This cookbook is one of our all-time favorites. In fact, it's on the list of 13 Healthyish Cookbooks That Changed the Way We Eat.
Last year, I found myself on the phone with Bryant Terry, the chef-in-residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora and author of the 2014 cookbook, Afro-Vegan, for a story I was working on at Fast Company. What was supposed to be a short, simple conversation about his mission to marry the food of the African diaspora with vegan cooking turned into a much larger and more painful discussion about the rampant food injustice faced by African-Americans, who disproportionately suffer from diet-related illnesses like hypertension and Type II diabetes in communities that sometimes have more fast food restaurants than sources of fresh food.
At the time, Terry mentioned how much he hates the term “food desert,” which is used to describe neighborhoods where fresh produce is in short supply. We talked about the term being passive and defeatist. Instead, Terry said, the only way to achieve food security in communities of color is for the people in those neighborhoods to take their fate into their own hands by opening their own co-ops, urban farms, and community gardens. We talked about treating food insecurity the same way we treat other parts of the social justice movement (like police brutality and racial profile)—by meeting them with outrage and activism.
I’ve thought a lot about that conversation in the almost year and a half since, and I’ve followed Terry almost religiously. I’ve also fallen in love with his cookbook. Afro-Vegan features more than a hundred flavorful, globally-minded recipes from Hominy and Spinach in Tomato-Garlic Broth to Skillet Cornbread with Pecan Dukkah, but, more importantly, it highlights how black people were torn away from this way of eating and are working to forge a path back. The cookbook includes songs and books to listen to or read while you’re waiting for your meal to come together. It’s also flexible: The point isn’t to sell you on veganism so much as encourage you to eat less meat and dairy. I’ve thrown non-vegan protein into my personal favorite recipe, the Verdant Vegetable Couscous with Spicy Mustard Greens, and I’ve spiked the Roselle Rooibos Drink (hibiscus, rooibos tea, OJ, cinnamon, and pineapple) with a little rum.
Besides being a truly inspired treatise on vegan food you’ll actually want to eat, Afro-Vegan dives right to the heart of one of the most difficult truths about being black in America: We are on a constant mission to reclaim our heritage, whether that’s through re-learning to love staples like millet and teff (an Ethiopian grain) or spending hours trying to figure out how to work with the natural state of our hair. It’s all connected, and the only way out of the tunnel is through education.
Afro-Vegan belongs in the Healthyish canon not because it speaks to the African-American experience (though it does and beautifully so), but because it speaks to anyone who wants desperately to feel well while living in a world that’s constantly giving us reasons not to. Bryant Terry may not have been the first person to figure it out, but he certainly figured out how to make that mission more approachable and less daunting than ever. And for that, I’m thankful to him.
Buy Afro-Vegan by Bryant Terry.