USC professor thrives on digging deep into five senses, including taste of heirloom food

David Shields rescues things from obscurity and shares them with people who didn’t know how much they would appreciate them.

The University of South Carolina professor has drawn the most attention for his effort to bring back lost Southern foods such as the Bradford watermelon and the Carolina African runner peanut, but he also has compiled amazing collections of Russian piano music and still photographs of silent movie actors.

Next is research on the history of physical movements through exercise. And he plans to dive into how the New World influenced the perfume industry.

His areas of expertise are diverse and eclectic, which is just the way he wants it.

“One of the advantages of having several areas that you work in is that when you get tired or fatigued or you hit a dead end, you can switch registers and go to a different stance, a different archive, a different set of problems, and work on it,” said Shields, 63. “That’s the Picasso principle – always have several projects you’re working on at the same time.”

Shield’s academic resume is impressive: The McClintock Professor of Southern Letters at USC, he teaches courses on early American literature, Southern literature and Southern foodways. He has written books on American poetry in the 17th and 18th centuries, on an early 19th century USC French professor who pioneered the wine-making industry in America and on the history of Carolina Gold rice and rice culture in South Carolina.

But his research into lost foods draws the most attention. Shields spends countless hours in the basement of Thomas Cooper Library, scouring old agricultural journals. When he latches on to one subject – such as the Bradford watermelon – he finds where and how it was best grown. In the case of the watermelon, he found remnants of the variety still being grown in Sumter County and has spread the gospel of its tastiness. In other cases, he has worked with scientists in a gene-based process that can lead to de-extinction of a variety.

“For starters, basically, there is nothing basic about David,” said Brian Ward, a horticulture specialist with Clemson University’s Coastal Research and Education Center, who has worked alongside Shields on several projects.

“In a world of food revolution where chefs and growers alike are realizing that what once was is now more important than anything, David is a superhero. ... When he finds a lead, he tracks it down, and if germplasm exists and he is able to obtain it and verify its validity, he entrusts seed to people like me who are specialists in bringing the germplasm back. He’s kind of like an Indiana Jones of old foodways.”

Glenn Roberts, founder of Columbia’s Anson Mills, was so impressed with Shields he tapped him as chairman of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, which pushes the development of that heirloom grain and other historic foods.

“There’s no one like him in America,” Roberts said. “He has the intellectual property and then goes out in the field and does the work, actually harvesting African sugar cane.”

Heirloom foods were a salvation for Shields. He was at a mid-career signpost, waiting for direction a little more than a decade ago. A tenured professor at The Citadel, he could have been comfortable writing or contributing to more books on literature.

“I didn’t want my life to be contained in six inches of a library shelf,” Shields recalled in his USC office, with black and white silent screen star photos on walls that aren’t lined with bookshelves. “So I decided I’d develop an expertise for each one of my senses, and they wouldn’t be connected necessarily, and I’d develop a real fundamental coverage of a problem, something that each area – seeing, hearing, tasting – hadn’t been dealt with before.”

When discussing his passions, Shields talks in those sorts of long sentences, as if his thoughts can’t slow down. “Still,” a book on silver screen photography, satisfied the need to delve into the sense of sight. About the time the Soviet Union fell apart, Shields worried the new powers would destroy many aspects of culture there. So he set about chronicling, and saving examples of, Russian piano music. That covered the sense of hearing.

The taste sense proved to be too strong to cover in one book. In addition to a book of essays on Carolina Gold rice, Shields has a new book on Southern food culture coming out this spring, and he’s working on a history of the top chefs in the country.

He really launched into heirloom foods when he hosted a conference, “Cuisines of the Lowcountry and the Caribbean,” in 2003 in Charleston. He invited chefs, historians, producers, growers, fishing boat captains – “it was the first time people came together for that kind of conversation,” Shields said.

Not long after the conference, Roberts approached Shields with a quandary. Many of the ingredients in historical South Carolina recipe books no longer were grown. He needed help bringing them back, especially heirloom rice.

“I had one of those moments of weakness,” Shields said. “You’re thinking, ‘Hey this is like New Orleans cuisine and the Cajun cooking in the 1980s, and I’ll get lots of free dinners and things will taste better.’ So I said yes, and then it became apparent how little we knew of anything.”

So Shields dove into old agriculture journals, cookbooks and newspaper articles. He started looking for Carolina Gold rice, then started adding other interests. Heirloom benne seed, the Bradford melon, the Carolina African runner peanut and his latest quest, purple ribbon cane. In most cases, they all had distinctive tastes, which might have contributed to their original demise.

“The foods that have the greatest potential for mass adoption are the closest that approximate tastelessness,” Shields said. “Any food that has pronounced taste will provoke disgust in a certain percentage of the population, but if you have no taste, you have no objection.”

Those unusual tastes, however, made Southern benne seed cakes and peanut fritters special. Heirloom food advocates in recent years have clamored for those old tastes. Shields’ research helped locate some of the classics.

The old benne seed survived in Mexico. The Bradford was still growing on, of all place, the Bradford family’s farm in Sumter. Shields found the peanut in a freezer at N.C. State, where it apparently was saved as part of a breeding survey in the 1930s. Forty seeds from the freezer, after three years of work by Ward at the Clemson farm in Charleston, have produced enough peanuts to hand out to farmers for general production.

Tracking down sugar cane has been more difficult. No exact genetic matches had been found, so Shields worked with Clemson geneticist Stephen Kresovich to come up with several close relatives. Kresovich will extract DNA from those, back breed them, and essentially de-extinct the classic variety. The plan it to bring the strain back on plots on Georgia’s Sapelo Island, where it first was grown in North America by slaves and now could provide a strong cash crop for the remaining African-American residents.

After all of the work with Kresovich on purple ribbon cane, Shields now might have found someone still growing the original. They’re doing DNA analysis to make sure.

Shields’ college and post-grad degrees are in English literature, but he always has had a passion for research. And when he researches something, he becomes an expert – enough so that he is conversant with Ward on botany and Kresovich on genetics.

“He’s like a cartographer who’s mapping the intersections between agriculture and society,” Kresovich said. “He understands and respects history, and sees it’s context in the future.”

Another analogy is forensics. Shields researches when a variety of plant died out, “then he connects the dots. To do that, he needs a skill set in a lot of areas,” Kresovich said.

“All of these projects are necessarily collaborative,” Shields said. “You get the best botanist, best biologist, best entomologist, the best organic farmer you can get working on the project with you. My dimension is I know what was. I know what was important. I know why it was important. I know the descriptions of how it was grown. I have a theory or so about why it was grown in such a way. I know why it was stopped being grown or didn’t stop being grown.”

Next up is the Klondike strawberry, once dominant in the state but like so many of these heirloom foods it fell out of favor because it wasn’t as easy to grow or as light on the taste buds. Those types of changes might make it seem Shields, who loves the old tastes, was born 100 years too late. He disagrees.

“I was born at the precise time to do my projects because they haven’t been done yet and they’re the sort of things that demand doing,” he said. “If I had been born 100 years ago, no one would have been interested in these issues.”

This story was originally published February 22, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "USC professor thrives on digging deep into five senses, including taste of heirloom food."