Taro Reading

Last year’s weather was not kind to Jamie Swofford. The summer sent spells of extreme heat and drought to Old North Farm, the one-acre operation he runs in Shelby, North Carolina, 50 miles west of Charlotte. The fall delivered the winds and deluge of Hurricane Helene—it dumped 16 inches of rain in less than two days—followed by a month with little rain at all. 

Swofford’s lettuce bolted, his turnips baked, and his okra simply keeled over.

One harvest, however, remained proudly unperturbed: His taro plants’ elephant-ear leaves and bulbous underground stems, or corms, came through with barely a broken stalk. “That was about the only crop that we didn’t see any damage to,” he said.

Taro’s resilience comes as no surprise. The plant is an agricultural staple of tropical areas where big storms are common, from the islands of Hawaii (where its corms are boiled and mashed into a puree called poi) to the Philippines (where its leaves are simmered in coconut milk for a dish known as laing). But its performance through Helene bolstered Swofford’s belief, shared by an ever-increasing number of farmers, that a plant unfamiliar to many Americans could flourish across the South.

Swofford and many other Southern growers first learned about taro’s potential through the Asheville-based Utopian Seed Project. The nonprofit’s founder and executive director, Chris Smith, is devoted to exploring new crop options that might stand up to the region’s changing climate, in which temperatures will be higher and extreme weather events like Helene more common.

Since 2019, taro has been a leading prospect for what Smith calls a “baseline, high-level, staple, utility-type food”—something like its fellow root crop, the potato, with culinary versatility and meaningful caloric content. The Utopian Seed Project recently wrapped up a U.S. Department of Agriculture-supported study on the crop that explored best practices for variety selection and planting in the South. 

“It does all the things that a new crop would need to do,” said Smith. “There’s no real challenges with it, beyond just nobody knowing what it is or how to cook with it.”

To help sweeten the deal for taro’s wider adoption, the project is partnering with Ashley and Greg Garrison, co-owners of The Hop Ice Cream in Asheville. On June 27, the locally beloved business will release a special batch of ice cream made with taro corms from Smith’s experimental farm in nearby Leicester.

The taro flavor isn’t The Hop’s first collaboration with the project; previous entries have included brown butter okra praline and roasted garlic ice cream flavors, and the store initially worked with local taro last year. By presenting flavors that feature area produce in playful and unexpected ways, Ashley Garrison said, ice cream can coax eaters into taking chances—and nourish demand for a locally grown, climate-resilient crop.

“There’s a lack of familiarity with it, but that’s why we’re doing it,” she explained. “We’re happy to take on the educational and information aspect, so that if people then go to a restaurant or farmers market and see it out, they’ll go, ‘Ooh, taro!’”

Getting to the Root of It

Southern farmers find growing taro to be the easiest part of cultivating the crop, says Sandi Osterkatz. She raises the plant for her community-supported agriculture program at Footnote Farm, outside of Chapel Hill, and she also interviewed more than a dozen growers about their experiences as part of the Utopian Seed Project’s recent study.

The South’s native insect pests, Osterkatz says, have no idea what to do with taro; mammals that ravage other root crops, like rats and voles, largely avoid the plant due to its irritating mineral crystals, called oxalates, that break down when the plant is cooked. Its yields are comparable to those of potatoes, but it’s from a completely different botanical family and thus isn’t susceptible to the blights that often plague nightshades. Taro corms also maintain their quality at room temperature for months, allowing farmers to store and sell them over time for consistent income.

“It requires so little care, so little maintenance, that I don’t have to babysit it either in storage or in the field,” Osterkatz said.

Some U.S. growers recognized these advantages as early as 1910, when a USDA publication flagged taro among its titular “Promising Root Crops for the South.” But for whatever reason, taro never took off.

The area’s immigrant populations offer some notable exceptions, said Osterkatz. She points to Chue and Tou Lee of Lee’s One Fortune Farm in Marion, which grows taro for the local Hmong community, and Michael Carter of Carter Farms in Orange County, Virginia, a supplier of taro greens for the African and Caribbean diasporas.

Experiments in Flavor

Of course, turn-of-the-century American farmers didn’t have a top-notch ice cream maker in their corner. 

Although taro is a common flavor in desserts from Asian countries such as Taiwan and Thailand (and sometimes pops up at frozen yogurt shops like sweetFrog), Ashley Garrison says she hadn’t eaten it in ice cream form before beginning to experiment with her own recipe for The Hop.

To turn raw taro into creamy goodness, Garrison starts by running the corms through a mill to remove the skins, then roasts the flesh to caramelize its sugars and eliminate excess moisture. Smaller corms, she says, are preferable due to their more concentrated sweetness and flavor. From there, she purees the vegetable to a smooth consistency with a stick blender and mixes in enough sugar to prevent any leftover water from crystallizing in the ice cream. 

The result can go directly into an ice cream base or find other sweet uses. Last year, the Garrisons used the taro paste as a “walling” to coat cups at their sister shop, Pop Bubble Tea, and this year they plan to top drinks with chunks of roasted taro. (Taro is already a popular base flavor for bubble tea, but due to a lack of local sources for dried taro powder, Pop currently imports its supply from Taiwan.)  

In desserts, taro is subtle but unmistakably delicious: creamy and very buttery, with an earthy roundedness and slight notes of popcorn. It pairs well with many other flavors, Garrison says. This season’s offerings might include a swirl combining taro with orange sweet potato.

The Garrisons acknowledge that sales of taro ice cream are unlikely to rival those of salted caramel, their customers’ favorite, anytime soon. But they want to help Smith and the Utopian Seed Project introduce the crop to local audiences, a long game of repeated exposure and gentle education.

Perhaps tasting a sweet sample over The Hop’s counter might lead to someone ordering a poi dish at Hell or High Water in Black Mountain, where Swofford sells his taro to chef Eric Morris, or a taro-infused cocktail at Durham’s Kingfisher, which has bought the crop from Osterkatz. 

Increased local demand would allow farmers to sow more plants, making the climate-resilient crop a source of economic resilience as well. Eventually, suggests Smith, Southern farmers could grow enough taro to start replacing U.S. imports of the crop, an estimated $69 million annual market. 

That’s a modest figure when compared with other root vegetables; the American sweet potato crop, for example, was worth more than $614 million in 2024. But it’d be a pretty good return for a revolution starting one $3.70 kiddie scoop at a time.

Daniel Walton is an Asheville-based freelance reporter covering science, sustainability, and political news. He was previously the news editor of Mountain Xpress and has written for The Guardian, Civil Eats, and Sierra. Contact him at danielwwalton@live.com.