I did not learn a thing from

Stephanie Burt 17:12

but it's, it's useful if you ever just need to bring it out about a party and hold up

Glenn Roberts 17:16

Guntergrass, every time I walk in the field. She's the the the most important thing to take take away from any of this is no matter what we come up with. And the US government has walked away completely from all the modern breeding techniques, no crisping, no, you know, gene drive, no advanced hyper GMO, none of that they're not doing any of that. Now they're working with land race stuff that we've been doing this whole time. And land races, the more sorry, I have to keep going. It's a there's a lot of there's a lot of vocab in this. In this episode. Land race is the correct term instead of heirloom, which can get pretty murky does because heirloom goes back 50 years, essentially why they decided to make that happen, I don't know. But it happened sometime in the 60s. And at that point, you are guaranteed to be on pre pretty much pre any crazy moneylion work. But I'll remind us all that the first thing we did with Mendel was not listen to anything that was proposed and dwarf the root systems for all our beautiful wheats worldwide. At that point, they started not uptaking full range minerals. And at that point, a century and a half ago, we began the long trek to the hospital with got disease,

Stephanie Burt 18:41

right, right. Because if they don't uptake all those minerals, then you have to add what is it called inputs to make sure that they have some of them and then that creates it tilts the whole system. It's a card.

Glenn Roberts 18:58

They bred them so the roots were close to the surface so they could spread nasty chemicals on them because we had way too much gunpowder. We didn't know what to do with it. We said okay, let's like poison all our fields. You know, that was the DuPont family. Hello out there. We know who you are. Now I'm gonna get shot. I take that back.

Stephanie Burt 19:16

I also

Glenn Roberts 19:20

I actually know some of my mom grew up with him. So I should take all that back that actually were very, very generous to my mother because she lost everything. The depression, they took care of her. So I take all of that back guys, except for one thing. Everybody knows what happened. That's all and that's not me.

Stephanie Burt 19:36

Right? Okay. So the government to get us back on track is now focusing on these landrace things.

Glenn Roberts 19:43

They take the stuff from the gene banks, all the different things you can imagine. Hundreds of 1000s of varieties of things, and they're scanning them all the time for for anything that looks like can we get a 32 day corn to dry from The day we put the seed in the ground. Where's that in our gene banks, so they send out a bunch of people. And lo and behold a wonderful guy named Heron Brain who ran with C.R. Lon and others at the Seed Company in Maine, that's so famous Heron always had his stuff on the side. And lo and behold, he has a 38 day maize that you put the seed in the ground and 30 days later, you got dry corn, just walk away. And it's drought tolerant, shade tolerant, heat tolerant, it's got all the tolerances. That's how you tell whether these things were around for the last catastrophes. So right now, if you're on the coast, and you're thinking rice, what's the tolerance you want? Salt? Who's doing that work? Clemson. University?

Stephanie Burt 20:44

Right, right on Highway 17.

Glenn Roberts 20:47

We're here. Yeah, then they've got plenty of salt. We salted out there a lot of times. All we moved off the coast. We do research on the coast, but we actually don't do production seriously on the coast anywhere in Georgia, the Carolinas anymore. Because result. Yeah, and our rice doesn't like salt. So we have salt tolerant Rice's in these systems that are wicked fast. And my favorite one of all this guy that's the specialist is Dr. Travis Huggins at the National Vice Research Center, and he's a colleague of Anna McClung, who runs this section of our government still, even though she's not the Supreme Leader at the national race Leadership Center anymore, she stepped back from that. She's strictly doing our own research, but they have races, that the roots are black all the way to the top of the plant. It's all black, because it was meant to be grown at very high altitude. So it collects heat. So it doesn't freeze to death. Right? And it's wicked fast. So yeah, all these wonderful things. And

Stephanie Burt 21:46

then you said one was creative. Why, why we lost this knowledge and why we're in a period of reclamation, what was the other side of it?

Glenn Roberts 21:54

The downside of it is the doom and gloom side where we're in a place where we don't have a choice, given the fact that Mendax under stress, the largest battery producer, on the American continents, plural. They're out of buckwheat, that's never happened to pasa, as a wonderful sesame company. They've had spotty production, both in the continental US and in what we call Mexico today. And they were lied to. And so if you keep looking at these things, the state of California is 30 Points off on rice. I'm going there Monday in order to listen to people figure out what they're going to do. And they have new races to deal with that, supposedly. And for wheats, if you go up and talk to Steve Jones. He's got all kinds of new things that are super fast. So he's at Washington State University, but he runs the bread lab too. And that's fun, because that's King Arthur right next door. So you get Steve Jones and a bunch of scientists and one lab and they're, they're actually fun. It's kind of like they're having a I don't know what you'd call it. Kind of a rave. With Brad, we're doing that yet. No, not just bread, they'll cook anything. I asked him if they cook some Ahsoka. They did 20 different versions of Soca. And then Steve grabbed into a bag and threw it out on the table like dice. And he had buckwheat and nine different colors from Silver, all the way to black, pink, red, orange, purple, blue. Never seen blue buckwheat before yellow gold. And I'm going what's that about? And he said, Wouldn't you like to know? I said, Yeah. All right. So if you're talking about where this is going all those buckwheat to put on the table 40 Day crop

Stephanie Burt 23:47

there's a long way from German lit and it's also a long way from cooking you know, it's your brain is is you know, one of the most fascinating things and I've always said I enjoy just spending time with you. But I even hesitate to ask this because you're always 1520 steps ahead of anything I can ask. But what did What are you thinking about now? What is making you hungry?

Glenn Roberts 24:21

Well, we were all doing this yesterday actually and everybody I mentioned Steve's buckwheat seed here yet and everybody just looks at me I said Have we asked for it and everybody just listening I said oh my god, it's time to plant in the season out here who asked and there's all silent I'm going oh, I was supposed to that's what happens when you get old. So right now, so I said that the first thing right across I want to have some pink craps. Right. That was the first thing that was said as soon as I said I didn't do my part of it because I was going this guy's like losing it. You know? supposed to get us to see it? It's not here and everybody's going, What is he talking about? Right. So pink craps? Why not? Yeah, that's from Pink buckwheat.

Stephanie Burt 25:09

I like it. Yeah. Or pink pancakes.

Glenn Roberts 25:12

It'd be like Laffy Taffy meets bazooka bubblegum. I love that I'm wondering. And then well, we can't even get into the fact that color has flavor. Don't even we don't, okay. I mean, we

Stephanie Burt 25:24

I can, but I can actually spell that because of Scott Blackwell. The repetition of that. That word?

Glenn Roberts 25:24

can, we can say anthrocynin Volatile aminos. No, nevermind.

Stephanie Burt 25:38

That's right. Okay, that's right. There's a there's going to be a worksheet with this episode. But this is very fast, your

Glenn Roberts 25:47

turn it in? And they get one pound of 10 things as a reward. There you go. Anybody that can answer whatever questions that Stephanie asks at the end, gets one pound of the weirdest food they've ever seen in their life, their promise,

Stephanie Burt 26:03

there you go. This is a man who has been inside seed banks all you know, around the world, and also on the back of tractors and also at many, many rental car, lots at airports all over the country. So there is one aspect of this thing that is a long way from being a chef, tasting a rice and wishing it word, not that flavor and going Why is something missing to where you are now. And there is an aspect of what you're doing now and how it's morphed that fits with your personality, like a puzzle piece. What is one of those aspects?

Glenn Roberts 26:49

That's a great question. Honestly, I think the fact that what we have is historically so fungible, that every time we try to put our finger on it, the rivulets like stone in the pond. And the rings just keep emulating out. And you pick up something way across the pond, and it's related to the original rock and you first you don't know it, and then all of a sudden you realize, oh, and it goes off in your head, that discovery thing I was doing as a little kid, even though it was probably started with mud. And my sister throwing it at me. And I said, Oh, that's my that's nice. But the idea was the composition of mud, then it turned into can I make synthetic mud? And everybody's going what's synthetic mud? You crazy? Yeah, but I want I want pretend mud. And that was before there was pretend mud, which somebody made a billion bucks on that idea. Right. So I also wish there were practical applications for the crazy stuff that we're doing in culinary. That is a lot like a chef just sitting in a closet thinking okay, what should I do next? And it reminds me of where I started with a guy named Julius Herford, who was an internationally famous composer and musician, and he taught Leonard Bernstein. And the rest of them. They all were students, Andre Previn, so that shows you how old I am. Because nobody knew who those people were when they were students. But Julius said, his favorite thing to do is to take a musical score and go in the closet and turn the light off and often wondered what the hell that meant, because I was only six when I heard it. What's he talking about? I asked my mom and dad is He's a very smart man. I said, I didn't ask that. What was he saying? And my mother said, you think about it, and we'll talk about it tomorrow. And then we never had that discussion. But the idea is now that the ancillary ideas that came out of what we lost in rice culture are applicable across the board. Everybody can do it. Now. Citizen sciences here. I think the last time we talked that did not come up. It's the point at which somebody like me that has no formal training whatsoever, can kind of pretend like they're doing something original, or helping. I think helpings even a better word that has changed exponentially in the last five

Stephanie Burt 29:23

years. This sounds a lot like new math. Exactly. And there's so much what you're saying, you know, I'm a big physics person. And so I'm hearing things and I'm going well, that's a physics concept that you're applying to seed reclamation and seed modification and experimentation, right? Yeah.

Glenn Roberts 29:46

Well, Velikovsky, wrote, Worlds in Collision turned out to be pseudoscience. And I was more interested in pseudoscience than I was in the real thing, which kept me open And enough to do stuff incredibly dumb. That ended up working. And a lot of the people, I remember my hero in the whole world is Anna McClung. She's got postdocs in maize, wheat and rice. So she's just devastatingly smart. And I can remember her telling me, she said, You know what? It's kind of like you're a mule in the field, and you're turning up a goldmine. It's not fair. I said, I don't even know what you just said. Right?