Food Files: Bryant Terry on Why We Have to Start with Food

Change.org Changemaker Bryant Terry is a chef, activist and author of two books about food and cooking. He uses cooking as a tool to engage with questions of food justice, sustainable food systems and social issues like poverty and racism.

Terry first became interested in food as a child in his grandparents’ kitchen in Memphis, Tennessee, and from there has become an active and respected figure on the sustainable food scene.

I recently spoke with Terry about a range of issues, including why the food itself must remain at the center of any food movement.

How did you get interested in food justice?

In graduate school I was researching the Black Panthers’ grocery giveaways and free breakfast for children programs. From there I argued that a wider social justice movement was remiss if it didn’t address food justice issues and decided to go to culinary school. While there I founded a five-year initiative that worked with young people, using cooking as a way to engage them around more political food issues.

Why did you choose to go become a cook yourself?

Cooking is my activism. One thing that often disappears in organizing and advocating for a more sustainable food system or addressing food insecurity or the rise of diet-related illnesses is delicious food.

That’s what we’re working for right? — for everyone to have access to healthy, sustainable, local, seasonable, affordable, good food. Not in the abstract, though. Tasty meals. One of my mentors, Alice Waters, has long used the “sensual pleasures of the table,” as she says, to move people. And I took a similar approach.

My philosophy is to start with the visceral, move to the cerebral, and end at the political. For me the visceral is sitting at the table and building community around good food. And I hope that from there, wheels will start turning that will catalyze people to make change in their own lives and their communities. And then I hope they would also push for structural change around these issues.

What do you think about the issue of food in schools that is causing so much debate lately?

The food in most public schools is horrible, and there needs to be a complete overhauling of school lunch programs. There also needs to be an overhauling of the curricula in schools. I think farm-to-school programs and educating young people about gardening and cooking should be integral to the curricula in all schools but particularly public schools.

I’ve visited countless projects around the country where schools have a garden on-site and they’re cooking the food that they’re growing. In the best cases teachers are weaving in the rest of the curricula with what the young people are doing in the fields and in the kitchen.

It’s just highly effective in establishing life-long patterns and helping educate young people about one of the most practical things they can learn, which is growing their own food and feeding themselves. So I support those types of projects as much as I can.

I know you’ve worked with getting youth involved in the past …

Yeah, I actually started out as a grassroots activist. While I was in cooking school, I started this initiative, “b-healthy,” that worked with high school students. We would get food that was being grown locally and sustainably and have our young people make it, and when they had a part in actually preparing the food they were much more likely to try it.

And once we got them engaged in that practical way, it was a lot easier to talk about issues such as race, class and gender and how that affects access to food and what’s happening in their neighborhoods and their schools.

I saw that teaching young people how to cook healthy food was a great way to create a cadre of youth food justice activists working to educate and organize their communities.

What do you think of the new Healthy Food Financing Initiative that Obama has included in his 2011 budget as a way of combating food deserts? Do you think that type of policy approach is the best way to help with that problem?

I do think there has to be a top-and-bottom approach. People working on a grassroots level have to work for change in their local and regional communities, and they have to push for local, state and national policy changes in order for the food system to transform.

One thing that has bothered me is that so much of the work around creating local and community food systems and moving to increase food access in urban centers has been done by organizations working specifically around those issues. I think the movement has to move beyond them. They can’t hold all the weight for affecting change.

I think that other stakeholders (e.g., faith-based institutions, long-standing community-based organizations, other NGOs that might not be working specifically around food security issues) have to play a part in supporting existing and creating new community-based food systems. That’s the only way change is going to happen.

What can an ordinary person do to help create a healthier system?

I always encourage people to try to grow their own food if one has enough green space available, to take part in greening urban centers. Even those growing fresh herbs on their windowsills or tomatoes on their fire escapes. It makes a statement that people do care about having fresh, locally grown food.

Also, getting involved in things like community gardens and urban farms. I don’t think those types of spaces have the capacity to feed everyone in cities, but there are models where there are tons of food being produced within cities.

And there are farmers’ markets, local food co-cops and community-supported agriculture programs. There are ways that people in cities can support rural farmers who are supplying food for people living in urban centers. We have to be vigilant about supporting those producers so they can continue to do the work that they’re doing.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a new book-project that will be out in 2011. It’s simply documenting a year of eating locally, seasonally and sustainably in a city, mostly from my front-yard garden and local farmers’ markets in the Bay Area.

Photo: Bryant Terry