Feeding the Root

Alumna prescribes produce as medicine

By Sarah Joyner

Samaria Grandberry was hosting a Juneteenth community wellness market on her great-grandfather’s land when it hit her. She had finally fulfilled a promise she made to him years ago.

When she was a student at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Grandberry studied abroad in Africa. Before leaving, she promised her great-grandfather she would bring something back to him; but he passed away while she was studying overseas.

“I was across the world. I never got a chance to say goodbye to him,” Grandberry says. “I never got a chance to bring something back to him.”

More than 200 people attended Grandberry’s Juneteenth event. She sold produce grown on the family farm and offered a food demonstration using traditional African foods. Local vendors set up tents and booths selling coffee and food. Folks rolled out yoga mats and took morning classes. All on the same field where her great-grandfather spent so much time tending rows of green beans and corn.

“Being there was my way of honoring him and bringing something back to him. Because I know that if he was there, he would have been so happy seeing our people and carrying on the legacy of what he did,” Grandberry says.

“He loved growing food and loved sharing it with people, and I was able to do that, just in a different way.”

DIETITIAN, ENTREPRENEUR, PHILANTHROPIST, GRADUATE STUDENT

In the three years since she graduated from the UTC Health and Human Performance department’s dietetics program, Grandberry’s been busy.

She’s blazing trails as a Black dietitian specializing in trichology, the study of diseases or problems related to hair and scalp. In 2020, she and her sister started a buy-one, give-one produce program to address food insecurity heightened by the pandemic in her hometown of Memphis. Every time someone bought a box of produce from her family’s farm, they donated another box of produce to the local food bank. From there, she founded her own private practice, Feeding the Root.

She says Feeding the Root grew out of necessity. Roughly 2.6 percent of dietitians in the U.S. identify as Black, “and in the city of Memphis, it’s even smaller. So I saw a huge need for a provider of color in my city,” Grandberry explains.

Grandberry specializes in helping people get to the root of their hair loss and other hair and scalp conditions. Her prescription? Lots of listening and the right kinds of food.

“I help them unpack what’s going on. Let’s look at the insides because your hair grows from the inside.”

Grandberry admits many people ask why she’s a dietitian talking about hair.

“Helping people understand the connection is a large part of what I’ve been working on, because a lot of people think of our hair as just this topical, outward thing. They don’t think of it as an outward manifestation of what’s going on inside.”

She’s tapping into her background and family farm to produce prescription boxes. The boxes of produce are curated depending on the client, often with food grown on her family’s land, and include recipes and meal plans.

It was on that farm where she grew up near Memphis that Grandberry spent early mornings helping her dad pick peas and corn before school. Back then, it was just another eye roll-inducing chore. Now, she’s putting those childhood experiences and the farm resources to use.

“I come from a family of what used to be sharecroppers, then just farming for pleasure and farming for our family,” she says. “That’s always been a part of my family and our heritage.”