USC Times April 2017

USCTIMES

APRIL 2017 / VOL. 28, NO.3

FARM TO TABLE

Farm & Garden

'Round the Mulberry

Local Lunch

Faculty, staff and students reap what they sow, page 6

David Shields returns forgotten fruit tree to the Midlands, page 12

Arnold School researchers promote fresh produce in school cafeterias, page 16

USC TIMES / STAFF

FROM THE EDITOR USC Times is published 10 times a year for the faculty and staff of the University of South Carolina by the Office of Communications & Public Affairs, Wes Hickman, director.

Managing Editor Craig Brandhorst Creative Director Bob Wertz Designer Brinnan Wimberly Contributors Chris Horn Page Ivey Megan Sexton Melinda Waldrop Photographers Adrienne Cooper Ambyr Goff Kim Truett Printer USC Printing Services Campus correspondents James Raby, Aiken Kerry Jarvis, Beaufort Jeanne Petrizzo, Greenville Shana Dry, Lancaster Jane Brewer, Salkehatchie Misty Hatfield, Sumter Annie Smith, Union Tammy Whaley, Upstate Jay Darby, Palmetto College Submissions Did you know you can submit ideas for future issues of USC Times? Share your story by emailing or calling Craig Brandhorst at craigb1@mailbox.sc.edu, 803-777-3681.

FRUITS OF OUR LABOR Front to back, this may be the most colorful USC Times we’ve ever published. I mean, look at those glimmering bell peppers gracing our cover. Look at the apples and Swiss chard on pages four and five, the plump red tomatoes on 16 and 17. Look at the herbs, the string beans, the grass, the field greens …

We didn’t set out to publish such a vibrant issue. It happened naturally. It happened organically. It happened because it’s spring and we stepped outside and because we were hungry for something seasonal and fresh, local and nutritious.

It happened because it was time.

We’d been planning a farm-to-table issue for months, and then one Tuesday in March we found ourselves chatting with the vendors at the Healthy Carolina Farmers Market — and while we were at it, snapping pics for a gallery, and after that, calling Sustainable Carolina and the Carolina Community Garden at Preston Green, and after that, well, let’s just say it didn’t take long to fill our basket.

And what a basket it is, starting with the aforementioned gallery. In addition to brightly colored fruits, veggies, spices and herbs, we also give you the customers and vendors who make our market more than just a place to grab an apple on your way across campus.

The farm-to-table movement isn’t just about the farm, and it isn’t just about the table. “It’s the people, the students, the faculty,” vendor Mandy Churchwell told us when asked what she liked best about selling produce on campus. “We get repeat customers, and they can depend on us.”

Churchwell has a point. You find some pretty good people at the market, and if you spend a little time talking to them, they’ll lead you to other good people, who will lead you to other good people, so on and so forth, until you’re ready to plant your own backyard garden.

Consider the half dozen folks featured in “Farm & Garden,” our tribute to going green and growing green, on campus and beyond. From Matt Kip, garden manager for Sustainable Carolina, to Buz Kloot, associate professor of environmental health sciences and regenerative farming advocate, we’ve laid out quite a spread.

And we’re not even to the main dish — the sweet promise of a rediscovered heirloom fruit courtesy of English professor and culinary historian David Shields. For Shields, who has been helping to revive lost cultivars for years, the Hicks Everbearing mulberry represents just one more reclamation project in an ongoing string of them. For the rest of us, it’s food for thought, plus an interesting story.

Food for thought and interesting stories. That’s a pretty good recipe, and not just for heirloom produce. Indeed, you could call that the recipe for this entire issue, and you wouldn’t be disappointed. As Shields himself puts it, “If it tastes good and has a story — bingo, you’ve got something.” Well, okay then.

Bingo,

The University of South Carolina does not discriminate in educational or employment opportunities or decisions for qualified persons on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation or veteran status.

CRAIG BRANDHORST MANAGING EDITOR ON THE COVER - The Veggie Patch at Healthy Carolina Farmers Market.

For more, see End Notes.

VOL. 28, NO.3 3

TIMES FIVE

DOCTORS ON DEMAND Under the weather? Too busy for the waiting room? With a Blue CareOnDemand video visit, State Health Plan members can see a U.S. board-certified doctor via computer or mobile device 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Doctors can diagnosis common health issues and even write prescriptions, when appropriate. Blue CareOnDemand is not a replacement for your primary care doctor. Visit sc.edu/facultystaff and click on the Human Resources tab for more information.

DEVELOPING A PLOT Outdoor Recreation is looking for teams of at least four people to tend campus garden plots. Carolina Community Garden at Preston Green features 20 raised beds, and the Strom Thurmond Wellness and Fitness Center Garden features six. Plots are awarded through an application process. To apply, visit campusrec.sc.edu/outdoor-recreation.

HIT THE BOOK! The 2017 Open Book literary lecture series runs through April 26.

Each Monday, host Elise Blackwell or a guest speaker will discuss a different book in anticipation of a talk by the book’s author on Wednesday. All talks except for the April 19 lecture by Jonathan Franzen will be held in the Campus Room at Capstone. Franzen will speak in Hootie Johnson Hall. The free series, sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, runs from 6 to 7 p.m. and is open to the public. Visit artsandsciences.sc.edu/theopenbook.

You Are What You Read Inside Carolina, the university’s monthly e-newsletter for the off-campus community, is a great way for friends and family to satisfy their hunger for all things USC.

Professional Development Plus Laughter Administrative professionals can register for a half-day conference on personal and professional development to be held April 28, 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Educator Paulette Cunningham will discuss strengthening workplace relationships. Stephen Patterson, author of “Better Living through Laughter,” will talk about lightening your mood with humor. The cost is $70 per person and includes breakfast and lunch. To register, visit sc.edu/facultystaff and click on professional development under the Human Resources tab.

Invite them to the table at sc.edu/InsideCarolina

InsideCarolina

4 USCTIMES / APRIL 2017

POINT&CLICK

MARKET WATCH KATE BLANTON, first-year adviser from HRSM, visited the Veggie Patch table and enjoyed a new experience — her first mango. “I’m just starting on fruits and vegetables, after 35 years,” Blanton said as she sampled a slice. “The mango is delicious. I’m super excited that I like it. That’s a big deal for me.”

Asked if she'd take another taste for the camera, she didn’t hesitate. “I’d eat another piece of mango …”

VOL. 28, NO.3 5

RAMIRO RAMURGUIA, market coordinator for Sustainable Carolina, mans a table at the Healthy Carolina Farmers Market on Greene Street each Tuesday. “Everything we bring is grown on campus, by students,” Ramurguia told USC Times. “We’re all organic and we’re a permaculture farm. Matt Kip, our garden manager, is teaching us everything he can about growing things as they grow in nature” (See “Reversing Course,” page 7).

6  USCTIMES / APRIL 2017

FARM & GARDEN Produce. Livestock. How, when and where do we grow what we grow and raise what we raise? In the farm-to-table movement, questions like these separate organic wheat from factory chaff. But who does the growing matters almost as much. With that in mind, USC Times went looking for the faces of the movement and found several in our own backyard.

VOL. 28, NO.3 7

REVERSING COURSE

By Megan Sexton

“I had a sense of the collision course of our industrial culture and nature. I thought, ‘Isn’t there some other way to be on the earth than to destroy it?’”

Matt Kip remembers playing in acres and acres of forest as a child. And he remembers watching that forest about 30 minutes north of Columbia get bulldozed in the name of progress. It was an experience that shaped his life.

“I had a sense of the collision course of our industrial culture and nature,” says Kip, the garden manager with Sustainable Carolina Farm and Gardens. “I thought, ‘Isn’t there some other way to be on the earth than to destroy it?’”

He came across the concept of permaculture — a way of education, business and daily life that weighs the needs of both people and nature. In the garden, it means using natural ecosystems as its blueprint for design, and employing sustainable practices such as composting and rainwater harvesting.

“It became my life. It’s one of the few concepts that could actually save the world if it was adapted and used,” he says.

After being trained in permaculture design, Kip was hired in 2007 to create the university’s Green Quad community garden, which later became the Sustainable Carolina Farm and Gardens. He left to build a business with his wife leading wild plant foraging tours, did permaculture design consultations and lived for a year with their three children in a 250-squarefoot cabin in the North Carolina mountains, foraging and selling wild, edible mushrooms, before returning to Columbia.

Now back at USC, he tends crops and guides students interested in gardening and sustainability.

In the winter garden, crops include kale, collards, bok choy, broccoli, leaks, onions and lettuce in the outdoor organic space. The woodlands garden is stacked with plants including berries, apples, pears and asparagus. The greenhouse is used for seed starting and for tropical plants such as bananas and papayas.

“The garden started as me with a shovel. Now there’s a whole infrastructure of garden guides, students trained in permaculture and in how to keep the garden running,” he says.

The approximately one-fifth-acre garden at Green Quad supplies food for the weekly Healthy Carolina Farmers Market and provides some produce for Carolina Dining and the Gamecock Pantry. Other food is taken home by volunteers. The garden also creates volunteer and leadership opportunities for students, who are able to get experience with small-scale food production and who learn how to run a farm-to-table vendor operation.

“I’m glad to be back. One thing I enjoy is a lot more student engagement,” he says. “Seeing them learning stuff and throwing questions at me. That keeps it alive and interesting to me.”

By M

8 USCTIMES / APRIL 2017

Heritage Stock Every spring when Joe Jones tills his garden, shards of old china plates churn up in the red clay, a reminder of the family treasures his great-great-grandmother buried there in 1865 during Gen. Sherman’s march.

That Civil War tale and others like it are part of the quaint history of Doko Farm, a 43-acre spread north of Columbia that’s been in Jones’ family since about 1820. Jones, the principal of USC’s Green Quad and a research associate professor in the Arnold School of Public Health, has kept the farming tradition alive on the family land with a deliberate nod to the past.

He and his wife, Amanda, raise heritage livestock — animal breeds from a bygone era that are well-adapted to the local environment and noncommercial farming practices.

The Jones’ chickens, turkeys, ducks, pigs and sheep all hail from heritage stock.

“We think the heritage breeds are much more flavorful than commercially grown live-

By Chris Horn

stock,” Jones says. “Our sheep are raised for meat, not wool, so we raise a breed from St. Croix in the Virgin Islands that don’t have to be sheared and can tolerate our hot summers.

The pigs don’t grow as big as the modern breeds, but the flavor is better — at least we think so.”

Amanda Jones has a background in environmental health and a wealth of experience in tending to wounded wildlife from her previous career in California. Those skills come in handy where livestock mishaps are part of farm life.

Doko Farm is on Cedar Creek Road, between U.S. Hwy. 321 and S.C. Hwy. 215, and about 15 miles north of the city.

Until well into the 20th century, it could be reached only by a wagon-rutted path.

The Joneses, with their young daughter and son, live in the farmhouse that his great-great-grandfather built with handhewn timbers and hand-cut nails. They’ve

replaced the windows and added modern appliances, of course, but the house probably looks much the same as it did more than a century ago.

“We probably could have bought a nice place on the lake for what we put into restoring the farmhouse, but you can’t put a price tag on something like this,” Jones says. “It’s part of the land we’re now the stewards of.”

And the Joneses take a long view of their stewardship. Amanda Jones is working on a permaculture plan for the land around the house that will involve planting a small orchard of fruit trees. The 21st-century orchard will grow alongside blueberry bushes and plum and fig trees planted decades ago.

“The canopy from the trees will shade out the weeds, so when we’re in our 60s, 70s and 80s, we’ll have a fruit crop with little work,” Jones says. “We like to eat, but we don’t like to work very hard.”

VOL. 28, NO.3 9

DO NOT DISTURB

By Melinda Waldrop

Buz Kloot, left, with Kansas farmer Darin Williams. Photo: Lizbet Palmer

“It’s seeing is believing.

Soil function makes water go in the ground and recycles nutrients and keeps plants healthy. Those are the things that a farmer cares about.”

Buz Kloot, an associate professor of environmental health sciences in the Arnold School of Public Health, is an aquatic scientist by training, but his passion is soil.

“I’d always thought of soil as just kind of dirt — a mixture of sand, silt and clay,” Kloot says. “In all my life and career, I had never thought about soils as living entities.”

But Kloot’s view has changed, and he thinks an entire way of life can change with it.

“Farming has increasingly become more mechanized, and less labor-intensive and profitable for the farmer,” he says.

“The farmer is in this arms race to buy bigger and bigger equipment and farm more and more acres. We think we can attract more people back to farmlands and build better communities through regenerative farming.”

Kloot says such a lofty goal can be accomplished by the simple principle of minimum disturbance. He’s worked with five S.C. farmers in three counties for the past three years, seeing yields increase and costs drop as they avoid herbicides, pesticides and tilling, plant cover crops and diversify crop rotations.

Cover crops help keep a live root in the soil year-round, maintaining a healthy nutrient balance and retaining moisture, and avoid the no-no of fallow fields. “If you treat the soil the way Mother Nature treats the soil, you can change things,” Kloot says.

With a few computer clicks, Kloot pulls up side-by-side video comparisons of a soil clump from a Dillon farmer who has been practicing no-till farming with cover crops and one from a neighboring field not planted with cover

crops. The first farmer’s soil is stable, held together by visible roots. His neighbor’s has disintegrated into a liquid mess.

“We know that between 5 and 40 percent of the plant’s photosynthetic energy goes down into the soil and feeds the soil through the roots,” Kloot says. “When we feed the soil, essentially we’re putting carbon in the soil, and we are attracting soil microbes that in turn provide a lot of beneficial services to the plant. If you take that out, then you’ve got to substitute it with chemicals.”

The farmers Kloot works with manage a total of 12,000 acres in Richland, Dillon and Marlboro counties. They’ve significantly reduced their nitrogen use and saved hundreds of thousands of dollars once spent on fertilizer, he says. One farmer left nitrogen out of a row of his cotton crop, which produced more than a thousand pounds — including more in the row without nitrogen than anywhere else.

“When he saw that, he went out the next day and bought two and a half thousand acres of cover crop seed,” he says.

Kloot talks excitedly of growth potential using natural methods in crops such as peas, exotic grains and grass-fed beef. Beekeeping can flourish with reduced chemical use, he says. And while practices might change a bit based on region or soil type, the principle of minimal disturbance holds true everywhere.

“There are a lot of opportunities if we can get the farmer out of this treadmill of debt,” Kloot says. “If we define soils as a medium to grow plants, all we have in our minds is essentially dirt. If it’s just dirt, we have to add all the inputs to make the plants grow.”

10 USCTIMES / APRIL 2017

Gardener Charlie Ryan and Patricia Moore-Pastides

RESETTING THE TABLE

“We need to broaden out and expand our horizons where vegetables are concerned.

My desire is to promote what we used to call wellness, but now it’s called lifestyle medicine.”

By Megan Sexton

From the time she moved into the President’s House in 2008, First Lady Patricia Moore-Pastides has focused attention on the importance of healthy living on campus. An example of her work is tucked behind the President’s House, where an organic vegetable garden produces a bounty of produce that ends up on plates at university events and tables at the weekly Healthy Carolina Farmers Market.

For Moore-Pastides, a public health professional and the author of two Mediterranean cookbooks, the commitment to better health is her motivation.

“I think the standard American diet is quite unhealthy. It’s dominated by meat and doesn’t promote varied vegetables.

The vegetable that is most common is the white potato — French fries,” she says. “We need to broaden out and expand our horizons where vegetables are concerned. My desire is to promote what we used to call wellness, but now it’s called lifestyle medicine. It does matter what we eat. The ingredients in our diet are so important, and we know that now.

“Plus, I think it’s fun to break the mold and try something new.”

She has been breaking the mold on the ingredients used by university chefs to prepare dishes served at the President’s House, using seasonal produce grown in the organic garden along with recipes from one of her cookbooks.

“I’m happy that we’ve really changed dining in terms of entertainment at the university to be more plant-based and more local and more seasonal. People have appreciated that,” she says. “And I’ve been surprised with what the chefs come up with.”

For example, a recent meal at the president’s house featured a collard salad seasoned with cumin and other spices.

“What’s fun is that when you are focusing on a plant-based diet, you can go in so many ethnic directions. People like that when they come to events,” she says. “A lot of times when you go to cafeterias, students gravitate to what they know. We’re trying to promote a varied table. Hopefully because of that, students will enjoy the flavors and seek them out.”

That means a winter garden filled with beets, carrots, garlic, broccolini, kale, Swiss chard and mustard greens. In summer, there will be tomatoes, zucchini, yellow squash, peppers and eggplant. There are always plenty of herbs for seasoning.

And right now, a variety of parsnip named “Harris” — more specifically, the Harris Model Parsnip, planted by gardener Charlie Ryan — is growing.

It’s a popular spot, especially for the other Horseshoe residents — the squirrels, who ignored the garden for the first several years but then realized there was something to eat other than acorns and French fries.

“One of the gardeners saw a squirrel had pulled down a giant tomato and was rolling it down the brick walk,” she says.

“In the fall, they went through all the Brussels sprouts and cabbage. One year, they ate the kale.”

VOL. 28, NO.3 11

Dream Gardens When sophomore Sonna Boothroyd works in the Carolina Community Garden at Preston Green, she is able to forget she is in the middle of the city.

“I’ve always been an outdoorsy person. Even if I’m just out there weeding, this sense of peace comes over me. I love getting my hands in the dirt,” Boothroyd says. “Even though we’re in the city, I feel like I’m in the middle of nature. It’s very relaxing.”

Boothroyd is the chair of Preston Residential College’s gardening committee. In that role, she works with about 15 other Preston residents and Lara Lomicka Anderson, Preston’s faculty principal, to make sure her group’s three raised gardens are planted, tended and harvested each semester.

“I didn’t know much about gardening before this, but I’ve always been into nutrition and organic food. I thought this would be a great opportunity to learn,” she says. “And it’s really helped me appreciate food more — the natural taste of food. It teaches you patience, too.”

Boothroyd says she does a little research before planting time, including checking out the Farmers’ Almanac and consulting with university gardener Charlie Ryan. The Outdoor Recreation office coordinates the 20 raised beds on Preston Green, which faculty, staff and student groups can apply to use each semester.

By Megan Sexton

For Boothroyd and her fellow students at Preston, it’s meant a bounty of peas, autumn squash, carrots, parsley, lettuce, rosemary, basil, oregano and sage. And kale — lots and lots of kale.

“The kale really grows well," she says. “We’re always saying, ‘Please take some kale. Please.’”

Her involvement with the garden also feeds her imagination. As a social work major, she sometimes thinks about how she could one day apply what she’s learning in the small garden behind her residence hall to a larger project that could help others, possibly overseas.

“One of my dreams is to have a community garden in an impoverished area,” she says. “It would be great to be able to teach people how to grow their own food, what’s nutritious, how to take care of their own bodies. Instead of just dumping salt on everything — which I’m guilty of myself — it’s better just to use more spices and herbs, things like that.”

And being in charge of Preston’s gardening committee has other benefits that will serve her well no matter where her career takes her.

“This has forced me to be a leader and keep people accountable,” she says. “This is what we talk about when we talk about being an org leader in Preston.” T

12 USCTIMES / APRIL 2017

'ROUND THE MULBERRY A lost fruit tree returns to its Columbia roots

By Craig Brandhorst

T

angles of grape vines, lush plums and dangling pears, oyster plants and delicate roses — you wouldn’t know it today, but 200 years ago the downtown Columbia hilltop now dominated by USC’s new law school was thick with competing gardens.

And the most prominent of those gardens, across Gervais Street from the new law building, was owned by Nicholas Herbemont, a renowned horticulturalist and the university’s first French instructor.

“That entire block was a sort of horticultural paradise,” says David Shields, professor of early American literature and self-styled culinary historian. “There are stories from early Columbia of women being bedewed with

purple if they walked on that side of the street under the vines. His great dream was actually that the Midlands of South Carolina would become a wine district.”

To listen to Shields’ colorful descriptions is to enter a world of vanished splendor.

“Herbemont’s wife, Caroline, was a breeder of roses, including the Herbemont rose, a noisette musk cluster rose, white with a pinkish hue,” he says. “The top of the hill in Columbia was considered almost like the gardens of Babylon!”

Shields has license for a little hyperbole.

Over the last two decades, he has collaborated with farmers, horticulturalists and chefs interested in bringing back lost cultivars,

and he has traveled the world to find them.

And while the downtown Columbia block three streets from his campus office would be dwarfed by contemporary farms and gardens, it’s a virtual backyard for his imagination, not to mention his research.

Witness the Hicks Everbearing mulberry, a cultivar produced by Nicholas Herbemont around 1813 and one of Shields’ many obsessions. As Shields explains, Herbemont crossed the hearty native red mulberry with the more delicate Asian white mulberry, a plant prized by entrepreneurs and schemers seeking to establish a silk industry in America.

Herbemont planted approximately 20 of the new trees on his property and wrote at length

VOL. 28, NO.3 13

“IT ISN’T AS THOUGH THE EVIL EMPIRE TOOK OVER IN TERMS OF BREEDING IN THE 1890S, BUT ALL OF A SUDDEN YOU HAD COMMODITY CROPS. DISEASE RESISTANCE AND OTHER FACTORS TRUMPED TASTE.” — David Shields

about their propagation, according to Shields, but his goal wasn’t mulberry pie or preserves or fruit for the table. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he wasn’t hoping to enter the silk trade, either.

“He certainly wrote about silk, and he thought silk would be part of the future of South Carolina, but from the first, he intended it as food for hogs,” Shields says.

“His intention was to create a mulberry that didn’t just drop fruit for a month and a half but that would produce enormous amounts of fruit for four months.”

And his mulberries did well — not just in his Columbia orchard but throughout the Southeast.

Thanks to arborists William and Adam Summer, who ran the famed 19th century Pomaria Nursery 30 miles from Columbia and distributed Herbemont’s cultivars to other nurseries, the new mulberry wound up in orchards, gardens and backyards far from their original breeding ground.

The tree was eventually rechristened the Hicks mulberry by an arborist in Georgia, but Herbemont would be credited parenthetically throughout the 19th century. And as Herbemont intended, its plentiful fruit did indeed become feed for livestock, including not just hogs but also chickens, both of which, according to Shields, were prized for their succulence.

“Every nursery had Hicks mulberries until, I’d say, the 1880s, 1890s, but mulberries suffered this extraordinary decline in repute,” he says. “One, the white mulberry boom busted when streams of silk fortune never material-

Hicks mulberry cuttings taken from a 160-year-old tree in February.

14 USCTIMES / APRIL 2017

ized, and then the feed systems for hogs and chickens goes almost entirely to grain.”

It’s a familiar story to Shields and his many collaborators, who have thus far reclaimed more than two dozen heirloom varieties of fruit, vegetable, grain and legume. A move toward industrial farming and food manufacture improved yield and boosted industry profits, but crop diversity suffered and, ultimately, so did taste.

“It isn’t disease that kills off the Hicks mulberry. It’s a paradigm shift in how to feed livestock,” Shields says. “In the United States, the mulberry ceases to be grown in the 20th century as a food source for animals, and the ever-bearing mulberry became just the thing that ruined your mom’s rug.”

In time, Herbemont’s once-ubiquitous cultivar became the foodstuff of lore, something scholars like Shields might read about but never sample — until he and alumnus Keith Mearns, ’12, a horticulturalist at Historic Columbia, learned of a vestigial orchard near Mount Olive, N.C. “Keith and I tracked down a man named A.J. Bullard, this retired dentist, who is also an extraordinary fruit savant,” says Shields.

“He himself is a great fan of mulberries, and he grows all sorts of them in his backyard.

His favorite are the black English-Persian mulberries, but he knew about the existence of the old historic ones we were looking for.”

Swallowed at some point by a pine plantation, the nine gnarly, 150-year-old Hicks mulberry trees Bullard led them to were spaced in 40-foot intervals, according to 19th century pomological practice. The nearby presence of persimmons gave further indication that the property had once been a hog farm.

After agreeing to a trade — “Everything in this world is a deal,” Shields says with a storyteller’s knack for drama, “so we took him some Sandhills rosemary” — Bullard showed Shields and Mearns where they could take a few Hicks cuttings. These were then brought

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“WITH OUR PROPERTIES, WE TRY TO THINK NOT JUST ABOUT HISTORICAL ACCURACY. ACCURACY IS IMPORTANT, BUT WE WANT PEOPLE TO USE THEM, SO THEY ALSO HAVE TO BE ACCESSIBLE AND EDUCATIONAL — AND WE NEED THE STORIES.” — Keith Mearns

to the grounds of Historic Columbia, at the 18th century Seibels House, just six blocks north of the site where Herbemont grew the original stock.

History was coming full circle, the project’s literal fruition was just two or three years off and Shields’ imagination started to play with possibilities. Maybe you could make mulberry sugar, maybe a chef could transform the fruit’s cloying sweetness through

molecular gastronomy, maybe someone could breed organic chickens under a Hicks mulberry and reintroduce a forgotten flavor.

“It’s worthwhile personally,” Shields says.

“Since I’m hunting for good flavor, I tend to eat very good stuff. There is a really immense gratification in adding a significant thing to the quanta of human experience.”

Unfortunately, the initial experiment failed.

None of the cuttings took root.

“Getting them to root is probably the hardest part,” says Mearns, who has since tweaked his approach. “It’s sort of a mysterious process. You wait for callous formation, like a wound. After that, it roots out. And if we can get them to root, we definitely have a place for them.”

As of early April 2017, the latest cuttings were sprouting verdant shoots. Once roots establish, Mearns says, the saplings will be transplanted to the gardens at the nearby Robert Mills house, where Historic Columbia is already cultivating other native species, including another Shields reclamation, the Herbemont wine grape. If all goes well, the first mulberries will appear alongside them in a few years.

Time, luck and outside interest will determine where things go from there, but Shields says hog farmers have already contacted the Columbia-based team as well as a woman in Virginia who has since taken her own cuttings

from the Mount Olive trees. “If you grow heritage pigs, you want to feed them the stuff that made them famous,” Shields says.

But for the berries themselves to become famous again, the trees need to do more than just bear fruit, says Shields. As with other reclaimed produce — the Bradford watermelon from Sumter, S.C., the now prized Carolina Gold rice from the Lowcountry, the Jimmy Red corn now being used by whisky distillers — Shields would ultimately like to see the Hicks mulberry reinterpreted.

“Once we get these mulberries back, maybe there is a chef that can make something out of them that makes something new out of their less-inviting qualities — their squishiness, their peculiar and uncomplicated sweetness,” he says. “What you want is to exercise all of the free play that human imagination, including culinary imagination, has at its disposal, to take that excellent flavor, mingle it with other flavors or process it in new ways.”

Which is not to say Shields wouldn’t sample a chicken dish like those he has encountered in his research.

“I would love to taste a mulberry-fed chicken. I’ve read about its legendary savoriness,” he says. “But the flavor is the driver.

Stuff can have a great story, but if it doesn’t taste good, people aren’t going to buy it. If it tastes good and has a story — bingo, you’ve got something.” T

16 USCTIMES / APRIL 2017

Local Lunch

BY PAGE IVEY

Farm-to-School program plants seeds of healthy eating

“Who knew that a nutritionist was going to be working on business supply chains? But you do what you have to do.”

— Sonya Jones

How do you get children to eat their fruits and veggies, especially when Mom and Dad aren’t eating theirs?

Sonya Jones, director of the Center for Research in Nutrition and Health Disparities at the Arnold School of Public Health, is trying to answer that question ­— and has been ever since the center conducted a study on children’s diets at 19 South Carolina schools.

The study, known as the Farm-to-School program, compared food trays — photographed before and after lunch — at elementary and middle schools. On one side were trays from schools participating in the Farm-to-School program; on the other, trays from similar schools in the same districts that did not have the program.

While the students weren’t exactly scarfing down their fruits and vegetables, the study did show that the students in the Farm-to-School program were more likely to at least taste and eat some of their servings.

“Certainly the school meals program is making it possible to get one or two cups of fruit and vegetables a day,” Jones says. “In the non Farm-to-School locations, they weren’t even tasting them.”

A native of North Carolina with a degree in Latino studies, Jones came to nutrition, in part, after her husband was diagnosed with cancer and was looking for solutions through nutrition. Now she works to combat food insecurity, hunger and health disparities, though she says all Americans are falling short of the national recommended nutrition guidelines.

“I am thinking about food security all the time,” Jones says. “When you look at what Americans in general are eating, we all eat a really lousy diet.”

According to a nationwide healthy eating index that ranks diets on a 100-point scale, the typical American diet scores a failing grade of 60. “The average child eats less than a serving of fruit every day and less than a serving of vegetables a day, and that’s everybody, not just poor kids,” she says.

The Farm-to-School program also connects South Carolina farmers with the schools. At least twice a month, participating schools offer South Carolina-grown produce, though sometimes there’s a breakdown in the supply chain.

“Some of the research we’ve been working on is what food distribution systems are needed here and how we can bring those together so that schools do get a connection to farms,” Jones says. “Who knew that a nutritionist was going to be working on business supply chains? But you do what you have to do.”

The program’s final component is the creation of school gardens.

“The idea is getting opportunities to interact with food and how food is grown, learning more about local farmers and where food comes from,” Jones says, “and then also having foods identified in the cafeteria as being from local farms that would encourage kids to eat more fruits and vegetables.”

VOL. 28, NO.3 17

IMAGINE More plants, less meat

By Page Ivey Arnold School study explores anti-inflammatory value of plant-based diet Arnold School of Public Health researcher Brie Turner-McGrievy has discussed the effectiveness of a vegan diet for weight loss in Time magazine, Women’s Health and the Washington Post. Now she is awaiting the results of an even more comprehensive study that could show the benefits of a plant-based diet on inflammation.

The IMAGINE diet study involved about 60 adults in the Columbia area who had a typical Southern diet, including lots of meat. The goal was to see whether eliminating animal products from that diet, and increasing anti-inflammatory foods, would reduce participants’ level of inflammation, which has been tied to increased cancer risks and other diseases.

Turner-McGrievy’s study was funded by the National Institutes of Health through fellow Arnold School researcher James Hebert’s company Connecting Health Innovations. It used the Dietary Inflammatory Index, a tool created

by Hebert to quantify a diet on how pro- or anti-inflammatory it is.

“Most of the animal-based foods like red meat were very pro-inflammatory, and the anti-inflammatory foods were things like leafy greens and squashes and vegetables and spices — onion, garlic, cumin, those kind of things,” Turner-McGrievy says. “So those were the things that we really wanted to emphasize as part of the diet.”

While the results of the inflammation part of the study are still unknown, Turner-McGrievy says the study clearly showed health benefits for participants.

“It wasn’t necessarily targeted as a weight loss intervention, but in terms of weight loss, we saw that our intervention group lost significantly more weight than the control group did, which we were happy to see,” she says.

There also were improvements in blood pressure and blood-lipid levels, though because the study also tracked other factors, such as participant activity levels, Turner-McGrievy and fellow researchers Delia Smith West and Christine Pellegrini now want to conduct a followup study to analyze the relative impact each part of the puzzle has on the health improvements.

“The goal will be to really tease out how improvements in diet, physical activity and stress management impact inflammation and health in general, both separately or in various combinations,” Turner-McGrievy says.

As part of that follow-up, the team also wants to look at predictors of adherence, particularly taste preference.

“There has been literature around people who are bitter-tasters having a harder time adhering to an anti-inflammatory diet because it’s onions and garlic and broccoli,” says Turner-McGrievy. “It’s things that people may have more difficulty enjoying if they are really sensitive to bitter flavors.”

For people interested in trying a plant-based diet, Turner-McGrievy recommends going full-force for three weeks to give your taste buds time to change.

“After just three weeks, you’ll see some benefits right away,” she says. “Your heartburn may go away, or you might realize you were lactose intolerant and never knew it.” T

“After just three weeks, you’ll see some benefits right away,” she says. “Your heartburn may go away, or you might realize you were lactose intolerant and never knew it.”

— Brie Turner-McGrievy

18 USCTIMES / APRIL 2017

BREAKTHROUGH BREAKOUT

PLANTS BY PRESCRIPTION Genetically engineered plants may suppress tumors

By Chris Horn

It’s been drilled into us since childhood that certain foods are good for

Vance had already developed a patented process for making any

our health and a select few might even prevent major illnesses like cancer.

type of miRNA in plants, and she used that to genetically manipulate

But the proverbial apple a day can’t compare with what Vicki Vance is

a common cruciferous plant called Arabidopsis to make three tumor-

growing in her lab.

suppressing miRNAs.

The molecular plant scientist at USC plans to retire next year, but she’s

A little more than a year ago, she and her lab team began feeding a

going out with a bang. An expert in genetic mechanisms of plants, Vance

steady diet of the special plant to rodents with a propensity for digestive

has genetically engineered a plant that can make tumor-suppressing

tumors. Preliminary results show that eating the special plant material

microRNA (miRNA). She got the idea a couple of years ago after reading

resulted in a reduced tumor burden.

the findings of a Chinese research team that had produced evidence of plant miRNA affecting mammals that ingested it.

“We asked ourselves, ‘What if we made tumor suppressor miRNA in a plant and fed it to an organism with cancer?’” she says.

There are some 2,000 types of miRNA that control every major

“We had to feed quite a lot of plant material to get that result — 10 percent of the total diet, and that might be too much for practical purposes,” Vance says. “We’re working on making a plant now that’s more concentrated in the miRNAs, and that’s looking very promising.”

Vance also found that the Arabidopsis packages up some of the

physiological process in the body at the cellular level. When the type

miRNA into microvesicles — basically, small pouches of genetic material

of miRNA that suppresses tumors is diminished, a cell’s ability to divide

that get taken up in the digestive tract of an animal. One of the three

rapidly can go unchecked, and when that miRNA increases, tumors are

tumor-supressing miRNAs is not being packaged in large amounts by the

more readily suppressed.

plant, but Vance has a strategy to fix that, and while she might not see

Cancer scientists have long been interested in using miRNA to control cancer, but it’s not easy. Synthetically manufactured miRNA rapidly

the project to full fruition before her retirement, she is confident that the concept of a therapeutic plant diet will advance.

degrades in the bloodstream and doesn’t infiltrate cells very well, Vance

“There’s a Chinese group that’s working on the same topic now, so

says. Putting the miRNA in nanoparticles and chemically modifying it to

eventually this technology will reach the world,” Vance says. “It seems so

make it more stable has yielded better results, but the accompanying

promising — a low-toxicity method of delivering tumor-fighting agents

toxicity can cancel out the benefits.

into the body.”

T

VOL. 28, NO.3 19

SYSTEM EQUATION

USC AIKEN

BY PAGE IVEY

New, fresh and not on Google USC Aiken prof brings students to the front line of research

USC Aiken biochemistry professor Nathan Hancock studies how tiny pieces of DNA called transposons, or more colloquially “jumping genes,” move from one part of the genome to another in plants and animals, causing mutations.

It’s research with implications for agriculture, medicine, pretty much any field affected by genetic mutations. It’s also research that requires many hands, meaning Hancock’s students get quality lab time while they’re still undergraduates.

One beneficiary is Allison Swiecki, a biology sophomore from Beech Island, S.C. “I would have never imagined I would love research to the extent that I do, and I attribute a large part of that to having a great mentor,” Swiecki says.

For Hancock, who is part of a grant that helps get students into the lab as early as their sophomore year, bringing undergraduates on board earlier rather than later is a way to set them up for bigger successes down the road.

“So many students come in not really knowing what they want to do,” Hancock says. “Exposing them to real research can change their lives.”

As an undergraduate, Hancock decided to study plant sciences because he loved gardening with his father. Then he fell in love with research and began pursuing his Ph.D. But, he says, he didn’t have a strong mentoring influence when he was an undergrad.

“I was at a much bigger university,” he says.

“In many ways, I’m trying to provide students what I didn’t get.”

For Swiecki, that means as much lab time as she can fit into her schedule. She is still trying to decide whether to pursue a Ph.D. or an M.D.-Ph.D. combo after graduation.

“When I actually started doing research, I loved it,” she says. “I really like how you have your own project. You have a mentor and a lab, but it’s your responsibility. It’s new, it’s fresh, it’s not on Google, nobody else is doing it.”

Swiecki says USC Aiken is adamant about students getting the opportunity to do research. She even met with professors while she was still a high school student — and now she’s working side-by-side with one.

“Dr. Hancock is a great mentor,” she says. “He understands that we don’t know everything. He explains things well and takes the time to make sure you understand, but he gives you your independence as well.”

It’s exactly that sort of attitude that Hancock looks for in student assistants.

“You can tell the students that are going to be good Ph.D. candidates,” he says. “They’re the ones who spend a lot of time in the lab without being prompted.”

But while Hancock’s research certainly benefits from the help of his students, the “a-ha” moments are still the best part. “What’s really cool is when these kids realize ‘I actually love science,’” he says. T

ENDNOTES

USC Upstate alumna Mandy Churchwell, ’09, business management, has been representing her family’s farm at the Healthy Carolina Farmers Market since the market began in 2008. The Veggie Patch, owned by Churchwell’s parents, is a Certified SC Grown farm, meaning at least half of what

they sell is grown on their 10-acre property in Neeses, S.C. In the spring, before most of the farm’s produce has come in, the Veggie Patch primarily stocks “grab and go” produce “providing something students can get on their way to class, so they don’t have to eat junk food,” says Churchwell, but starting in May, their own crops start to come in. “We sell a lot of our tomatoes, okra and corn in the summer,” she says.

Asked why she keeps coming, year after year, Churchwell smiles: “It’s the people, the students, the faculty. We get repeat customers, and they can depend on us. We interact with them and we let them sample, spring, summer and fall.”

The Veggie Patch's Mandy Churchwell, foreground, with Tonya McLeavy