Slow Food Upstate

If you would like to join our e mail list, contact us.  We typically send a monthly newsletter with events or other food interests of the Upstate.

Janette Wesley, Convivium Leader

I grew up in Walhalla, SC, running around on a 100 wooded acres where my great grandparents and their 18 children operated and worked a commercial cotton farm for many years. It was also a self-sustaining farm where they grew, raised and processed almost all of their own food. The full-scale operation was gone by the time I came along, but I remember helping my great-grandma, aunts and uncles, and my own grandmother in their gardens and kitchens. They still live on the land and it is a very special place to me. After studying marketing in college and spending a year in nonprofit marketing, I began to travel abroad and discovered my growing passion for good food. I became very interested in and dedicated to ‘cleaning up’ everything from my vegetables and household cleaners to cosmetics. That’s how I found Whole Foods Market in Atlanta almost 7 years ago, and I continue to learn more about our food and food systems all the time. Currently I am responsible for the marketing and community relations at Whole Foods Market Greenville and am fortunate that I get to work on projects that are important to me personally.  I love to travel and discover the food cultures and traditions around the world, but the foodways of the American South are the ones that are most often carried on in my own kitchen these days.

 Debbie Cooke

Debbie Cooke discovered Slow Food while serving as an artist-in-residence for the University of Georgia's International Studies Program in Cortona, Italy.  When she returned home, she contacted the international office of Slow Food, and in 1999, the South Carolina Convivium was formed. Covering the entire state, the South Carolina Convivium was one of the first Slow Food groups in the United States. In 2000 she was invited to California to attend the first Slow Food national event where the Manifesto for Slow Food USA was written.  Cooke enjoys cooking, studying, and learning about food and its traditions.   She teaches photography at the Fine Arts Center in Greenville, SC. 

 Tom and Linda Trantham, owners of the Happy Cow Creamery

Happy Cow Creamery is a unique on-the-farm milk bottling operation offering high quality fresh milk directly from its own dairy cows.  Whole Milk, Chocolate Milk and Cultured Buttermilk are just a few of the products offered at the on-site-store. 

"What scares me is that I feel like I am goofing off..." Tom Trantham

Renato Vicario

Vantage World Travel is owned and operated by Italian born Renato G. Vicario in Greenville, South Carolina. With over 39 years in the travel and tourism business, Renato Vicario has lived in seven different countries and traveled to nearly every country in the world, speaks seven languages fluently and knows the destination he promotes very well.    He became a sommelier in France, was a chef in England and Italy, and has a wealth of knowledge of wines, food, and the culture and history of food, as it is his passion to cook.  He grew up among the vineyards in Northern Italy where his grandfather produced wine and his grandmother made pasta so well that the newspaper could be read through it.  His mother was an opera singer in the Milan Opera. 

Renato has recently written a book on antique liqueurs that is currently at the publisher, Aboca Museum  in Sansepolcro Italy.  it will be released fall of 2010.

Ann Marshall, Convivium Treasurer

New Board Members, 2010

Lil Glenn

Lil Glenn is a lover of fresh food, the smell of freshly tilled black soil, and  rolling terrain of the Upstate.  Assisting the community in the sensitive growth of Greenville is a passion for me.  While owning a boutique real estate firm located in the heart of downtown I served on  commissions and boards through the years.  I participated in the town of Greenville maturing into a neighborhood city while supporting local farming and restaurants.    You can contact me through  www.lilglenn.com. 

Anna Kate Hipp

Anna Kate Reid Hipp, a 1963 graduate of Mary Baldwin College where she served on the Board of Trustees for 25 years and Chair of the Board for 5 years, is a native of Arkadelphia, Arkansas.  In 1963 she married Hayne Hipp.  The Hipps moved to Greenville from San Francisco in 1969. 

Anna Kate's current board memberships include Brookgreen Gardens, The Southern Environmental Law Center, the Pawleys Island Beautification Trust, TreesGreenville, the Greenville Community Foundation and the Carolina Foothills Garden Club.  Anna Kate is an instrument rated pilot with 3000 hours of flying including seven all-women's cross country air races.

Anna Kate and Hayne have three children and five grandchildren.

Donna Johnston

Donna Johnston is a marketing representative with the Community Journals.  Community Journals publications like the Upstate Foodie Guide and the FoodieFEST event have put her in contact with farm and restaurant operators across the Upstate.  Through her relationships with restaurateurs and farmers, her awareness about and interest in local food has grown. 

Donna is an avid gardener and loves the feeling of Carolina dirt on her hands and harvesting her own vegetables.  She also enjoys entertaining friends and family and takes pride in her talents in the kitchen.

Her personal passion, combined with her professional experience, has led her to Slow Food Upstate and she is excited about furthering their mission in our community by serving on the board.

Contact Donna Johnston. 

Dr. Beth Kunkel

M. Linda Lee

A native of Virginia (the D.C. suburbs), Linda moved to Greenville in 1992 to take a job as an editor with Michelin Travel Publications. In this role, she traveled the U.S., editing and writing Michelin travel guides, and bringing back edible souvenirs of the places she visited. During the last five years of her tenure with Michelin, she wrote and edited parts of the North American collection of The Michelin Guide, the acclaimed red-covered restaurant guide. Her travels to and meals in New York City, San Francisco and Wine Country, Los Angeles and Las Vegas whetted her appetite for writing about food.

Linda left Michelin in late 2009 to pursue a career in freelance writing. Drawing on her Michelin experience, she specializes in food and travel writing, and is a regular contributor to G Magazine. One of her first food memories in Greenville was at the state farmers’ market (the only market in town at the time) shortly after she moved here. She remembers asking for arugula, and getting some pretty puzzled looks. In the years since then, Linda has supported the Saturday downtown market from its first days on Court Street, and is thrilled to see how much the market has grown in both popularity and number and variety of vendors—not to mention the presence of arugula when it’s in season.

Clark and Katherine Mizell

 Cassandra Nelson

Cassandra Nelson, L.Ac., Dipl. OM, is a Licensed Acupuncturist and a National Board Certified Chinese herbalist. She is the Owner and Clinic Director of Acupuncture Center of Greenville in Greenville, South Carolina.

Cassandra’s interest in Slow Food came about as a result of her studies in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). In TCM, Chinese herbal medicine and Eastern nutrition utilize food as medicine.  It’s considered medicine from the earth, for the people. 

Cassandra believes in a body-mind-spirit approach to life and healing.  She respects the inherent value in following nature’s way. 

Cassandra, an urban girl at heart, is embracing her new found country life in Greenville County and is starting an ‘edible landscape’ garden on the grounds of her new home.  She also enjoys playing Farmville on Facebook!

Grants Program

This year Slow Food Upstate has developed a plan to issue grants for four programs specific to the Slow Food Movement.  With a goal to use 90% of our fund raising efforts this year toward these grants, in essence the funds from our dinners and tastings, we hope to put our money where our mouth is.

Our four grants will go to applicants in 2011 who meet our qualifications, and that fulfill our mission statement.  The grants will only go to applicants who are members of Slow Food and who will use the funds in a sustainable manner within the Upstate counties of South Carolina.

You may donate to our grants program by mailing a check to Slow Food Upstate

10 Old Tyler Court, Greenville, SC 29615 and please mark your gift as a donation to the SF Upstate Grants Program. 

Slow Food in Schools Grant: Awarded for the purpose to create hands-on community based educational food projects for school children enrolled in kindergarten to high school.  These projects may range from schoolyard gardens, to cooking classes, to farm to school initiatives, and should be diverse but directed to offer all children an opportunity to explore from where their food comes, who grows it, how to prepare it, and the importance of sharing it with friends and family.  The project must be supported by the administration of the school. 

Slow Food on Campus: Awarded for the purpose to create a new Slow Food Chapter on a college campus run by students with a project to address a good, clean, and fair food system, as well as addressing food system and food justice issues, spanning environmental and social causes. 

Slow Food Ark of Taste: Initiate an “Ark of Taste” food on a farm, ranch, plant nursery, fishery, restaurant or retail grocer or use an Ark of Taste product in the Upstate that is culturally or historically linked to the region of the Upstate, to South Carolina, or to the region of the south-east, and that is sustainably produced; that if better known and celebrated, would benefit the wider community of food producers.  

Slow Food RAFT: Develop a RAFT (Renewing America’s Food Traditions) project which identifies, restores, and celebrates unique biologically and culturally diverse at-risk food traditions with priority given to projects regarding foods of the Upstate, or the South-East through conservation, education, promotion and regional networking. Examples of a RAFT project could be to organize, promote and administrate and event, conference, public lecture and discussion, field trip, workshop or summit that identifies and helps to restore endangered foods at risk of disappearing. 

In terms of food, Greenville has the usual amenities of suburban culture—an abundance of supermarkets, fast food outlets, and chain restaurants. With economic success upscale restaurants and gourmet businesses have multiplied, but some appeal more to style than substance. Ethnic places, usually catering to North American tastes, are popular here. Predictably, Greenville boasts several local venues that serve up southern or soul food, although they are more beholding to industrial food processing than land-based cuisine. It’s the home of a meat steamer that largely replaced pit-smoke barbecuing in the immediate area decades ago and a grocery chain with a name that expresses mainstream appeal, “Bi-Lo.” It’s also home to that southern icon Duke’s Mayonnaise—an industrial success story that began in a Greenville woman’s home kitchen. Like most American cities, Greenville is what it is culinarily because of the drive to succeed in the fast lane.

But that’s not the end of the story of Greenville and food—or its beginning. What attracted the earliest white settlers to the area was the potential for farming the land already inhabited by Cherokee peoples. Waves of Scotch Irish, German and English settlers migrated primarily from Pennsylvanian and Virginia, bringing European food traditions. Their main crops were wheat and corn, large quantities of which were distilled into whiskey. While the proximity to rivers and later the railroad made exporting crops possible, the inhabitants were mainly subsistence farmers living on starches supplemented by pork, greens, and other vegetables. Lowcountry planters from the other side of the State summered in the area, bringing food traditions developed by African slaves. African vegetables and cooking methods helped to diversify the diet and distinctive foodways arose from them. For example, dozens of varieties of beans and peas bred from Lowcountry parent plants were cultivated here. Most are now lost. Some survive in the gardens of families who have passed them down through generations.

Social life in the Upcountry centered on food and farming. Corn shuckings, sweet potato roastings, and preserving parties made fun out of the work of survival. To romanticize that way of life, however, would be to dishonor the realities of those early residents. Most were poor and farm life was hard and precarious. Until almost the mid-20^th century, educational opportunities were limited or non-existent for most. No one would want to re-create that reality today; indeed, “progress” here has been largely defined by distance from it. But that has also meant losing many things well worth reviving creatively in the very different culture the Upcountry has become. These include connection to and stewardship of the land, a sense of community based in cooperation and conviviality and sustained by local production and artistry; and an understanding of foodways grounded in those things as central to life and culture and worthy of attention and nurture.

Cotton eventually caught up with the Upstate. (It was grown here but never on the scale of other parts of the South.) From the Civil War to the mid-20^th century, cotton milling and textile manufacturing dominated Upstate culture. Farming communities dwindled as children of farmers poured into the mills seeking employment and began living in mill-owned villages. In more remote parts of the Upstate, with colorful names like “Possum Kingdom” and “Dark Corner,” agricultural life as known in the 19^th century continued. Neither lifestyle was easy, but it was in the Upstate’s mill villages that pellagra became epidemic. Researchers working in Spartanburg County, neighboring Greenville, discovered that adding a few backyard-grown turnip greens (something even the poorest farm family would have had) to the cornmeal and fatback-based mill diet could provide the niacin necessary to prevent the dreaded disease.

Industry didn’t come just to the mills though. Farming became agri-business in the 20^th century. Cash cropping tobacco and soybeans and industrial meat and dairy production replaced growing vegetable crops for local consumption. Peaches became a viable cash crop and a distinctive source of pride for the region. By the century’s end, however, peach trees were being removed to make way for residential development. Some orchards remain, but the vast majority of peaches grown here wind up in canning facilities and very few in the hands of local children.

The economy of the Upstate waxed and waned throughout the last century; mostly it got tough for manufacturing and tougher for farming. The recent economic boom is a source of both wealth and pride for this community (although it is important to underline that poverty and chronic hunger still exist here). Greenville understands that a progressive society values the arts, education, and natural beauty and has poured its newly gained financial resources into these areas. It is also painfully aware of the precariousness of success and keen on planning for the future, primarily by investing in new technology-based enterprises and capitalizing on the tourism potential of its natural resources.  

And as the city and region look toward the future, more and more of its citizens are asking what we might have lost in all the gains. Happily, food is at the center of this reflection. Pellagra may not threaten, but there’s increasing concern about the high incidence of obesity, diabetes, and cardio-vascular disease that are, like pellagra, linked to a monotonous industrial diet. We may eat cheaply and plentifully, but many people are questioning whether we eat well, not only in terms of physical health but also environmental and cultural. There is more concern about where and how food is grown, and how animals, laborers, and land are affected. More concern about the loss of local foods and family and community gatherings around the table. Concern among many newcomers from “slower” places or strong ethnic heritages about how they (and the children they are raising here) will eat. Eagerness among many—from twenty-somethings to retirees—for a different way of living expressed through a different way of eating. And in general, there are many more who are asking what how we eat might say about who we are and who we will become. There is a growing hunger, in other words, for something slower.

            And there is much hope that it can be fed well here despite the dominant food culture. That hope manifests itself in the return to elements of our early food heritage—in the resurrection of an 1845 Grist Mill, the preservation of heirloom seed and “living history” vegetable gardens. In regional artisans who are reviving the “lost arts” of wood-fire baking and meat curing. In local restaurateurs and chefs—as well as home cooks—dedicated to co-producing with local food artisans and farmers to reintroduce seasonal, sustainable, slow eating. Indeed our greatest hope lies in the growing number of these local heroes, who have risked building their lives around working and sustaining the land to feed the community well. Large-scale agribusiness dominates now, but perhaps a different future lies with the 20,000 farms under 200 acres that dot the State. Just in the area of Possum Kingdom, that historic holdout to industrialization, a visionary dairyman with an innovative sustainable grazing program produces great milk and inspiration for farmers throughout the country. His neighbors include goat farmer/cheesemakers, beekeepers/honey makers, organic vegetable growers, and heirloom pork and poultry producers. Their products and others are showing up increasingly in the suburban and urban farmers markets that have arisen in the last few years and local alternative markets. They’re showing up in the newly opened Whole Foods Market, which has a promising local foods initiative and has become a center for the already sustainability-minded and an entry point for many more into better eating. More rays of hope shine in area organic activist groups, CSAs and cooperatives, food-focused wellness enterprises, and schoolyard vegetable garden initiatives.

            So with hunger, heritage, and confident hope, we enthusiastically seek to found a Slow Food convivium that provides—in the truest sense of that word—a space for the “feasting and living together” of those seeking and providing sustenance that is “better, cleaner, and fairer” in Greenville and the Upstate.