Jennifer Sparks, 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.

https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/stores/greenville/index.php   

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.   

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

http://www.happycowcreamery.com/

Marnie Record, Environmental Services Coordinator for The Cliffs Organic Farm

Marnie Record is the Environmental Services Coordinator for The Cliffs Communities. In this role, she coordinates the Organic Farm education and social programs, recycling program, and green building projects. She moved to South Carolina in 2006 after graduating from Antioch New England Graduate School . During her masters program she focused on local food issues through work on a CSA farm, planning a local foods event attended by over 1,000 people, and teaching farm education to school kids. She and her husband, the Sustainability Coordinator for Furman University, grow food in their backyard and shop weekly at area farmer’s markets.

Janette Wesley, Convivium Secretary

A Greenville native, Janette Wesley works in Marketing and Design for Vantage World Travel, but also works as an artist in the field of oil painting.    Historic places, good food and wine, travel and art are her passions.   Janette has a small family organic garden at home in Greenville, but also enjoys a small family olive grove in Tuscany.  In painting, the landscape is a primary focus, as "I feel that the landscape is everything.  It is who we are, what we eat, what we wear, and how we live together.  It is most worthy of our care and consideration."

www.site.yahoo.com/santandrea 

Renato Vicario

Vantage World Adventures 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. 

www.travelvantage.com

Ann Marshall, Convivium Treasurer

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.