Bryant Terry is the author of Vegan Soul Kitchen: Fresh, Healthy, and Creative African-American Cuisine, Afro-Vegan: Farm-Fresh African, Caribbean, and Southern Flavors Remixed, Vegetable Kingdom: The Abundant World of Vegan Recipes, and the editor of Black Food.

Alicia: Hi, Bryant, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today.

Bryant: Thank you so much for having me. I've been a big fan of your work for a minute and have wanted to connect. So I'm glad we can make it happen.

Alicia: I'm so glad, too. Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Bryant: Sure. So I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. And, you know, I think it's always important to talk about my family's roots, which are in rural Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas. And the fact that we had farms that we owned, and I got a chance to, you know, visit one of the farms. Unfortunately, as many African-Americans experienced throughout the 20th century, two of the farms that we had actually were taken away from us. It's important for me to really put the work that I'm doing and the kind of practices that I promote in context.

I always say that, really, I'm simply imparting the lessons that I learned by my elders and ancestors, because many of the practices that I would argue are rooted in survival, some in pleasure, you know, things such as growing food at home, canning and pickling and preserving, making meals from scratch—these were the type of practices that my grandparents, they were just kinda central to the way that they lived. And, you know, I say that because so often when we talk about these things, they are kind of attributed to—or at least the stories that we hear often about, at least as of late—young kind of urban gentrifiers who are taking on these practices as a way to kind of push back against our industrialized food system.

For me, it's important to recognize that working-class, working-poor, rural and urban Black folks, particularly in the south, have embraced these practices. It's about understanding that this was just a way that they lived; they didn't feel any need to name it or kind of classify it’s just like, growing food was cheaper, growing food made sense, growing food was, you know, they had the agrarian knowledge and skills that they wanted to apply in an urban context. And, you know, our food was as local as our backyard garden. We mostly ate what was in season and we would often, you know, literally go out and harvest food right before we made it. And so that's really the foundation of all the work that I'm doing, and I stand on the shoulders of ancestors and elders who taught me these things when I was a child.

Alicia: How did you end up eating a vegan diet or getting connected to the world of veganism?

Bryant: Once again, I think it's important to acknowledge that my early kind of contact with these ideas came from Black folks, you know, when we talk about, like the vegetarian, vegan diet, plant-based eating, or however you want to talk about it, you know, once again, so often in the popular imagination, you know, people immediately go to  the practices of these kind of upper middle class white suburbanites, or the kind of urban gentrified white hipsters, and the first time that I even learned about vegetarian and veganism, it was from some Black family members who were Seventh-Day Adventists and obviously theirs were theologically driven practices around eating in this way but, you know, that was the first contact that I came into.

I would say the kind of pivotal moment as a young person that launched me into food activism—and I can talk about what their food activism looks like in a second—was when I heard the song “Beef” by the rapper KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions in which he just so brilliantly talks about the impact of factory farming, not only on animals, but human health and the environment. That was a major shift in my habits and attitudes and politics around food.

One of the things that is so funny—it's funny now, but back then, I'm sure my parents were really disgusted with me, because whatever stereotypes one has of kind of like the self-righteous, dogmatic, finger-wagging vegans, that was how I was showing up. And there were a lot of fights and me haranguing them and trying to get them to shift their diet, even though I just changed like the week before. And that was a great lesson. I really carry that period with me, because it just showed me that the least effective way to help people think about changing their habits and attitudes and politics regarding food is yelling at them and screaming at them and making them feel wrong for the way that they're, you know, just living their lives. And so as someone who's worked with young people for the better part of two decades, and specifically starting this work around food justice activism, working with young people, you know, I realized that there are more effective ways to help young people think more deeply about relationship with animals in the natural environment, and for me that was, you know, actually cooking.

When you hear about these types of dietary practices and political positions, I think a lot of people default towards people like Peter Singer and John Robbins and Frances Moore Lappé, and, you know, they certainly are important thinkers and activists and have inspired a lot of my work—two of them being personal mentors. But I just always have to pivot back to: my early teachers were all Black folks.

I mean, we could talk about just like me hearing this song by KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions, and the way in which that just totally transformed my relationship with food, and then starting to spend a lot of time at the health food store in downtown Memphis and I connected with this community of Black folks who had been vegans for decades. It was interesting because it was such a diverse group of folks. I mean, the people I felt drawn to the most initially were Rastafarians, and there were a lot of there are a number of Rastas who would go to the who would shop there and who would hold court in the little prepared eating section, and so I would talk to them and just learn more about, you know, the ital diet, but, you know, it's pretty much parallel to what we think of as kind of like a ethical vegan diet. But I also met like, you know, older Black folks who, for whatever reason, had shifted from a standard American diet to plant-based diets and learning about their journeys and not just around consumption but also, you know, these are folks who had agrarian roots and that's where I started to get interested in gardening, because they would talk to me about just the importance of growing food and and contributing to local food systems.

I think is vitally important for me to really name and claim these Black elders and thinkers and writers and activists and kind of uplift this thread of Black-led food activism throughout the 20th century, whether we're talking about the, you know, theologically kind of based health ministry of like the Seventh-Day Adventists or we could look at like the Nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammad's health ministry. I mean, he wrote two books, How to Eat to Live and was very focused on how food can both heal and hurt Black communities. We can talk about Dick Gregory, who was a major inspiration and reading his book Cookin’ with Mother Nature in high school and listening to his lectures, and, you know, these were the people that I would say deeply inspired me to feel like I can contribute to this conversation through my activism and eventually, you know, writing.