Melissa Harris-Perry: You're listening to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We just heard how the Netflix series High on the Hog brought the stories of Black people who have shaped US food culture past and present to a mainstream audience. It turns out there's a lot of appetite right now in recognizing and celebrating Black foodways and culinary traditions. That's something our next guest knows very well. Chef, activist, and educator Bryant Terry is the author of the new book, Black Food, and editor in chief of four-color books.

Featuring the work of more than a hundred contributors, Black Food explores, Black foodways across the US and around the world through recipes, poetry, essays, art, and more. Chef Terry is best known for his vegan and vegetarian spin on African-American cuisine, so I asked him what we really mean when we say Black food today.

Chef Bryant Terry: I guess I should start by talking about what I've been pushing back against the past two decades that I've been working around health food and farming issues. This is a very reductive way that people often imagine or talk about or write about Black food. When people hear that term, I think they think of one of two things. I often hear people refer to the antebellum survival foods upon which many enslaved Africans had had to rely. One, we know that before 1865, there were free Blacks we weren't all enslaved, and institutional slavery wasn't a monolith.

There might've been, more paternalistic ways of enslaved Africans being fed. That's, let's say the Black belt. In parts of the coastal Carolinas or the Caribbean or Louisiana, the institution could look different depending on the disposition of the plantation owner, their financial status, so there are a number of factors that might influence the way that enslaved Africans or Black folks, in general, were cooking and eating.

To simply call it slave food, which I hear many people referring to our cuisine, "I don't want to eat that. That's just slave food," and vilifying it I think is wrong-headed and historically inaccurate. The other thing that people think about when they hear Black food is soul food. When people hear soul food or say that, what they are most often imagining are the big flavored meats, the overcooked vegetables, and the sugar desserts that one might find at a soul food restaurant.

I'm not denying that either of those things, they're subsets of a larger and richer, diverse, and complex African-American cuisine or culinary traditions. What I want people to do is understand that diversity and complexity and move beyond the stereotypes. If you just think about just looking at African-American cuisine, the traditional staples of our cuisine, you're talking about nutrient-rich mustards and collards and turnips and kale, and tubers like sweet potatoes and sugar snap peas, and pole beans, and black-eyed peas. These are the foundations of what I think many people would say should be a healthful and nutrient-dense diet.

I want people to have a more diverse and complex understanding of what our food is. You can't talk about African-American cuisine without looking at the diaspora and understanding that the foods that traveled from Western and Central Africa to the new world and melding with the indigenous foods and flavor profiles and ingredients of this country, or this land, and the influence of European cuisine. I like to think of African-American cuisine as the original modern global fusion cuisine.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I need to pause for a second. I'm so disrupted. Are you saying that white kids in Brooklyn didn't discover kale?

Chef Bryant Terry: Yes. They didn't-- The funny thing when you say that, it's not just kale, but it's interesting to me that, even something like chitlins or chitterlings, depending on how you want to describe it, the way in which Black folks would often be made fun of because of eating animal innards, and now you go to some fancy hipster restaurant and you pay $30 for some chitterlings or whatever they might call them.

I think it's just in line with the anti-Blackness that I see that just permeates this society where people feel that they need to denigrate our traditions and our culture. I'm here to say that we need to be uplifting it. I think when we talk about criteria for healthful eating, we often focus on nutrients and micronutrients. One thing that I think is often missing from that conversation, are cultural foods. I think that one of the keys to Black liberation is us embracing our cultural foods, consuming them, cooking them, and building community around those foods.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What are other frameworks we could have as Black folks for building community around food?

Chef Bryant Terry: When you ask that question, the first thing I think about, is the activism that I've been involved in for the past two decades around building a more healthful and just and sustainable food system and understanding that, when we think about issues with many historically more marginalized communities, many of them being working class and working poor Black communities, being devoid of healthy, fresh, affordable, and culturally appropriate food. Often what I've seen is this idea that you need some type of outsiders to come in and help fix this problem.

Whether it's philanthropic organizations or I don't know, well-meaning white folks who don't come from the community. I'm not saying that folks can't be supportive and help efforts in communities to ensure that everyone has access to the human right of fresh, healthy, and affordable, and culturally appropriate food. I always think about the reality that the people who are living in the most impacted communities are the experts. They know the problems that they face. They often have very inventive solutions to addressing those problems and overcoming those barriers, whether it's physical, economic geographic, but people need power and resources shifted into those communities.

I've always been invested in helping and empowering communities. I found that one of the most powerful ways to start those conversations and help people feel more invested in doing that work is starting with the food, not starting with the heady intellectual ideas or the public policy, but actually building community around table, giving people opportunities to care for each other and break bread, and then using that as a site for strategizing.

Look. Some of the most powerful organizing that was done during the American Civil Rights movement was done in kitchens and restaurants and homes, around table. So many of the aunties and grandmothers and mothers were feeding these revolutionaries. I see the table as a powerful site for literally feeding ourselves, but feeding the revolution as well.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I have, I have a couple of, let's call it more grounded questions about some of those. The first is, a couple of years back I really threw myself into this and really started farming my backyard with everything from, fairly intensive sized flock of poultry, and with all of my many, many, many raised beds across the acres, which have gotten a little out of control. Here's one of the things I experienced. Growing your own food is hard. It is hard, it's hard. It really is actually hard. I just mean the amount of work, time, energy love, and sometimes I'm so tired from farming, I don't cook.

Talk to me about what it means. How do we think about the ways that we engage with food in these multiple levels? I'd love having my hands in the dirt, but I hate being too tired to make my own food at the end of the day,

Chef Bryant Terry: Not to say that this is happening for you, but I think that capitalism often convinces us that we need to address problems on our own. We need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and we need to just fix this problem. I think that we can look at multiple areas, but when it comes to feeding ourselves, growing food, building, thriving local food systems, these are things that, I think, is important for us to be engaging in these practices with community.

Let's just talk about cooking itself. We can talk about your farming and urban homesteading, but a lot of people will cite the time-intensity or the labor-intensity or the cost of making meals from scratch and feeding oneself with food and not going out and buying processed and packaged foods. People feel like it's a lot, with our busy lives. Many people are working more than one job because the job that they were working at isn't paying a living wage.

I paint a picture for people. I say, "Imagine this. What if rather than you doing that all alone, what if people in your neighborhood or family members or whatever community you're part of decide to collectively do it, and everyone gets up early on a Saturday morning and you go to that local farmer's market in town. You posse up and even before going in the shop, how about you do some menu planning and decide what ingredients we're going to be purchasing? Then after we get the food, we go back to the person who has the nice chef's kitchen and lots of room for us all to be cooking and preparing. Somebody makes a soup, another person makes a casserole, somebody makes a big VAT of tea."

You can have a week's worth of delicious freshly made local, seasonal, sustainable, yummy food that you can freeze some of it, you put some away, and guess what? You're building community. You're connecting with people that you love. You're supporting the people who are growing our food with integrity and care for the earth and care for communities. I think that the short answer is that we need to build community. While we're building a better food system for ourselves and our family, we should be building community and lifting each other up in the process.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I love that response. Now, one more question. Talk to me about cookbooks, and where they fit in our contemporary moment of how we cook and download quick recipes. I still do love and have some pretty sticky page cookbooks from years and years of returning to them, but how do we think about or how should we be thinking about cookbooks within this community building of food?

Chef Bryant Terry: Well, first of all, unfortunately, our industrialized food system and our capitalist society creates conditions where, oftentimes, people don't have the time and the space to practice cooking. Even over the pandemic, it's interesting, cookbooks did extremely well. My book, Vegetable Kingdom came out at the beginning of 2020, and then the pandemic hit, and my tour was canceled, and I was like, "Oh, it's done. That book is going to disappear."

People were invested in practicing more home cooking. I think that cookbooks are important because it provides a lot of the fundamental skills that I think many of us are lacking. A couple of generations ago, when we were spending lots of time-- I learned early on, many of the cooking techniques and preserving and canning and pickling from my grandmother. I recognize that, oftentimes, that's just not something that people are able to tap into. I, as an educator, as a community organizer, as someone who's invested in raising people's food IQ see my cookbooks as a way of empowering people to have the fundamentals of cooking.

Look, I may run myself out of business by saying this, but I actually think that cookbooks should be used as a guide. I think the magic of cooking is spontaneity, creativity, and the kind of spirit of jazz, working within a structure, but improvising and using that Swiss chard that you have at home, even though the recipe calls for collard greens, or if you don't do dairy, and the recipe calls for milk, make use of some cashew cream and substitute it for that, or use coconut milk. I think books can be useful, but I don't want people to rely on books because I think that the soul, the spirit, the excitement of cooking comes from just being in the flow.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Just because we're coming up on the holiday, or holidays, what's a go-to fall dish that is going to be on your holiday community table this year?

Chef Bryant Terry: My oldest daughter, Mila, has become a-- I was going to say militant, but I'm not going to say that. She's become a dedicated vegan over the past [unintelligible 00:12:54]. It's been really beautiful because I was very clear, I didn't want to force her to adopt a particular dietary model because I've seen that go terribly wrong and kids rebelling. I just modeled and it's been really beautiful seeing her embrace vegan eating and a lifestyle because she's clear that it's not just for the health reasons, but she can cite the environmental, economic reasons. The girl's 10 years old.

She inspires me, but lots of our eating in our home has been driven by what she wants to do, so we can encourage her to continue to grow and learn as a chef, and her favorite book these days, I have to just shout out this book. It's called The Korean Vegan. We have been pretty much cooking out of that book since we got it. She said that we will be having Korean holiday meals because that's what she wants to cook.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I love it. I love it. She's your oldest, you said?

Chef Bryant Terry: She's our oldest. Yes.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. She's 10. That means she still likes you. When she starts eating barbecue ribs just in front of you at 14, just know that it's going to be all right. She's going to come back around. Just as a mom of a 19-year-old and an auntie of some 30 and 20 somethings, I'm just saying, there comes a moment when they rebel, but then they come right all back.

Chef Bryant Terry: Oh, I needed that reassurance. Thank you.

[laughter]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Chef, I so appreciate you and this conversation. Chef Bryant Terry, thank you for joining The Takeaway.

Chef Bryant Terry: Thank you for having me, Melissa. It's an honor.

[00:14:33] [END OF AUDIO]

Copyright © 2021 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.