Dr. David Shields

Dr. David Shields is known as “the flavor saver”. He tracks down lost food crops and assists in restoring them to fields and tables: Carolina Gold Rice, Cocke’s Prolific Corn, Rice Peas, Purple Straw Wheat, the Dyehouse Cherry, Benne, Carolina African Runner Peanut, Purple Ribbon Sugar Cane, Hick’s Mulberry, Seashore Black Seed Rye, and Bradford Watermelon. He has written award-winning agricultural and culinary histories, including Southern Provisions (2015), The Culinarians (2017), Taste the State South Carolina (2021), The Ark of Taste (2023) (with Giselle Kennedy Lord), and Taste the State Georgia. Shields documents the extraordinary creations of two centuries of American plant breeders, farmers, and chefs while showing the forces at work that marginalize flavor and nutrition in the nation’s food system. He chairs the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, heads the Ark of Taste Committee for the South, and is the Carolina Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of South Carolina. He is the Southern Foodways Alliance’s “Keeper of the Flame,” twice a James Beard finalist in food history, and Slow Food’s Snailblazer for Biodiversity.