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Where food opens the door to conversations about craft, culture & tradition.
The Wild Kitchen Ep. 15 Glenn Roberts
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Tiffany: [00:00:00] been developed for shelf life over flavor. My guest today went looking for the food that we lost. He found it in seed banks, old agricultural records, and with a few families who never stopped planting it. He got it back in the ground, gave the seed away to farmers, and worked directly with chefs so they would know how to cook it properly.
Welcome to the Wild Kitchen, Glenn Roberts. Hi. It's
Glenn: a pleasure to be here, Tiffany.
Tiffany: Well, it is, it is really great to have you here. I have to say, um, I do an intro for all my guests, and I see it as a way to welcome them to the podcast and introduce the audience to who they are if they don't know them already, and for yours, it was the most challenging I have-
I've ever... I- you have done so much, and you've had such an impact on the industry, and I couldn't, I felt like I just couldn't succinctly [00:01:00] get it into a introduction that, that was worthy of, of what you've done. And, and i- in our conversation the other day and chatting about, you know, you starting out at 17 working a TV station, you know, putting out bootleg movies, and, and, like, being a pilot when you're eight, like, I just, I, I'm curious how you went from, you know, TV station at 17 to doing, doing what you're doing now and, and how, how you got, how you, how you took that path.
Glenn: Um, well, it's, uh, the fault, uh, of my mother who- ... uh, was actually raised, uh, not more than 40 miles from where I'm sitting right now. Okay. Um, I took so much for granted as a kid. I didn't realize that, uh, normal families in La Jolla and San Diego in general, uh, didn't go down to the airport every week to get rice.[00:02:00]
Uh-
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: And, and I'm talking I'm five, I'm four. Mm-hmm. And we're going down to the international airport, San Diego was a very small town back then, uh, to get rice from a Pan Am pilot who was a friend of my mother's. He lived in Aiken and he used to fly his own aircraft to Atlanta and then he'd fly internationally out of Atlanta.
And this is back when, uh, this is the '50s, so, you know, Connie, uh, Constellations were just barely out, six engine, tri-tail, really cool international, uh, jet. And that's back when everybody was all dressed up and everything, and there are no security gates or anything. It's a- the fence at the r- runway where they pulled up was only two and a half to three feet tall.
I got to where I could jump over it, and that really scared my mom to death. But- ... um, I was always interested in the airplanes. Uh, and then because rice was coming off of them, and, uh, of all the crazy things [00:03:00] we cooked at home, like collards, uh, most people I think may have heard of this, but if they haven't, collards is Southern.
Uh, but it is not really Southern because it's, uh, an international, uh, phenomenal, uh, plant, which is used in neem suppression in non-chemical farming for rice. Hmm. So if you alternate collards and sesame and field peas, if you're doing rice, you have a perfect trilogy for food. Huh. If you harvest that, you can live on that forever.
Every nutrient in the world is in that if it's grown naturally, uh, and not pushed, uh, to grow. You can either intercrop it and do moist ground rice and everything else growing with it, or you can do them in succession. And I had no idea as a kid, obviously, and as a surfer as I grew up, my surfing buddies- [00:04:00] Would scream when mom brought out the collards.
But they would absolutely adore the rice and even the peas. Uh, so, you know, field peas is not something that people on the West Coast, uh, were, uh, worshiping. Um, mostly there was, uh, San Diego was Asian food because of the Navy presence there, and, uh, then local diners that had all kinds of things that essentially were grown at the monastery in Mission Valley.
And, uh, there's another connection there, too. My parents, because I was a very nervous child, uh, used to get free babysitting at the Jesuit monastery where the nuns were there, too. So it wasn't just Jesuits in, uh, Mission Valley. And so they used to drop me off 'cause they were both professional singers back then, and they were working with Robert Shaw, Julius Herford, Leonard Bernstein, everybody you can think of that's from generations ago.
Wow. A lot of people don't remember these people, but they were world-renowned artists.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: Um, [00:05:00] and Dad was taking a master's and a doctorate in composition for whatever reason I never really figured out 'cause he, he was a very good composer, but he never took that work to the public. Hmm. So they would drop me off at age five and six at the monastery in Mission Valley.
And back then, when you looked from the monastery down the valley, you could see the water. There was no commercial development out there. It was the hugest dairy farm in California back then. And so all you saw was just cattle off into the distance, and then you saw the dairy barn way off there on the left from up there.
But, um, I thought I was a Native girl 'cause Natives were working there. Their children in the field, uh, as part of their education would make nixtamal for tortillas and things like that for the monastery and for the sisters. And, um, it was amazing. The food was killer. And I just thought everybody grew up with tortillas.
I thought everybody grew up with corn in their backyard, [00:06:00] and everybody made masa every day. And I, I thought I was a really cool Native girl until I was, like, seven. Right? And then somebody said, "Well, you're really not." My parents didn't care.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: Right? They, they thought it was funny. Um, but, uh, so I had Native influences right off the bat.
I had a lot of Jesuit thinking right off the bat. We weren't Catholic, but, uh, Dad was kind of pan-religious because he was a professional musician, and, you know, directing a choir in any religious institution paid a lot of money.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: So we were, uh, one of everything, up to and including Seventh-day Adventist, and he was actually a cantor in the local synagogue in Hillcrest, Cal- South Ca- California, Southern California in, uh, Hillcrest.
And, um- All those different exposures had their food culture with them. Yeah. All those exposures, uh, and I was way over my [00:07:00] head at the time, had biosecurity with them, because native people in that region, and then Hispanic settlers in that region, and the Jesuits all had biosecurity on their own. Yeah.
They were independent. They weren't going to buy seed anywhere. They already had their own seed, 'cause it was part of the food chain.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: So I just took everything for granted like that, and then as I got older, I went off to conservatory, then, um, I went to college, and I didn't think about it for the first two years in college.
Then all of a sudden it dawned on me that I was driving through massive amounts of phenomenal farmland, because I went to Chapel Hill in North Carolina.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: And the farms there were on, still on what we call landrace seed, which is the seed that everybody had for thousands of years until Mendel came along and started accelerating things.
So- In a good and a bad way ...
Tiffany: can you, for people that haven't heard that term before, landrace, can you, can you describe that a little bit more, what, what, th- what that distinction is? 'Cause it's [00:08:00] pretty, pretty important for what you're doing.
Glenn: Yeah. Okay. So- That's not high.
Tiffany: That's,
Glenn: that's the hand that does land race.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: It's all done with this, and it's done with this and this and this.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: And in native communities, it's done with a... It's always, by the way, women.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: Uh, men were not allowed, uh, to do this in most cultures. There were a few.
Tiffany: Mm-hmm.
Glenn: Uh, and obviously Jesuits were, uh, interactive, but they would rely on native women, too.
And, uh, so this means selected by hands. You're going through the corn, and you look at every ear until you find the perfect one with this. Then you take that ear, and you set it aside. Okay. Or you have a, what's called cutting the corner, and you actually have a dedicated corn plot. You're still doing this because you're looking at the tax morph from the time the plant evolves out of the [00:09:00] ground all the way till it's time to harvest the corn.
And corn's a good example 'cause it's really tangible. Everybody sorta knows what a corn plant looks like.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: Uh, so when you use your hand, your eyes, your, uh, sense of, uh, aroma, f- and your, some people eat the kernels as they're, like, judging them. Yeah. I've seen a lot of native women do that. They don't even look at the ear.
They just take one kernel off and bite on it.
Tiffany: Really?
Glenn: Uh, uh, and so I've seen one of everything on that level.
Tiffany: Hmm.
Glenn: Uh, for rice, same thing. Look at every part of the plant. Watch it grow. Only take the best of the best away from the seed plot. That would equate to what we know as modern seed from voucher level, which is the highest purity in true type replication, through head row, which is a little larger plot, but you're still looking for absolute uniformity.
Next level is breeder, [00:10:00] which is a bigger plot. Same kind of uniformity, but less because you're getting more true type replication by the time you get to breeder, 'cause that's year three if you're doing it, uh, seasonally.
Tiffany: Hmm.
Glenn: And if you go to year four, you get to certified foundation seed. These are all modern, but they have their equivalence in native culture, which is all done by women.
Uh, they judge everything, and native women won all the corn shows in Iowa up until the time they got bored showing up. In Iowa, they used to build castles out of corn.
Tiffany: Really?
Glenn: And they'd cover whole houses out of corn, and they'd build huge sculptures like a globe, uh, the Earth made out of corn, and it's pretty crazy up there, but it really, uh, world-class art and amazing ideas.
And native women, uh, they'd say, "Okay, we need two red kernels on row number seven, three down from the top." And Native [00:11:00] women to do that.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: And they'd win the show because their stuff was the best, and they'd do it fastest and the best. So I've been following that for a long time, so it's all the way back to doing it like this.
When we get to Mendel- Mm ... microscopes, all kinds of things, and you're actually looking for stability in Mendelian. Uh, that was our first move, and we didn't think about aroma flavor profile when we did it.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: So we ruined a lot of really good land raised crops doing that, and having to get back to it really didn't start happening till right after World War II.
So we took a 60-year vacation from aroma flavor profile, which aroma and flavor equals nutrition. So when you're doing this, you're actually looking for the highest nutrition, too.
Tiffany: Okay, and these, these plants are, are growing a certain way in a certain place based on the certain conditions there. If you were to take a corn that you're growing in South Carolina and try to grow it where I am in BC, it's gonna be totally [00:12:00] different, correct?
Glenn: Yeah, that's called phenotypic plasticity. Okay. There'll be a test later. No, I'm
Tiffany: just kidding. I don't think I'm gonna do well.
Glenn: The, uh, limit for native people prior to first contact- Mm ... was what we would equate to 200, uh, kilometers.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: So they would run north and south out of South America. Mm. And literally run.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: Carrying the maize, because they knew- Mm ... biosecurity. They had to separate the source.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: So they'd run 200 kilometers, replant, and hang.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: And then they'd run 200 kilometers more north, and they'd go all the way up into what we call Colorado with those topical, uh, maize varieties that were mothered, that were very, very, uh, important to their culture.
And, uh-
Tiffany: Yeah ...
Glenn: the, the Niquit's, uh, caves, um, are sacred because that's, uh, what native culture says is the birthplace. So they'd run to Niquit's- [00:13:00] Mm ... and bless it, and then also swap genetics, because everybody from all over Central and South America and Mexico would come- Mm ... to Niquit's with their corn on a religious pilgrimage, which we-
Tiffany: Okay
Glenn: we'd call it that. They didn't. But-
Tiffany: Yeah ...
Glenn: we'd call it that. They were actually breeding, uh, but breeding was human, 'cause everything was mothered.
Tiffany: So often we're, we're told that y- you know, genetic, um, consistency in plants is, is not a good thing. We wanna have, you know, the, where we're, we're looking at heirloom plants.
These are plants from a long time ago, and these are great, and there's this almost idea that these are stable and th- the plant that, that great-great-grandma grew, this tomato plant, is gonna be identical to what you're growing now. Now, with these landrace plants, like, y- you're actively managing them to try to keep them to what you feel is authentic?
Or, or are you, are you... Like, I guess what I'm asking is [00:14:00] are you, is that correct, that, that thought process? And secondly, are you trying to be cognizant of what you feel the plant used to be and try to maintain it? Or are you always sort of managing for different conditions that you're, you're facing when growing these things?
Glenn: Well, uh, since I'm in the southern part of the US, the answer to that question is yes to everything.
Tiffany: Okay. Sorry. No, it's all good.
Glenn: Um, so, so, uh, one, uh, true type replication becomes very, very important if your replication is feeding a community.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: And if you go before 1900, essentially everyone was on that.
Tiffany: Mm.
Glenn: Uh, there, by then there was also shi- shiploads of stuff coming out of the canals, uh, from the Great Lakes, going to the East Coast and vice versa. Uh, but discounting getting into industrial agriculture- You wanted to maintain [00:15:00] true type identity if you were exporting. Okay. And that meant that everything in the South, on a commercial basis, needed to be the same, 'cause Europe didn't like it changing.
New England, which we were supplying a lot, like, uh, Martha's Vineyard, which is one of the islands off of, uh, the coast of Massachusetts, um, we were, the Quakers were an active bark and till trade, uh, from our rivers in the South on every staple we could grow- Hmm ... and then a lot of vegetable seed, too. The USS Constitution was shipping on a lot of Southern identity grains, but it was based in Massachusetts as well.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: So you see this massive amount of trade going back and forth, and everybody wanted that to stay the same. But when you got to the families growing for their communities, and women, uh, pretty much taking lead on that in the American South, you see a lot of phenotypic plasticity, a lot of purposeful, [00:16:00] uh, changes.
And you're looking then not for what's the same in a field, if you're a woman in that era, which is the 1600s to the end of the 19th century. You're looking for what's changed in a field, because that could always be better. Okay. So you don't go and kill it. Mm-hmm. You go and see if it's gonna screw things up.
If it's going to, you pick it up by itself and take it somewhere, and then you hand bag and pollinate it, which you put a bag over the developing ear on maize.
Tiffany: Mm-hmm.
Glenn: And, uh, then you go get pollen from either that plant and put it in there, or you go get it from another plant if you wanna cross it.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: So it, it's very complicated if you get down to it, and it's amazing that kids were doing this kind of stuff, young women were doing this, and that's the equivalent of an advanced PhD degree in biogenetics. It's
Tiffany: amaz- it's, it's amazing how things have changed. Like, I remember first moving out of my parents' house, having my [00:17:00] very first garden, and I grew up gardening with my grandparents and my parents, and, you know, typically having the role of, like, "Here's a salt shake," when I was first super young, "Here's a salt shaker.
Go pour it on the slugs." And then, you know, "Go weed the garden," and, but always sort of passively aware of what's going on. And then growing my own garden, and having an area with squash, and growing giant pumpkins that I got these special seeds from Nova Scotia, and I grew them right next to zucchini and, and a few other squash.
And then going out there, and my now husband saying, "Uh, what happened to the giant squash?" I'm like, "I don't know. I know I planted it." And it's like, all we had is zucchini. And having that realization of like, oh, some plants are gonna cross-pollinate and they're gonna change, like, right there and then, and it just, it was...
There's so much that we don't know and, and we've completely lost, right? Like, even the idea of Like open pollinated versus like, uh, plants that [00:18:00] need pollination from another plant and plants that self-pollinate. Like, uh, g- do you wanna, just for people that maybe this is all very, very new to them, do you wanna just maybe take a few steps back and just talk about, about, uh, even just that?
What, what the difference is between those?
Glenn: Okay. So, uh, s- self-pollinating plants-
Tiffany: Mm ...
Glenn: are known to be plants like wheat-
Tiffany: Mm-hmm ...
Glenn: uh, which doesn't need another wheat plant in order to produce grain. Yeah. To replicate. Uh, and that's the, probably the simplest version.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: Whereas corn does not replicate on its own.
Mm. It has to have companions. Um, and you either do it yourself by covering up the, when it's in the reproduction phase, you cover the whole, um, ear of the corn up with a bag-
Tiffany: Mm ...
Glenn: or you separate the plant [00:19:00] from the rest of it and then you bring pollen either from that- plant or from another plant and dust the ear.
So that's called- Yeah ... you know, hand pollination. The- Yeah ... for wheat, uh, it's supposed to be self-replicating. So if you put one wheat seed in the ground with nothing within 20 miles of it, it'll grow- Hm ... and make wheat. You can harvest it- Okay ... and eat it. Uh, now let's go forward when that all used to actually really be true.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: And now, uh, most of the self-replicating and self-pollinating plants are now open-pollinated, just like corn. My goodness. And my big education was rice had started this in the '50s, and I didn't know it. And we were growing Carolina Gold rice and-
Tiffany: Mm-hmm ...
Glenn: it's not supposed to cross with itself or rices from another place.
I got a [00:20:00] huge system that came from Africa to the Ace Basin, which is in the North and South Carolina and Georgia coast. Uh, the Ace Basin- Hm ... is huge. It's got seven rivers that are massive, that drives that. It's the largest wilderness area on the East Coast, and it has all the critters to go with it, by the way.
It's lots of fun.
Tiffany: Yeah, I d- I- Uh, but the- After talking about it with you, I'm like, "I need to go on a road trip."
Glenn: Yeah. You
Tiffany: need
Glenn: to
Tiffany: come- I need to
Glenn: get out ...
Tiffany: down and visit. Yeah. I do.
Glenn: It is the most stunning visuals on the East Coast, period. Yeah. And I'm not exaggerating, 'cause I grew up north of here. Yeah. And we...
I wasn't in the Ace Basin that much as a kid, and it's phenomenal. So having said that, all the way back, we've got miles and miles and miles of domesticated rice fields that are abandoned. So in the middle of that, you should be able to plant rice, and since there's no other rice around-
Tiffany: Mm-hmm ...
Glenn: and not get cross-pollination.
And we were assuming that, and we got pollination of red rice, which is weedy rice-
Tiffany: Yeah ...
Glenn: from Africa in a [00:21:00] fresh hit that blew all the way across the Atlantic and dropped pollen- Oh my God ... in our field. That's when we found out for sure that we weren't immune and there was no such thing as non, uh, self-pollinating, 'cause there is such a thing as open-pollinated rice.
Now there's open-pollinated wheat. They'll all cross. And as climate change moves forward, hate to bring it up, but it's true- Mm-hmm ... all that is changing. The plants knew this way before we were talking about it as a real thing. Hm. They didn't like where things were going, and they started expressing their catastrophic, uh, recovery plan, which is to just grow anything to make sure they persist.
Tiffany: So how do you, how do you manage that as someone that is actively growing plants to sell to the customer, to sell to farmers to continue to grow the... Like, you've resurrected plants that were basically extinct, or nearly extinct.
Glenn: Mm-hmm.
Tiffany: And how do you- Sure ... how do you continue to, to offer Carolina Gold [00:22:00] rice to people if it's po- potentially self-pollina- or pollinating with rice from Africa?
Glenn: Yeah. And the answer is you have to buffer- Yeah ... uh, which, uh, used to be sort of a little bit. For corn, you could get up to 200 feet, sometimes a quarter mile max, and you'd have a good buffer. That doesn't work anymore for corn. You really- Yeah ... need to give it a lot of space, and you still can get contamination from the atmosphere.
Um, for rice, wheat, and things like that, uh, same thing.
Tiffany: Right.
Glenn: Now you have to buffer. And buffer meaning if you're planting a big field of wheat, probably the center of that field won't get messed up- Mm ... but the edges can. And if you're doing seed, you certainly can't just be indiscriminate about that, because you won't know generation one.
So you take the seed, it's not- Mm-hmm ... showing any variance, and then you plant it. It doesn't show any variance year [00:23:00] one. You plant it, and it doesn't show variance year two. In year three, it blows up in your face. And we had whole rice fields go down because of that overdraft from Africa-
Tiffany: Oh my God ...
Glenn: where it just wasn't Carolina Gold.
It was-
Tiffany: Yeah ...
Glenn: two years it was fine. We produced the seed, it was all true type, put it in the ground. Year three, boom, all kinds of crap coming out of the field. Kazoos, uh, giraffes, you know, you name it. Armadillos, you know.
Tiffany: It's, it's, it's exciting as, as a home gardener. I remember when I had a green zebra cross with a, uh, just, like, a little, um, patio tomato, and I was like- Yeah
"Oh, this is so cool. I've got these tiny little green zebra tomatoes." But as a, someone that's commercially growing these crops- ... that, that's, I could see that being pretty catastrophic, and I'm starting to see why you tell people how expensive this, this endeavor is of Anson Mills of, of trying to grow these plants.
It's, I, I just, it's, it's insane. [00:24:00]
Glenn: Well, we've, um, f- as the best example right now, we've just, uh- And Dr. Stephen Kresovich, uh, is one of the foremost geneticists on the planet. He's in charge of, uh, US, uh, biosecurity, meaning he's helping locals. He's not taking stuff out of Africa for the northern part of Africa.
Uh, and then as a secondary job, he's got three, um, he does biosecurity for all kinds of things, starting with his own, which is sorghum plants, but all the way out to wheat and barley, and you name it. And he has, uh... I was just on the phone with Rick Boyles, who was astounding. I remember when he was an undergrad, and now he's a postdoc PhD researcher, and I went, uh, on the wrong day to his field day, uh, which is in Sumter, South Carolina at the Wheat Research Station, and they had Probably [00:25:00] 90 different cultivars of einkorn at least.
Tiffany: Wow.
Glenn: All landrace in the ground, growing them true type, and they had buffers on stuff. They kn- knew they needed to have buffers, and they were buffering plants in some cases where they needed buffers so they wouldn't get crosses. All of them landrace, and they had full complements, reps of hybrids coming out of all those for future how to speed them up, how to dwarf them so they won't blow down as easily, how to make them more drought tolerant or more water tolerant, depending on what was going on.
Every kind of research you can imagine. It was the most diverse time I've ever been there, and I met geneticists from all over the world. I went to the wrong session, and just... 'cause I'm not a geneticist. I didn't have any reason- Yeah ... to be there. I know Rick really well. He's a good guy, and he's super smart.
And I got there, and he's looking at me, like, really concerned, and he said, uh, "Did you come, uh, to... What, what'd you come to do?" And I said, "Well, isn't this the open field day for farmers in [00:26:00] South Carolina?" He said, "No, that's yesterday." And I said, "Uh-oh. Well, I guess I'm a day late. I'm gonna, I'm gonna leave now."
And he said, "No, no." Yeah. I was with you Euphren Ramos, our number one research grower, and he said, "No, no. No, you, you actually are here on a good day." And then we were running around with 60 or 80 geneticists in the field from all over the world, and that was the coolest thing I've done in years.
Tiffany: So- '
Glenn: Cause there's a lot of brainpower there.
Tiffany: I bet. So why, why landrace plants over, over other conventional plants?
Glenn: You have to have base genetics.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: I hate to say it that way, 'cause it sounds so boring and it seems silly.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: But you've got to go somewhere. You can't just start with CRISPR.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: Which is the fastest breeding technique we have now, which, uh, they're just like AI.
There's two schools. One says, "Oh, yeah, CRISPR is the savior of the world," and the other one says, "Do we really know what it's doing?"
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: And so you got both things out there, and what you [00:27:00] need is a check on that advanced technology. Whereas it used to take 10 years to 11 years to do a Mendelian cross and get stability, then we had GMOs come in in the '50s and '60s, and they would take anywhere from three to six years to get stability.
You would need true type replication if you're working with Mendelian crosses or GMO crosses, and the same thing's true if you want the plant to yield to stat. Mm. Which obviously if you're doing advanced breeding with something as advanced as CRISPR, that's not inexpensive, number one. Number two, you need it to be true type replicating.
You don't want it to bring a sport or a spontaneous- Whatever-
Tiffany: Mm ...
Glenn: come out of the field and infect everything else for 200 miles, uh, which has happened in the past. It happened, too, in Oregon in the early '80s with the first GMO soy. It was actually- Oh ... planted commercially. Nobody even knew it was [00:28:00] there, and it contaminated crops all over the state.
Tiffany: So by contaminated, what do you... Like, cross-pollinating with other plants?
Glenn: Yeah. It, it- Okay ... actually, to put the GMO soy in, and within a 200-mile radius, they had contamination. They, it changed their l- their soy plants, which were done landrace style. Okay. And so they, they, coming out of the landrace soy revolution into Mendelian, and Mendelian was doing fine.
It was nice and stable. Then they bring in a GMO soy, and nobody knows it, and it pollinates out with everything out there, and all the Mendelian stuff, it gets contaminated. And then they had to untangle everything, and that was, uh, half a decade of work.
Tiffany: So when, when the general public is afraid of GMO, there, there seems to be a lot of fear of GMO plants, and my, my perception of it had nothing to do with any of, any of the stuff you're talking about right now.
It's that, you know, we just don't understand it. We don't know. We don't know how the human body processes it and all these [00:29:00] other things. But, uh, from a, from a, like, how we grow food, it's massively... It could massively impact how, how farmers grow food. And, and from that standpoint, it's m- potentially not, not a great thing to be using.
Glenn: Yeah. The, the word- Yeah ... the word that comes to mind, uh, sounds more like war than anything else, but it's called invasive.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: And, um, what you don't want is if you're trying to do soy, soy is the number one crop-
Tiffany: Mm-hmm ...
Glenn: uh, that's a GMO crop in this country. If you're trying to do soy that is non-GMO, if you're in Arkansas anymore, you cannot do it because you will get a GMO cross, and you'll fail when you're exporting.
Um-
Tiffany: Okay ...
Glenn: that is changing 'cause they're closing off, uh, that promiscuity on purpose because there are places in the world that don't want GMO crops, and they want that export thing. Okay. But when you s- stop and [00:30:00] think about how much momentum the industrial soy complex has, which is one of the most complicated, um- crop systems on the planet.
Uh, uh, I forget how many different products from just a soy field comes out, but I think it's in the 300 plus range.
Tiffany: Oh, my gosh.
Glenn: Different ones from the same exact soy goes into the system, and it comes out all these different products.
Tiffany: Mm-hmm.
Glenn: Um, and it, it, that is n- not to say that in non-processing regions, they're not just putting it in rail cars and sending it to a ship and then exporting it, 'cause they're- Yeah
doing that too. But the bottom line is, um, the ideas about cross-contamination, promiscuity, um, lack of resilience, because if you get a closed system, a GMO crop that's meant only for licensing, and you contaminate a non, uh, GMO soy field, [00:31:00] you got nothing. You, because if you're doing your own seed, you're screwed, 'cause that gene is very aggressive, and it's gonna make it so it can't replicate.
This all sounds very, um, uh, scary in a lot of ways, but the fallback is nice and simple. The US government has realized that they have to get a rope around all this stuff, and they've actually made a lot of moves in the last half century. Excuse me, in the last half decade.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: Sorry. Okay, I gotta go back to the field now.
Tiffany: Yeah. Just kidding. Need sunshine. They,
Glenn: they've made a lot of moves in order to start, uh, buffering and protecting these systems.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: Um, and the, to me, um, because of climate change, uh, I used to be an absolute, "I'm not touching any of that advanced stuff." Mm-hmm. I've always been a landrace person. You know, all research, farming, production, everything, all landrace.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: Uh, but then I would go around saying, "Yeah, [00:32:00] that's bad," and I stopped saying that about eight years ago, when I realized that if we don't hurry up, we're gonna have a lot of starving people in the next 25 to 30 years. Okay. And so anything that gets food on the table is helpful at this point, not that it excuses promiscuity and complete disregard for s- biosecurity systems.
Tiffany: Mm-hmm.
Glenn: But it does say, you know, anybody with an idea ought to at least go for it just to see if it's gonna help.
Tiffany: Okay. And so can you, can you walk that back a little bit? Sure. Why, why is it important from, like, a climate change standpoint to, to sort of reexamine how, how we're growing food?
Glenn: Well, without...
I've done everything in agriculture since I was a kid without knowing why.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: Uh, and without knowing why, honestly, uh, it was a horrible wake-up call. But without knowing [00:33:00] why, starting about 2010, um, I started looking at f- super fast crops.
Tiffany: Mm.
Glenn: My... It was for me personally, just for starters, if we get hit with a big storm, uh, we're- we've got rice fields.
Yeah. We get hit with a big storm in, um, you know, September, well, that's height of the hurricane season down here. Hello.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: Uh, you know, if we get hit with a big storm, bye-bye harvest. There's nothing left.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: You know, five days later you got, we called it the mirror, 'cause y- you, you flood the fields to keep the rice from blowing down and dying.
Mm-hmm. And hopefully it won't drown. And rice, uh, our old rices can take about, I don't know, three to five days of full flood. Okay. Like, everything's underwater.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: And they, that's the technique they use to protect it in what we call- Mm-hmm ... freshets or now we call them hurricanes and all that.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: Uh, the bottom line is if that [00:34:00] system continues to flood an area, and I've seen it down there where you couldn't even get down the roads, both in Texas and every other state coming all the way back up here, including Florida.
Uh, 'cause we grow in all those places, and I've been on the road- Mm-hmm ... where I had to stop and get a bloody boat, when I used to just drive to the farm, right?
Tiffany: Wow.
Glenn: So, uh, in those particular instances, you want crops that, um, can survive anaerobic 'cause the-
Tiffany: Okay ...
Glenn: the rates- roo- roots will not get oxygen. So the plants that need aerobic horticulture, they're gonna die immediately.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: Uh, the other side of the coin is if you're doing anaerobic, 'cause that's the, the entire world monetary system is based on anaerobic horticulture, by the way. The roots don't have oxygen.
Tiffany: Mm-hmm.
Glenn: They have CO2, so they're growing anaerobically, and that makes the most stable long-term storageable seed, which turns into money.
And if you look hard at that, that was in the [00:35:00] Levant, uh, and all invented in the Levant, came around into Provence and, uh, the Mediterranean rim into s- Spain, and everybody had big movements on that, but the bottom line was that biosecurity actually became money, and it then became the stock exchange.
Kinda cool, actually,
Tiffany: if you stop to think about it. Yeah, and this is, this is like a whole new thing that, like, uh, looking, looking at your work and what Anson Mills has done, and-
Glenn: Mm-hmm ...
Tiffany: this whole idea of aerobic and, and anaerobic, and this is, this is totally new to me, and I think for a lot of listeners, this is a very d- they probably never thought a thing, something like this.
Like, when you order products from Anson Mills, it ships cold, and you mill cold, and, and all, you, you harvest and process the grains in a certain way, and people probably don't understand why. Do you want to back up just a touch and, and- ... [00:36:00] explain, explain- Sure ... I know it's, it's a big thing, but, like, why you do that, what the difference is for people that, um...
'Cause I'm, my audience is, is likely not experts on, on, on this stuff at all. So it's really interesting, and I'd love for you to dig into it a bit.
Glenn: Okay, so-
Tiffany: Okay ...
Glenn: in, uh, since we're in the Western world, it's easiest to look at the Levant for our history- Mm-hmm ... but it is true everywhere in the world. Um, so dating from the dawn of agriculture, uh, most if not all plants, no matter what they were, even if they were forced into anaerobic habit- Were two things.
There were new crop plants, and they were breathing oxygen like people.
Tiffany: Mm-hmm.
Glenn: And then those plants would eventually go to sleep, called dormancy, and/or die, called dead. And if they're dead, they're not respiring anything, but when they go into dormancy, they're barely respiring, and [00:37:00] it's CO2, like a plant.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: And, uh, that is the one that's money. The new crop stuff, we got rid of here in the mid-1800s to 1900. Uh, by the time World War I came around, we were hardly doing any new crop stuff anymore on a big scale. All local farms kept at this until the '50s. It started dying out then. By 1980, trying to find an aerobic harvest anywhere was nigh on impossible in our, our neck of the woods.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: Uh, so aerobic meaning the rice is still b- breathing oxygen. For us, it was rice. It's still breathing oxygen like a person, which means it has a certain aroma flavor profile associated with that aerobic activity, which is totally different from the same exact rice when it switches over and starts breathing oxygen or goes dead, either one.
Tiffany: So when, when Sean Brock is talking about Carolina Gold rice and how- Mm-hmm ... it's revelation and all these things, he's referring to [00:38:00] this, this type of plant, living, breathing rice.
Glenn: Yeah, and-
Tiffany: Okay ...
Glenn: Sean, Sean's a exceptional case, uh, uh, because, you know, he didn't take anyone's word for anything- Yeah ... so he just did everything himself-
Tiffany: Okay
Glenn: back in the day.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: And he still is like that in California, where he's in LA now, and he just went through three different revolutions in the way he was writing his menus and the philosophy behind them and then the entire production system behind them as he keeps proselytizing for this, that, and the other thing.
And one of the first thing he did was chase down Sherry Mandel, who has her own rice system out there, uh, with Alex Weiser, who runs the largest farm and most, uh- densely quality-oriented farmers market in California. She and, uh, Alex Weiser actually founded that farmers market, and now she's a miller and she's a philosopher and all kinds of wonderful things.
She's just [00:39:00] amazing, and she's also huge into women's rights. Every time you start pushing somewhere, you're gonna come up- ... with a woman that's actually pushing the envelope- Yep ... and no one messes with Sherry.
Tiffany: No.
Glenn: So anyhow, um, they actually started doing aerobic culture out there. I took a combine out to them, and Alex was huge into aerobic culture 'cause he was a vegetable guy, the best in California a lot of people said.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: Uh, so he, he understood the two different kinds of harvests you can have with vegetables, because if you let a vegetable die in the field, then whatever that is, if it dries down and doesn't spoil, that's anaerobic. And if you get it while it's still aerobic, that's fresh vegetables. So that's an easy thing to understand on that level.
Hardly anybody thinks about that with regard to wheat, barley, rice, corn, you name it, but there are two distinct cultures, two distinct aroma flavor profiles. It's, they're [00:40:00] totally different. You can tell when something flips dormant. It's actually money then. It's actually the preferred historic biosecurity value-oriented crop But then we walked away from all the new crop stuff, and cereals that are aerobic and new crop are very, very vibrant aroma flavor profile-wise, and we do everything we can to stay in that window because we like the new crop aroma flavor.
Everybody else is already doing aerobic, the anerobic, excuse me, so there's no reason to do that. Uh, but we didn't find a whole lot of people doing aerobic culture, and the one thing we haven't mentioned yet is if there's oxygen around, it doesn't matter how fast you're milling. If there's oxygen around, you're going anaerobic even if you don't intend it, which means you can mill wheat right into the dough where you're actually hydrating the wheat right out of the mill, but it'll be going anaerobic [00:41:00] on the way to the surface of that.
So the mill chute is here, the big, uh, receptacle for, like, 50 pounds of dough or something like that with casters on the mixer bowl. You know, it's got liquid in there, water or whatever you're using, and the grist is coming out of the mill, which is milled wheat, straight into that water. On the way there, it oxidizes if you don't have CO2, and if you're not milling cold, you're volatilizing a major portion of the a- aerobic and anaerobic aroma flavor profile.
So you need to be cold, and you need to get rid of oxygen in order to do what we're doing, which in the mountains is easy because they would breathe into these little mills. They were just hand kern things.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: And they'd breathe on this stuff while they were doing it, so you're respiring
Tiffany: CO2. Okay.
Glenn: You take in oxygen, use CO2 coming out.
Yeah. So they'd breathe on that crop until it got to the pot, and they'd be doing this on the front porch, in the backyard, and run back in [00:42:00] with it. Um, and no one's gonna go through that these days, I don't think, although I'd be surprised, uh- You never know.
Tiffany: I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah, you never know. Uh, d-
Glenn: I have done it.
It works. Yeah. Really? My mother did it when she was growing up in the 1919s and 1920s, around in there.
Tiffany: She was- So it was an, it was an intentional thing they knew to, like, as you're, as you're grinding your, your corn or your, or your wheat, you're, like, breathing on it to- Yeah ... to help keep... Really?
Glenn: Yeah, and even Africans, uh, the African diaspora that were brought in under slavery- Yeah
they knew this too. Oh. So they'd get kerns, hand kerns, which are-
Tiffany: Yeah ...
Glenn: horizontal mills, from, uh, the masters, and they'd have the whole family breathing on that thing while they're moving the stones around, grinding whatever they're grinding. Yeah. And then they'd be putting it right in a pot. Okay. I've watched them do it.
Tiffany: Really?
Glenn: Uh, not as, as slaves, thank God. But yeah, I've watched them do it. And
Tiffany: So-
Glenn: There's... Oh, by the [00:43:00] way- Yeah ... it's a good thing to tell you, there are whole communities off the grid still from the 19th century in the ACE Basin.
Tiffany: Really?
Glenn: African diaspora and native, uh, Maroon culture, native, uh, and Africans who, uh, got together.
The native people, uh, who were mostly killed by settlers in our neck of the woods.
Tiffany: Mm-hmm.
Glenn: Uh, the few tribes that survived have been very generous with their knowledge and would come back, and they'd work with Africans, and they'd work with anybody. My mom used to get beautiful baskets and all that stuff from the tribes that were still present.
Tiffany: Mm.
Glenn: And then they would actually have the best maize and the best, you m- bes- here in the South, it's grits, which is just ground corn.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: Um, and they'd have the best grits. They'd have the best seed. My mom used to get all her seed from the tribes when she was a kid.
Tiffany: Now, now for the, the person cooking [00:44:00] your stuff at home- Yeah
uh, it needs to be cooked differently than... Say, I guess s- same as you're cooking a, a mule deer or white tail tenderloin, you're gonna cook it differently than, like, a, a beef tenderloin. So how, how would you suggest if someone goes, purchases a package of your, uh, Carolina Gold Rice, how they approach that differently?
Glenn: Okay, so the, my favorite thing is we really don't understand the word in the United States, but the term, which goes back thousands of years in the Levant, and especially in Italy where everybody used to come for rice harvest-
Tiffany: Mm ...
Glenn: from everywhere, and tons of women, tons of guys, all that stuff. Uh, the term that applied from 1700 and earlier to this phenomena that we engage in at Anson Mills is called basso, basso, [00:45:00] polenta.
And then everybody hears polenta, they say, "Oh, you're talking about corn." Yeah. And the answer is no, polenta just means ground.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: It can be anything. You can do, uh, steel bolts and grind them to polenta. And have ground up metal.
Tiffany: Right.
Glenn: Right? Uh, I don't think that would be really good to eat, but you can.
So the idea of basso, basso, polenta means low, low, and slow.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: So if you're in Italy, why would you tell anybody that? 'Cause you grew up with it. Everybody you know knows it. Right. So this actually came to America and has left again. I think a lot of people have forgotten that we had an entire culinary revolution based on the term basso, basso, polenta.
It started in San Francisco with Alice Waters and covered the entire globe. Wow. She was actually reintroducing that notion. It also came with Italian immigrants in the 19th century. So in San Francisco particularly because of the Gold Rush, and where we [00:46:00] are in South Carolina, that symbiosis, everybody that came back from the Gold Rush that didn't become billionaires came back with an idea of basso, basso, polenta, and the best chef on the East Coast of the United States went to San Francisco during...
He was Italian, and went to San Francisco during the Gold Rush and took the idea of low, low, and slow with him. So what does it mean? You can't be- go past a simmer. If you go past a simmer- Okay ... you volatilize everything you're trying to do with regard to aerobic cookery.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: If you have an aerobic grain of any kind, you boil it, it's all over.
You might as well have just gone to the store and bought something that's on the shelf.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: So that's it
Tiffany: Okay. Well, that's-
Glenn: Yummy ...
Tiffany: I mean, that's c- That's... And, and, and for people that wanna, wanna see recipes, y- the website has tons and tons and tons of stuff.
Glenn: 1,700 pages. Wow. And it's, uh, done by my phenomenal wife, Kay Rentschler.
We decided... She retired, uh, I think in [00:47:00] 2021.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: And we just decided to keep it that way as a relic. And- Yeah ... I don't believe there's a 1,700-page culinary website anywhere in our country anymore. I could be wrong, but I don't think there is. And it's, uh- Mm ... everything we have is applicable there, and you can actually go to your local miller who might be milling in your, uh, local, uh, you know, Saturday market.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: If somebody's milling right there, you'd be really close, and then those recipes would apply because the hydration is different. Obviously, the temperature's- Yeah ... different. And then you're also controlling finished texture, uh, when you're slowing down the cooking process with anything that's, uh, ground.
And if you're doing whole grain cookery, you definitely don't wanna boil that because you blow the whole idea of it. So something like pilaf that we know- Mm ... um, things like that, you really need to avoid heat if it's new crop. If it's, uh, anaerobic, you can put heat to it, just get it done quickly [00:48:00] because it doesn't really affect the aroma flavor profile that much.
Tiffany: So is that, is that part of the reason why you guys, uh... Like I, I actually cooked off some of your, um, the peas the other day, and it, it- Yeah ... it was like adamant you have to soak these peas. Don't, don't cook them from dry. Soak them first overnight. Um, is that part of it? So you're, you're not cooking them too long?
It's shortening the cooking period and minimizing the chance of, uh, overheating it, or is it some other reason?
Glenn: I think everybody's gonna hate me 'cause it keeps sounding like a chemistry class, and I was a chemistry major- Ah. ... but I don't do this 'cause I was- ... honestly. But now you've hit another one, amylase-amylase transition.
Tiffany: Okay
Glenn: If you soak something-
Tiffany: Yeah ...
Glenn: in good water, and it's gotta be good water, right? Yeah. If you've got tap water with chlorine in it, forget it. You're just wasting your time.
Tiffany: Sure.
Glenn: So you have to have good water. Okay. Meaning it's clean. Uh, and we actually, uh, I don't know whether [00:49:00] we all know this, I think it's true in native culture everywhere, but here people still worship water.
Tiffany: Oh, I think we should. Like, more people should.
Glenn: No, but they worship water this way. They're, the people that are here, I'm in the Midlands of South Carolina, worship the water on the coast because it's spring water. Right. It's natural, and they go and collect it, send it to relatives all over the world, and use it for themselves, and they wait all year to go down so they can cook it fresh out of the spring.
Tiffany: Really? That kind
Glenn: of thing. Yeah. Wow. And this is exactly the same thing native people do.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: The oldest touchstone place on the East Coast of the United States for Norwegians- Hmm ... believe it or not, the Huns- Yeah ... or h- whatever you wanna call them, Vikings-
Tiffany: Yeah ...
Glenn: is right in Hilton Head, which is in the center kinda on the coast, East Coast, Atlantic Coast of South Carolina.
There is a rock there- Hmm ... that has supplied maritime explorers since the 1400s, late 1400s. [00:50:00]
Tiffany: Really?
Glenn: So you had Jesuits coming up, bombing islands on the way saying, "Okay, we're gonna show you what our guns do, and you need to... We're gonna send you," boats. They wouldn't even go on shore. "Send you boats of stuff.
You grow it, we come back, it better be grown. We're gonna harvest it. If it isn't, next time we're gonna come back- ... and all those bombs you heard, they're gonna be hitting your homes."
Tiffany: Really?
Glenn: It was a really lovely, uh, thing. But I digress. Bottom line- Amylase is starch- Yep ... amylose is sugar.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: If you soak something, the longer you soak it, the more and slower the amylase/amylose transition goes.
If you slow that transition down to, say, 12 hours in soak in good water- Mm-hmm ... and you've got really good aerobic grain, you're putting factors of two, three, four times the expression of aroma flavor to whatever you're gonna cook. So you soak it- Yeah ... room temperature. You can put it in the fridge and soak it for days.
Some people do, and it just keeps evolving [00:51:00] that way. If you leave it out too long, it starts to ferment, and then you have a complicated fermentation, because you have amylase, amylose, and then you've got alcohol.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: And when you put heat to it, the alcohol comes off, but then you have a totally new food, which is actually very complex and probably the highest state of nutrition you can get.
But trying to convince a mom that she's gonna produce alcohol in something- ... and then serve it to her kids, good luck with that.
Tiffany: Yeah. Yeah, that might be a bit much, but, uh, Out- outside, outside of, uh, aroma that you're building, uh, soaking it in good water, uh, what about nutrition-wise and digestion? You're, you're adding to think layers there as well?
Glenn: Yes.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: With all land race crops, no matter what it is- Okay ... tomatoes all the way out to whatever, f- aroma and flavor equals nutrition. The higher the aroma flavor, the true aroma flavor expression-
Tiffany: Yeah ...
Glenn: the more nutrition you have in your hand-
Tiffany: Okay ...
Glenn: in, in [00:52:00] your palate. So yeah.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: You want, you want the best expression, and time is of no essence when you're dealing with cereals.
That's whole grain, too. So you put whole berries of, say, einkorn or what we call farro piccolo, or in France they call it la pi- la petit epoitra. You put that in water, and you let it sit there for three days. It starts to actually what we call pro- like, produce wine. They don't even call it- Wow ... fermenting alcohol.
It's actually, uh, a wine that you can drink. That water you can drink, and it's not, uh, going to make you drunk- Hmm ... but it's highly nutritious. The other side of the coin is you cook it at that stage, and you get the highest expression of aroma flavor you can get out of a grain.
Tiffany: Really?
Glenn: Yeah.
Tiffany: Okay. Well, that's gonna, that's gonna change up how I've been cooking my grains a little bit, I think.
Glenn: Well, we're at your service. You... We can supply you with anything. We just, uh, harvested the 2026, [00:53:00] um, spring crop of einkorn.
Tiffany: Really?
Glenn: Uh, and it's, uh, probably the best we've ever had.
Tiffany: Really? And
Glenn: we're really... Yeah, einkorn's been on the planet supposedly longer than any other grain that's domesticated by humans.
And when I started, it was said to be here for 8,000 years. Now it's passing 40,000 easy, and, uh, people think it's a lot more than that. So I've seen that progression myself-
Tiffany: Yeah ...
Glenn: which is crazy, 'cause I said, "8,000 years, that doesn't make sense to me." And they were telling me stuff about maize and native people here, and the...
I grew up with native people, and I'm going, "They didn't get here, like, 6,000 years ago with maize. Um, maize was here."
Tiffany: Yeah. "
Glenn: They just got here tens of thousands of years ago and messed with it the whole time, and our histories just aren't accurate enough yet to prove it out." So archeology's gonna tell us where we're going with that.[00:54:00]
Tiffany: And, um, from a, from a selfish standpoint, I have to ask. I was, uh, going through your website. I didn't notice before that you had oatmeal. Uh- ... the, uh, on-the-bias cut oatmeal, toasted. Now, uh, where my grandparents lived in Nova Scotia, there was a gristmill there. And they used to- Mm-hmm ... there was like a wood-fired, uh, mill.
And so- Yeah ... all of the oatmeal, it was, it was cut, um, and it always had this smokiness from the, from the smoke- Yeah ... percolating up- Yeah ... through the bottom floor. And I saw yours and I was like, "Oh my God, I..." 'Cause this mill, gristmill, The Balmoral gristmill in Tadoussac, Nova Scotia doesn't produce- Cool
their oatmeal anymore. And I've been wanting to recreate my grandmother's oatcakes. And I saw that you guys toast yours, and I was like, "Oh, I've gotta, I've gotta get a bag of that and try it out." 'Cause the... Even your recipe is, like, identical to my, to my grandmother's oatcake recipe, so I have to check it out.
Glenn: [00:55:00] So here- It looked... Yeah ... um, we, uh, custom smoke for chefs only. Oh, really? So the chefs order just for everyone in the whole world- Yeah ... 'cause when I say that, all of a sudden we have tens of thousands of people- ... that would, "I wanna order four retail bags, and can you custom this?" And you're going, "No, no, we do that with a m- Mm
minimum 50 pound order for chefs."
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: But for media, and that would include you- Yeah.
Tiffany: Okay ...
Glenn: we'll stand on our heads upside down. Uh, so- Well- ... you will get smoked, and then you can- Yeah ... pick your smoking material. And if you wanna get down to that, when you talk about farro verde- Yeah ... which is smoked with its own stems, we can do that- Oh,
Tiffany: cool
Glenn: with oats too. 'Cause we keep- Oh, wow ... the hay for that special purpose when we harvest them.
Tiffany: Okay. I'm gonna... Uh, we're gonna have a chat after because, and quite honestly- ... I, I can... I know I don't think it would take me long to personally go through a 50 pound bag of oatmeal. It's like, uh- No, [00:56:00] no, you
Glenn: don't have to get 50 pounds.
Tiffany: No, I'm happy
Glenn: to
Tiffany: do it. I'm just talking
Glenn: about our policy. Our policy is even if you're a chef and you ask for something special- Yeah ... you have to order... You have, in order to get a chef order, you have to order 50 pounds of stuff. Ah. It's in 10, 15, 20,
Tiffany: 25, 30s.
Glenn: Yeah. You have to mix and match or get all the same thing- Mm-hmm
but it's a minimum of 50 pounds. Because- Yeah ... if you can imagine us doing custom for a three pound order- Oh, yeah ... you know, that's ridiculous.
Tiffany: No, it's crazy. It's crazy. Yeah.
Glenn: We'd spend all of our time doing custom and not getting production done, and not getting farming done. By the way, we only mill two-
Tiffany: Yeah
Glenn: two days a week and we farm the rest of the week. Ah. Otherwise, we wouldn't have anything to supply people.
Tiffany: Yeah. No, I bet. And I, I know I've taken up a bunch of your time, and I know we've talked a lot about Anson Mills, but you're doing something totally different now. Do you wanna, do you wanna... Do you have time to talk a little bit about what you're doing?
'Cause I think it's pretty, pretty cool and exciting.
Glenn: Okay. So yeah, really, really fast.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: There's a
Tiffany: place- Can you do it really fast?
Glenn: Yes, really fast.
Tiffany: Yeah,
Glenn: okay. There's a [00:57:00] place, uh, on the East Coast where there's a whole international agriculture biosecurity, uh, complex, and there is a place in multiples on the West Coast, and there's a place in the Mid Americas and in the Gulf.
Uh, and they're there on purpose, one, so that we don't have somebody cross-contaminate our crops because everyone's tried. I think Osama bin Laden was the last one that was dumb enough to be transparent enough for people. He actually told somebody that he was in the process of bioterrorism to infect the corn crops of America.
Tiffany: Really?
Glenn: He hired a bunch of internationally famous corn geneticists and sent them to the Levant to work in their research system, and they were all had different pieces of it, so they didn't know what they were working on. Okay. And the money was killer, and nobody said anything until that came out. And when that came out, then everything else started spilling down from Oba- [00:58:00] Osama bin Laden.
And there's a la- whole generation or two now that doesn't even know who Osama bin Laden is. But that was pretty scary, and I was watching that even though I didn't understand anything. What's going on now is everything gets screened. I've had geneticists pulled out of the public domain where all their work has to go black until the US vets it out and makes sure that it can't be a bioterrorism suspect, not the geneticist working on it, but that another crook geneticist would get ahold of it, mess with it, and then throw it out there in the system and contaminate everything.
And so that's a real threat. Uh, I respect it. I understand it. I've watched some of the best geneticists I've ever worked with, especially two women geneticists that I was really hoping was gonna work out in upper New England, and it, they got turned black because the stuff they were working on was so good.
And I hear they're coming back, so because they can get in the public domain now because the US- Mm-hmm ... has changed its stance because we have better [00:59:00] surveillance for bioterrorism now than we've ever had. Okay. And I shouldn't be egotistical and/or s- sound so certain about that, but compared to what we used to have-
Tiffany: Yeah
Glenn: it's hugely improved. So what does this mean? We have to have for bioterrorism, we have to have for not bioterrorism short season crops for recovery no matter what. Yeah. We've got catastrophic events happening everywhere in the United States every year. We've already had a bunch of them. Mm. And look what's going on in, in Europe, in Spain and France right now.
My God, 200,000 people?
Tiffany: Mm-hmm.
Glenn: Wow. Yeah. Uh, and what do you do? Are they tending their farms? Well, if the whole damn farm burnt down, no, there's nothing to tend. What do you do now? You're halfway through the summer growing season. Can you plant again something else before you get a cold spell and the ki- the frost kills everything you're growing 'cause it's a long season crop?
No. You come back in and you file... In the United States, if this [01:00:00] happens, you file for relief with the US government.
Tiffany: Mm-hmm.
Glenn: Or you do what we used to do way long time ago. So if it's before 1850 and your field blew up in your face, you went and got super short season crops to go in there so that you had something to eat, so you didn't die of starvation- Yeah
if nothing else. We actually have been doing research now, uh, since 2010 hard, um, part-time, and then right after the pandemic started, I got called back in 'cause we had to redesign everything during the beginning of the pandemic because unlike most of the other mills our size in the United States, we didn't shut down.
Tiffany: Hmm.
Glenn: Uh, we went from zero to 40,000 to 50,000 pounds of production a week, which is something- Wow ... we used to do, uh, per month, right? Wow. Before the pandemic, it all changed within 90 days of the pandemic hitting.
Tiffany: Jesus.
Glenn: And we switched everything. It went from all the diversity we have to a bunch of [01:01:00] different wheats.
We were selling... And a lot of oats, by the way.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: But rice, nah. You know, nobody was really lining up for bulk rice, but wheat- Mm ... went from being crop number four in best case scenario in volume that we do to the number one crop. And we went from one retail pack line to seven retail pack lines- Wow ... all within 90 days because we had no wholesale.
Our wholesale went from Hundreds of thousands a month down to 3,432 bucks in the third month of the pandemic. Just from restaurants? 3,000 bucks in
a week. Yeah.
Tiffany: Wow. Right?
Glenn: When we were doing close to, you know, 80 to 100,000 a week-
Tiffany: Wow ...
Glenn: uh, prior to, in wholesale. Yeah. So we're a wholesale company that does some retail. Went from that to doing almost no wholesale and all retail, and then we came back again. So we learned a lot from that. Uh, and the wheat flip back, too.
[01:02:00] It's growing again, by the way. Hmm. I'm not sure what's driving that, but just so you know. Yeah.
Tiffany: Huh.
Glenn: And I don't know whether we're just seeing something that's a flip or whether there's a trend going on. We haven't bothered to chase it down. But what- Yeah ... we're doing is if we lose a farmer because of catastrophic loss, they can apply to US government and get relief.
Tiffany: Mm-hmm.
Glenn: And what we want them to do is also plant short season crops, if nothing else, for wildlife-
Tiffany: Yeah ...
Glenn: and certainly for them to harvest. And we actually put this model to work in the mid-teens of this century, um, in different places where we had catastrophic loss. We just went in and said, "Okay, you want some seed?
Just throw it out there and then come back in three weeks to six weeks to see if you've got food. You've got food, that's for wildlife. If you wanna harvest it for your animals or you wanna harvest it for your family, you can do it. If you wanna harvest it and sell it, help yourself." So we had that program.
So now [01:03:00] that, um, it's become a very important part of what I'm doing, uh, it's going to be, uh, it looks like it's gonna be its own standalone, uh, function, and that's, uh, HSSR- ... W for Hand Select Sensory Research Worldwide. Big mouthful. Wow. Um, and I won't be doing everything soup to nuts anymore. I'll be helping direct it, and we'll have- Mm
a bunch of really qualified people because I'm just the donkey in all this anyhow. It's always been the geneticists that know what they're doing, and they just tell me what to do, and if I say anything, they say, "Shut up." Right? And I learned how to shut up- ... so I've got geneticists that actually put up with me, right?
So, um, it'll be the geneticists at the forefront of this and-
Tiffany: Mm-hmm
Glenn: It's looking pretty good. Talk's cheap.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: I got another probably two months before we start to [01:04:00] formalize this, but the hand select research stuff, uh, that's actually slightly formalizing as a model, just me.
Tiffany: Okay.
Glenn: And then it goes within, hopefully 90 days, it goes into a national, uh...
It's only gonna be US, by the way.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: Uh, I work internationally, but it's go- only gonna be US, which is just fine with me. Uh, not for profit, that funds the same kind of stuff I've been doing f- since 2010.
Tiffany: Wow.
Glenn: So we'll see. That's incredible. Well, it's- It's- ... incredible if it happens. Yeah. We never know for sure, but so far it's looking really good.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: And I'm, I got my first, uh, kinda support come in this month. I got all yeses. I couldn't believe it. I did some really nutty things, and everybody said, "Fine. Uh, what are you doing with that?" Nice. And I said, "I'm developing, you know, relationship with geneticists that you need if you're gonna do this not-for-profit."
Mm-hmm. [01:05:00] We all need it. You can't do it without 'em. I wish- Mm ... we could. We used to, but our geneticists were Native women.
Tiffany: Yeah. Wow.
Glenn: Here.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: Okay?
Tiffany: Yeah.
Glenn: That was, that w- that- that's the only reason why we're still here and we didn't all starve to death. If they hadn't a come back to save New England, that's the Abenaki, if they hadn't a come back, there would be no one New England right now.
Same thing down here with the four tribes that we did not kill- Mm-hmm ... in our region from Virginia down to Georgia, right? Yeah. They saved us even after we had the Trail of Tears. Go figure. So I always go back to that- Wow ... to make sure I don't forget it, 'cause I mean nothing in this. It is all about saving that culture and honoring- Mm
that culture, I think, honestly, 'cause that is America.
Tiffany: Yeah. It's, it's amazing y- people like you are listening, too, and respecting it and, and are honoring- Yeah ... it as well, yeah. [01:06:00]
Glenn: Well- So it's good. It's good even where you are. It's always women, and it's always good to know the culture.
Tiffany: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, Glenn, I don't wanna hold you back from the, uh, getting outside in the field.
I wanna, I wanna thank- It's that time. It is. I really appreciate you sitting down and talking to me, and I really enjoyed our conversation, and thank you so much.
Glenn: Thank you, Tiffany. This has been great, and you're- Yeah ... really good at this. I had no idea. Good for you.
Tiffany: Oh, thank you.
Glenn: I looked at all the- Thank you very much
prior episodes, and it was obvious, but I didn't know it was gonna be this easy. This was easy, and thanks.
Tiffany: Oh, well, thank you. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it.
Glenn: You bet.