Read Online The Tastemakers by David Sax - Free Book Online

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 anderror, 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.
    â€œThe 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