Vegan soul food: Down-home cooking goes meatless

SOUL FOOD carries a certain connotation of deep fryers, heavy cream, lard and tastiness at the expense of arterial clogging. It doesn't have to be that way.

Vegan food also carries a certain connotation - of tasteless but sensible cuisine dependent on faux tofu meats and processed fake cheeses. That's not always the case, either.

Chef and self-proclaimed food activist Bryant Terry wants to set the record straight: Soul food can be fresh and even healthy; vegan cooking can have soul.

Terry's cookbook, "Vegan Soul Kitchen" (Lifelong Books, $18.95), brings the flavor without the fat. It's a collection of fresh fruit-, vegetable- and nut-based meals which, while classified as "vegan," are also traditional family recipes with a hip and healthy flair.

"I thought it was important to make an intervention in the genre of African-American cookbooks," Terry said in a recent interview. "In terms of books from major publishers, there isn't a single book that presents African-American cuisine without animal products - without dairy, without meat."

Terry was raised in Memphis, Tenn., where he watched his grandfather cook up Southern dishes every day. Watching such a strong man in the kitchen made it a far less gendered space, he said.

Terry completed the Chef's Training Program at the Natural Gourmet Institute for Health and Culinary Arts, in New York City. Since then, he's founded b-healthy, an initiative to involve youth in the sustainable-food movement, and has written three cookbooks. These days he lives in Oakland, Calif., and lectures across the country.

Terry's not a fan of food-preference classifications even though he's answered to almost all of them. He went from childhood omnivore to high-school vegetarian to college vegan. He spent a summer as a fruitarian and tried the raw-food diet in graduate school.

"When I reflect on my journey with food, I realize that most of the times when I was naming my diet, it was for other people," he said. "I want to empower people to embrace a more ethical, sustainable and helpful diet without feeling like they have to box themselves into a model," he said.

Vegan soul food isn't just about promoting healthier diets, Terry explained. It's about dispelling common beliefs on the history of the cuisine.