How This Southern Town Became One Of The Best Healthy Food Cities In America

He had plenty to choose from. The Low Country's climate is ideal for food cultivation, with an almost year-round growing season that only omits a few weeks at the peak of winter and summer. At this year's Wine and Food Festival, one of the excursions was to Spade & Clover, a turmeric and ginger farm on Johns Island, just outside of Charleston. The environment was so verdant that attendees filled bags with foraged sorrel, lavender, and other greens that grew wild around the property; on another part of the farm, a bee farm ensured a supply of fresh honey (there was also an alligator lurking in the Spanish-moss-draped oak-lined pond, but that's another story). It was enough to prepare a multicourse meal mostly from the grounds, a hyperbolic experience of the commitment to locality exhibited by the rest of the area restaurants.

In the town itself, a commitment to heritage is obvious: Most of the buildings are original structures from the 1700s and 1800s, and one can easily find themselves late to any event by getting caught up reading one of the many signs detailing the historical stories that dot the downtown. This extends to the cuisine; Anson Mills has led a revolution in the ancient grain world, finding, preserving, and bringing to market grains that often haven't existed for hundreds of years. Their carefully cultivated Carolina gold rice, once a staple crop of the South but forgotten since the 1800s, is a staple at most of the city's fine dining restaurants, where its creamy, sweet, faintly nutty flavor demonstrates that ancient grains, beyond greater nutrition, bring to the table a new world of flavor.

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