Bryant Terry’s love of and passion for food began when he was a child.

His family owned farms in rural Mississippi and kept home gardens in Memphis, where he grew up. As a result, he always had the freshest, most local food available, and it was cooked by people he loved. That way of living didn’t seem special to him because it was all his family knew. Like most of their neighbors, they had agrarian roots, kept gardens, and had vegetable-centered diets.

Today Terry is a James Beard Award-winning chef, multidisciplinary artist and the author of five cookbooks who served from 2015 to 2022 as the inaugural chef-in-residence at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora. The artist, chef and author working at the intersection of food, art, culture and justice will speak on Oct. 15 at VCU Cabell Library.

When he was a graduate student in history at New York University, he began delving into the thread of Black-led food activism throughout the 20th century. Terry found himself deeply inspired by programs of the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s and ‘70s that addressed the intersection of poverty, malnutrition and institutional racism, specifically their Grocery Giveaways and Free Breakfast for Children Program.

Food justice has become a movement to ensure that everyone is afforded the human right to healthy, safe, affordable, and culturally appropriate food. “I’m simply using my national platform to bring light to the economic, physical and geographic barriers that many people in communities across this country face when attempting to access good food,” he says. “We’re working to build power in those communities so those most impacted can create solutions to food apartheid.”

While at NYU, Terry switched to a plant-based diet, although becoming a vegan was not without its issues. “The toughest thing was feeling disconnected from my larger family at gatherings centered around food,” he says. “The best part was feeling like I was living a value-based life at such a young age.”

Soon after, he enrolled in the chef’s training program at the National Gourmet Institute for Health and Culinary Arts in New York. Of all the lessons he took away from his training as a chef, one stands out most clearly. “Read the recipe. Not skim it. Read it,” he says.

Along the way, the legendary chef Alice Waters became a mentor. In the summer of 2003, Terry was invited to go to the Bay Area to pilot a program that was at the intersection of cooking, entrepreneurship and community activism. “I started dating a woman who worked at the Edible School Yard, and she connected me to Alice,” he recalls. “Alice saw how passionate I was about these issues, and she has been a supporter, trusted mentor and friend ever since then.”

After cowriting “Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen” in 2003, Terry went on to write more cookbooks, including “Vegetable Kingdom” and “Afro-Vegan” and was the editor of “Black Food,” “The Best American Food,” and “Travel Writing 2025.” “I write for anyone who loves good food and wants to cook in a way that’s joyful, nourishing and connected to culture,” he says. “My cookbooks welcome curious home cooks, vegans and non-vegans, and people looking for plant-based food that isn’t bland or dogmatic, just vibrant and rooted.”

Terry is passionate about many things, one of which is sustainable agriculture, mainly because so many people think it simply means buying organic kale at the farmers’ market. “It’s way deeper than that. It’s about soil health, biodiversity, fair wages, cultural knowledge and communities being able to feed themselves without destroying the land,” he says. “Too often, the conversation gets reduced to a marketing label instead of a living system.”

Fighting food injustice is another way he seeks to educate the public. For those interested in joining the fight, he recommends researching local organizations fighting to create a more healthful, just, and sustainable food system in their communities and supporting them with their time, talent, and treasure.

“I also think it’s equally important to reframe seemingly apolitical acts such as growing food, making meals from scratch, and building community around our home tables as highly political, dare I say radical, in an industrialized food system controlled by a handful of multinational corporations who spend billions of dollars encouraging us to buy food at corporate-owned supermarkets, eat out at fast food restaurants, and stuff our faces as quickly as possible so we can get back to work,” Terry says. “Those things are just as important as the movement work.”

Just last spring, Terry completed a degree in the MFA Program in Art Practice at UC Berkeley and was subsequently awarded a 2025–2026 Graduate Fellowship at Headlands Center for the Arts, a yearlong residency supporting promising emerging artists. Not surprisingly, given that justice isn’t an abstract concept to him, but something that’s built into how and why he creates, he’s using his artmaking to stir up political change.

Going through the MFA program didn’t just provide Terry with new tools, it stretched the way he thinks and allowed him to connect his art to bigger conversations about power, history, and community.

“It pushed me to experiment, bringing sound, video, sculpture, and social practice into what started as a food-based practice, so the work can show up in more spaces and speak to more people,” he explains. “I think political change often starts with shifting perspective, creating spaces where people feel seen and sparking dialogue. My art tries to do that: it holds memory, challenges old narratives, and invites people to imagine something freer and more just.”

A talk and Zoom, “Food for All: Intersections of Politics, Poverty, Public Health and the Environment” with Bryant Terry will be held on Wednesday, Oct. 15 at 7 p.m. at Cabell Library, 901 Park Ave. Registration