At precisely 7:00 PM on June 24, 1967, the 8-year-old version of Greg Bohlen, with a new buzz cut and a new suit and bow tie, began his walk down the center aisle of the Moweaqua United Methodist Church. He was carrying a cushion to which two gold rings were affixed, and following his niece, Nancy Bohlen, who strewed flowers in his path.
Fuzzy scrapbook snap of 1967 wedding.
Jay and Greg are wearing the bow ties.
I’m told Greg wasn’t happy that day. But he wasn’t losing a sister, he was gaining a co-author.
After the ceremony, the whole party adjourned to the dining room in the basement to enjoy a wonderful feast of fresh farm to table comfort food.
None of the farmers or farm wives who crowded the room, along with my immediate family and some of Susan’s college friends, had ever heard of nutritive density, nor regenerative farming, for that matter.
Susan and I left the party early, I stopped the car just outside of town and untied the string of shoes and tin cans Greg’s brother Chris and some other Moweaqua hooligans had affixed to our rental car, and we sped on to the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge in Champaign, where we would spend our wedding night. Howard Johnson’s restaurants, with their orange roofs and aqua trim, had been around since the 1920’s, but the motels were a new addition; the first one opened in 1954. Being new, they were extra clean and snazzy, with innovative design features, including silent toilets. (I’ve never understood why silent toilets didn’t become the industry standard.) But I digress.
Ho Jo’s restaurants (as they’re also known) featured 28 flavors of ice cream, an unheard-of range of choices then, and it was delicious ice cream too, thanks to an extra portion of butterfat in the mix. They also featured, at 20 cents apiece, the best-tasting hot dogs ever made. “Grilled in Butter,” the advertising said, and it wasn’t only the frankforts” as they called them that were grilled in butter, so were the buns – New England style buns with the slit in the top, which meant both sides could indeed be grilled, just like a grilled cheese sandwich, which were also on the menu at a quarter.
The last stand-alone Howard Johnson’s restaurant closed in 2022, but the company had been in decline for decades, as the nation became step by step more health conscious. Ho Jo’s frankforts may have been comfort food (they certainly were to me) but they were nothing resembling healthy, and as to their nutritive density the less said the better.
The next day, we sped from Champaign up through Michigan (stopping at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge in Bay City) on our way to Canada and the shores of Lake Nipissing in North Bay, Ontario. That was our international honeymoon, although Susan never did pronounce Nipissing correctly, and from there to Old Town, Maine, where we set up housekeeping. In all that long trip, I don’t know if we happened to hear a commercial on our AM radio for Royal Pudding, but we might have.
Royal Pudding is still in business, but like Ho Jo’s much reduced in scope, but in those days, it was a serious competitor to Jell-O in the pudding mix industry, Their commercials featured a catchy jingle, which went:
ROY=AWL
PUD-DING.
Rich, rich, rich in flavor
Smooth, smooth, smooth as silk
More food energy
Than fresh whole milk.
Food energy?
Even a 6-year old
knew what that meant.
That commercial must have been around at least since the late 1940s, because I have a distinct memory of it from when I was in first grade. Perhaps it was a sign that I would grow up to be a radio-TV commercial producer, that I remember thinking about the wording in the Royal jingle. What did it mean, I asked my little self, to have more food energy than fresh whole milk? And bright kid that I was, I figured it out, right then and there in the pantry of our apartment in Bethel, Connecticut: it meant it had more sugar!
Sneaky, I thought. Trying to make a health claim out of adding sugar, which I knew even then was definitely not a healthy food, even though it did indeed give you energy. Mother tried, with only marginal success, to keep my candy, etc consumption down to curb my rambunctiousness.
Howard Johnson’s frankforts, Royal pudding and even the scrumptious casseroles and pies served in the basement of the Moweaqua United Methodist Church, were fattening Americans day by day. As we were to learn, all that flavor came at a price.
And all that farming, with all that fertilizer and weed killer, was ruining the very soil.
When little Greg grew up and left behind his bow tie and buzz cut, he came to realize these things, and once his successful work in venture capital funding had given him the wherewithal to do something about it, he resolved to do so.
I have written often about the regenerative agriculture part of it, and how Union Grove Farm became the only vineyard in the country to attain Level Five Regenerative status.
But the summer of 2026 is here, and before it’s over, a new, much more than ever harvest will be under way. The grapes of that harvest will (I’ve written about this, too, see here) be magically turned into freeze dried snacks and marketed as SuperHero Grapes. The SuperHero part is to the point. Union Grove freeze dried grapes are packed to the brim with nutrients; they are nutrient dense.
Greg and his team at Union Grove Farm see these delicious morsels, unlike Royal Pudding, Ho Jo frankforts and even the fare at Moweaqua church dinners, have a higher level of nutrient density than practically any other food you can name, or eat.
What they have done is literally to reimagine the muscadine grape—a legendary Southern superfruit—into a brand-new variety that’s seedless and thin-skinned. SuperHero grapes are designed to fuel active bodies, delivering 6.4 times the antioxidants and 8.6 times the phenolics compared to conventional green grapes.
“We’re the spearhead of a whole new movement toward more nutritiously dense foodstuffs,” Greg said to me. “Don’t you agree?”
“I do,” I said.
