'Afro-Vegan' recipes, singing with flavor

Tofu Curry With Mustard Greens Tofu Curry With Mustard Greens Photo: Paige Green, Ten Speed Press 2014 Photo: Paige Green, Ten Speed Press 2014 Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close 'Afro-Vegan' recipes, singing with flavor 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

The soundtrack of cookbook author Bryant Terry's life is mixed with memories of his boyhood family harvest in rural Mississippi and Memphis, and singing around the piano with a family of songwriters and choir singers.

So it's impossible for the self-described Oakland food justice activist to separate music from food, or to overlook that poverty and industrialization in his hometown and elsewhere have pushed low-income communities of color further and further from the plant-based soul food he remembers.

He honors those lost recipes by reinventing them for today's home harvesting renaissance in his fourth and latest cookbook, "Afro-Vegan: Farm-Fresh African, Caribbean & Southern Flavors Remixed" (Ten Speed Press, 2014; 224 pages; $27.50).

Bryant melds recipes, food politics and music into a genre of plant-forward cooking influenced by West and Central African agrarian diets. Each recipe is paired with a song.

Q: Your book tour has taken you to more than a dozen states, the Bahamas and on a Caribbean cruise ship. What kind of response are you getting?

A: The thing that is most moving to me is having audiences where there are a lot of black people. In 2006, when I was promoting "Grub" or "Vegan Soul Kitchen," there would be only a handful, if any, African Americans. I think we are in a place where there is much more interest in eating in a vegetable-centered way; it's not as scary or weird or marginalized as it was seven years ago.

There's a zeitgeist now, especially among prominent African Americans making a public shift toward a vegetable-centered diet. There's the PBS documentary, "Soul Food Junkies," and Jay Z and Beyoncé going vegan, and Oprah having her entire staff go vegan for two weeks.

Q: What surprises people most about the way you do soul food?

A: You mean that it's not all fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and red velvet cake?

My book is not the first to call for a healthy connection to cultural food. I'm just helping trace the thread of African American health advocates throughout the 20th century, from the Seventh-day Adventists promoting vegetarian and vegan diets, to the Nation of Islam rejecting a "white man's diet," which is just a metaphor for industrial food.

There are the Rastafarians with their Ital diet that rejects processed foods and those sprayed with pesticides, and Dick Gregory, the social justice comedian, promoting better food for African Americans. Coretta Scott King was a major advocate of veganism. I am clearly standing on their shoulders.

Afro-vegan is not some new hippie thing. It has a serious cultural history. Before food was industrialized, working-class black families gardened for survival reasons - they couldn't afford meat every night of the week.

Q: What was your path to veganism?

A: I heard this song in high school, "Beef" by Boogie Down Productions. It was a brilliant criticism of factory farming.

Q: So you stopped eating meat after you heard it?

A: My path to being a vegan wasn't linear, and I'm just starting to have the courage to talk about it.

There's so much judgment about what you eat, and people feel guilty or give up when they break their own rules. Life is more nuanced, and should shift according to age, health status and bodily constitution and seasonality.

In my house, I'm the vegan, my wife is the caveman who eats anything, and my 3-year-old daughter loves kefir and chicken, and she requires noodles daily.

Q: What is a food justice activist?

A: Low-income communities of color face a number of physical, geographical and economic barriers to fresh, local, affordable food, and too often well-meaning organizations go into those communities to fix the problems, but they are not deeply interested in shifting power. The responses must come from those living in the communities, and they must be full partners, and eventually take over the leadership of these efforts; otherwise, it's just another form of poverty pimping.

Q: What do you see in Oakland that's working?

A: The People's Grocery in West Oakland, which used to deliver groceries in a van, they are soon going to break ground on a brick-and-mortar grocery in West Oakland. And what's really interesting is the effort to get local growers to stock the shelves. Also City Slicker Farms, they go into people's homes and help them build their own gardens.

Q: What do you grow in your garden?

A: My wife, who is Chinese American, and I like to blend our styles in what we call Afro-Asian cuisine. So we grow collards, mustards, bok choy, joi choy and a huge box of herbs - we have four types of mint. Watermelon, Asian eggplant, string beans. And this neighborhood once used to be all fruit orchards, so we have a persimmon tree, figs, Meyer lemons and kumquat. All the neighbors swap produce.

Q: How do you pair soundtracks with your recipes?

A: Sometimes it's literal, like I'll match a recipe with green onions with a song that has green onions in the title. Other times it's what I was listening to at the time I was creating the recipe. Then sometimes it's an emotional match.

For my All-Green Spring Slaw, I wanted to reinvent that overly mayonnaised coleslaw. I combined green cabbage and sugar snap peas and a tangy silken tofu dressing with apple cider vinegar, and added toasted pumpkin seeds for crunch. Something about the boldness of it matched the energy and thrust of this song by this Australian band, Hiatus Kaiyote, "Mobius Streak."

Q: Where do you like to eat?

A: In Oakland, I like Pizzaiolo, Camino and Miss Ollie's. In San Francisco, I go to Yamo or Gracias Madre.

Q: Five-year plan?

A: My wife and I want to fuse our styles into a cookbook called "BBQ Bean Sprouts."

Getting in the cooking mood Bryant Terry's new cookbook, "Afro-Vegan: Farm-Fresh African, Caribbean & Southern Flavors Remixed," pairs each recipe with a soundtrack and, in some cases, a book or a movie. Here is a sample of his blend of sound, smell and taste: -- Savory Grits With Slow-Cooked Collard Greens: "The Funk" by Oh No from "Dr. No's Ethiopium." -- Pumpkin-Peanut Fritters: "Leliyafu" by Ladysmith Black Mambazo from "Songs From a Zulu Farm." -- Dandelion Salad With Pecan Dressing: "Down in Memphis" by Booker T. Jones from "The Road to Memphis."