Paste without haste: call it old-fashioned, but a Rutherfordton company makes more miso the traditional way than anybody else in the world.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: PICTURE THIS

Rutherford County didn't lack history and tradition before John and Jan Belleme moved there. It's named after a Revolutionary War general, and for generations, high-school kids have held summer jobs in peach-packing houses--many older teenagers, as their parents whose parents did before them, worked in textile mills--and spent Saturday nights cruising drive-ins in Spindale, Forest City and Rutherfordton, the county seat. To that mix, the Bellemes imported history and tradition from another hemisphere.

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He had grown up in South Florida, where he worked as a research biologist. A trip to a health-food store in Coconut Grove, Fla., during the mid-'70s sparked an interest in macrobiotics, which fed his fascination for an ancient Japanese foodstuff. With some investors, the couple started what would become American Miso Co., which sent them to Japan in 1979 to study a craft that dates back some 1,500 years. The salty paste is used in soups, sauces, fish and meat recipes and scores of other dishes. It's as much a staple of Japanese cooking as soy sauce. Today, more than 30 years later, the company is the largest maker of traditional organic miso in the world--Japan included.

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This year, its dozen workers will produce 400,000 pounds, worth close to $3 million on the retail market. In an increasingly high-technology economy, fewer Japanese companies are making it, particularly in the delicate, time-consuming old way. "We've reversed the trend entirely," Belleme says. "We're an American-made product. We're employing Americans in jobs in this country that are displacing jobs in Japan."

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They're doing it in a 13,000-square-foot metal building near U.S. 74 west of Rutherfordton. After doing some research, the company founders chose the Blue Ridge escarpment because its climate is similar to Japan's and ideal for fermenting miso. But the company had to survive a man-made disaster before it could make full use of its natural advantage. Two years in, its distributor, Cambridge, Mass.-based Erewhon Trading Co., went bankrupt. "We got stranded with no distributor, no brand, no raw material, no nothing," Belleme says.

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In 1981, Barry Evans, the chief investor in the...