Free The Tastemakers by David Sax Page A

dabbled in a number of things. He flew jets in the Air Force, sailed around the world on yachts, rode horses, drove long-haul trucks, crewed on shrimp boats out of Charleston, and even tried his hand at growing corn, working at a cotton mill, and making moonshine (which he still has a soft spot for every so often). Eventually Roberts settled into restaurant consulting, working with chefs and ownerson everything from concepts and menus to architecture and construction, a discipline that demanded that his pulse rest firmly on the latest food trends. He opened, closed, and revived restaurants in California, DC, and the South, getting to know the country’s emerging top chefs, such as Thomas Keller, before they were household names. By the 1990s he had settled down in Charleston.
    Anson Mills came about thanks to a stroke of bad luck. In 1998 the Smithsonian Institution was conducting a series of historical dinners focusing on the railroad cuisine of the post–Civil War era, and they asked Roberts to help put one on in Charleston. He began working with a historian to learn about the cuisine from that time period, leading him to the Carolina Rice Kitchen, which had been named by historian Karen Hess. Roberts wanted to serve the rice that was central to many of those recipes, a strain called Carolina Gold, and he ended up at the Turnbridge Plantation just north of Savannah, which is one of the few places where that rice was still growing. Arriving late in the day, he looked out over the flooded fields of Carolina Gold rice, their stalks lit by the glow of the setting sun pouring across the water like spilled paint. “Man, it was gorgeous,” he said, the image still in his eyes. Glenn Roberts fell in love with growing rice right then and there. The first thing he did after leaving was send his mother a bag of that same rice for her approval. “She flipped out. She hadn’t seen anything like it since the Depression.”
    Unfortunately, the Smithsonian dinner turned into a disaster. The church group that was cosponsoring the event had no idea how to properly store the rice, and when Roberts opened the bags in the kitchen, an hour before service began, the precious grains were full of corn weevils, a common agricultural insect. He freaked out, then calmed down, told the kitchen to switch the order of the meal around, grabbed a few busboys, and got down to the dirty work of salvaging the rice. “Imagine sitting in a pair of Gucci loafers and an expensive suit, picking dead bugs out of rice for three hours,” he said. “It fucking sucked.” At the end of the night what stuck in people’s minds was the food, and the reaction they’d had to the rice more than made up for the agony of its execution. “I decided a lotof chefs would like that rice,” Roberts said. “It was the real thing.” Anson Mills began the next day.
    Roberts started growing corn right away because he had done it before and it was easy to cultivate quickly, and he used the proceeds to finance his first crop of Carolina Gold, which was more labor intensive. Using historical records and seeking out seed experts and backwoods farmers, he began pulling together a breadbasket of heritage southern grains, most of which were no longer commercially available. Anson Mills brought back native blue corn, heirloom yellow hominy corn, yellow flint popcorn, traditional couscous, Sea Island red peas, Carolina Graham wheat, Sonora white wheat, Einkorn wheat, Italian grains like several varieties of polenta, farro, buckwheat Taranga, and a whole slew of Carolina Gold products. Everything was grown using traditional, organic, sustainable methods, including hand harvesting, to retain flavor, preserve soil integrity, and keep a historical continuity with the grains. Multiple crops shared the same soil in rotation because they complemented each other’s flavors and doing so improved soil health. Rather than use large