Bryant Terry

Author of Vegan Soul Kitchen and Grub

Link to this speaker

Create PDF

Email to a friend

Back to search results

THE LATEST: Bryant Terry's latest book, The Inspired Vegan, is a fusion of food, music, art, and storytelling. It equips readers with more than just delicious recipes--it imparts the wisdom of a food movement with an inspiring vision of the future.

"Bryant Terry knows that good food should be an everyday right and not a privilege." -Alice Waters, renowned chef and food activist

Bryant Terry is an eco chef, food justice activist, and author of critically acclaimed Vegan Soul Kitchen (VSK): Fresh, Healthy, and Creative African-American Cuisine. For the past ten years he has worked to build a more just and sustainable food system and has used cooking as a tool to illuminate the intersections between poverty, structural racism, and food insecurity. His interest in cooking, farming, and community health can be traced back to his childhood in Memphis, Tennessee, where his grandparents inspired him to grow, prepare, and appreciate good food.

Bryant is a former fellow of the Food and Society Policy Fellows Program, a national project of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. He has garnered many honors and awards for his work including receiving the inaugural Natural Gourmet Institute Award for Excellence in Health-Supportive Food Education and being selected as one of the 2008 "Hot 20 Under 40" in the San Francisco Bay Area magazine 7x7. Bryant's first book, Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen, is a winner of a 2007 Nautilus Award for Social Change. Since the publication of Grub, Bryant has traveled to dozens of cities speaking at public events as well as colleges and universities such as Brown, Columbia, NYU, Smith, Stanford, and Yale. Bryant contributes essays and recipes to a number of online and print outlets, and his work has been featured in Food and Wine, The New York Times Magazine, Jet and many other publications. He has made dozens of national radio and television appearances (Fox, NBC, PBS, BET, and Sundance) including making a guest appearance on the eco-reality series Mario's Green House and being a host on The Endless Feast, a 13-episode public television series that explores the connection between the earth and the food on our plates.

In 2002, Bryant founded b-healthy! (Build Healthy Eating and Lifestyles to Help Youth), a multi-year initiative designed to empower youth to be active in creating a more just and sustainable food system. Along with his fellow organizers, Bryant helped elevate cooking as an important tool for organizing and base building in the food justice movement.

Bryant Terry Speech Topics

Food Justice: At the Intersection of Food, Politics, Poverty, Public Health and the Environment

How can we provide healthy food choices for all Americans, regardless of income, geography or race? In this interactive talk, Bryant Terry shows us how the food we eat directly affects issues such as poverty, sustainability, and structural racism. How can we get healthier food into low income urban areas? What can each of us -- whether urban dweller or suburbanite -- do to eat healthier? And how will these choices affect everything from the environment to social justice? Terry doesn't push faddish or prescribed diets. But he will occasionally sing and even cook a meal to demonstrate how simple (and delicious) making better food choices can be. Fusing food justice and personal history, Terry shows us how to improve access to fresh food in our communities -- whether that community is your campus, your workplace, your neighbourhood, or just your own set of friends gathered in the kitchen.

VIDEOS

LINKS

Bryant Terry's Official Website

Bryant Terry Radio Interview on The Travis Smiley Show

BOOKS

The Inspired Vegan

Vegan Soul Kitchen

Grub

All Speakers > Bryant Terry

GAYLE LEMMON at TEDxWOMEN

"If you're going to talk about jobs, then you have to talk about entrepreneurs," says Gayle Tzemach Lemmon. "And if you're talking about entrepreneurs in conflict and post-conflict settings, then you must talk about women." Lemmon is the author of the New York Times bestselling book The Dressmaker of Khair Khana and a Contributing Editor-at-Large for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. She has devoted her life to shedding light on the resiliency of female entrepreneurs, and their remarkable power to reshape local economies. By recognizing and investing in these female breadwinners, Lemmon says, we can help grow economies of all development levels around the world.