Wearing an apron and standing at a lectern beside a table full of mixing bowls and vegetables, Bryant Terry showed the crowd gathered in Gomes Chapel on Martin Luther King Jr. Day just how communal, joyful, and personal food is to him by opening his keynote address with a soulful rendition of the song his grandmother sang while cooking in her kitchen in Memphis, Tenn.

“Glory, glory. Hallelujah. When I lay my burden down, burden down. No more Monday, no more Tuesday, when I lay my burden down,” Terry sang.

An artist, author, activist, and award-winning chef, Terry delivered the �ֲ���ý MLK Day keynote address on Monday, tying together the problem of food injustice today with the history of Martin Luther King Jr.’s fight against systemic racism during the Civil Rights Movement more than 60 years ago. Along the way, Terry spiced his talk with personal stories and, as a dessert of sorts, ended his presentation with a live cooking demonstration of one of his vegan recipes.

President Garry W. Jenkins first greeted the more than 200 gathered at the observance, explaining that while this year’s �ֲ���ý MLK Day theme of food justice is a modern-day concern, it is one of many injustices King fought to correct before his life was cut short.

“Dr. King himself was explicitly focused on the issue of food justice,” Jenkins said. “Speaking in Montgomery, Ala., in 1965 he said, ‘Let us march on poverty until no American parent has to skip a meal so that their child may eat.’”

Offering further evidence how King raised awareness about the stark inequalities in the American food system, Jenkins quoted from King’s 1960 speech at Spelman College where King said: “I do believe that in America we must use our vast resources of wealth to bridge the gulf between abject, deadening poverty, and superfluous inordinate wealth.”

Phoebe Stern ’24 of Nashville, Tenn., one of  the student representatives on the �ֲ���ý MLK Day planning committee, briefly spoke about the prevalent inequalities in food systems today. And Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Tyler Harper, the committee’s co-chair, thanked the committee for its work and reinforced the connection between King and food justice. 

Describing King’s speech from when he accepted the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, Harper noted the continuing relevance of King’s message, that “even as our politics feel fraught and perhaps broken, we must not lose sight of the most basic political question of who has food and who does not.”

Then after the MLK Day Keynote speaker greeted the crowd with his grandma’s song, Terry shared with energy, humor, and personal anecdotes how his life’s work came to focus on the fight for healthier, more equitable, and more sustainable food systems. 

The James Beard Award–winning chef added with some mirth that in his early days as a food justice activist he was “the most self-righteous, dogmatic, judgmental, vegan that you’ve ever encountered.

“I don’t know if you guys have ever dealt with someone who has a vegan diet, and they are the most self-righteous, finger wagging nanny. That was me, and I apologized to my parents almost every week for putting them through hell for several years because of my zeal.” 

On a more serious note, Terry explained how, just as King did, he came to champion the idea that healthy food should be a fundamental human right. The fact that marginalized communities in the United States have less access to healthy, more sustainable food systems, he said, has resulted in food apartheid in our country.

Terry explained that he specifically chose the term “food apartheid” rather than the more familiar term “food desert.” 

“The word desert almost makes these “economic, physical, geographic barriers that many communities face seem natural. But ‘food apartheid’ refers to the systemic and structural inequalities in the food system resulting in some communities having limited access to healthy, affordable, and culturally appropriate food while others have more abundant access,” he said.

His love of cooking came from his grandparents in Memphis, Tenn., who Terry said used their example of scratch baking and farming to teach him the ideals of “self-determination, practice of generosity, community care and the mutual aid to meet the immediate needs of neighbors and the wider community.” These early life lessons instilled in him a desire for healthier food systems. 

View the full Martin Luther King Jr. Day keynote gathering in Gomes Chapel on Jan. 15, 2024:

“My maternal grandmother kept a cupboard in her kitchen that was about 7 feet tall and a foot deep,” he said. “Each shelf crowded with glass jars full of preserves, pickle, pears, peaches, carrots and green beans, figs, blackberry jam, sauerkraut, and her not to be forgotten: chow, chow — cabbage, onions, peppers, chopped finely cooked for about five hours and served as a relish along with leafy greens such as collards, mustards, turnips, kale, dandelions. Listen, my grandmother could work magic in the kitchen.”

His activism took root in culinary school in New York City, at the Natural Gourmet Institute, where he worked to empower young people in neighborhoods affected by food apartheid by teaching them culinary skills and training them in advocacy work. “Our aim was to empower these youth to resist the influence of these corporations and make healthier choices,” Terry said. 

Around 2001, Terry said he started advocating more strongly for food justice within marginalized communities after he first attended gatherings aimed at addressing the problem and looked around at those attending.

“These gatherings were predominantly attended by privileged white people, and those who suffered the most from our flawed food system were often absent from the discussions.” He also noticed educational and class biases within the gatherings, and felt those impacted the most by injustices in food systems should have been leading the discussions.

“The conversations often initiated with discussions of public policy and high level intellectual concepts, yet they lack the essential elements of art, culture and a focus on community,” Terry said.

His journey in activism at that time spawned his personal mantra — that he repeats to this day: “Start with the visceral to ignite the cerebral and end with the political.”

While he found inspiration everywhere —  in art, music, and literature, including some of the hip hop music he played for those gathered in Gomes — Terry said that two creative works, published 85 years apart, inspired his path forward. One was Upton Sinclair’s expose of the Chicago meat-packing industry, The Jungle. The other was “Beef” by Boogie Down Productions and KRS-One in 1990. 

“Surprisingly, it wasn’t a scholarly monograph or a lofty intellectual lecture that profoundly reshaped my habits, attitudes, and political views concerning food. It was a song and a novel,” Terry said.

While a graduate student at New York University in the early 2000s, Terry researched the “methods of resistance employed by the Black working class in the 20th century to combat capitalism and white supremacy,” such as protests and slowdowns in work places that were used as forms of resistance.

Yet, Terry said, he came to advocate for food justice by embracing a simpler approach, such as foraging, cooking, and breaking bread together.

“While the food justice movement engages in organized forms of resistance, I believe it’s equally vital to recognize and celebrate seemingly apolitical acts such as growing food, preparing meals from scratch, and fostering community around our dining tables as profoundly political, dare I say, radical acts of resistance,” Terry said. “I celebrate these everyday acts of resistance and view them as accessible entry points into the food justice movement for everyday people.”

Terry closed his keynote address demonstrating his most favorite everyday act of resistance to food apartheid: A 25-minute cooking demonstration in which he encouraged novices, assuaged cooking fears, and served up humorous stories about spices, tofu, and the pleasure of a communal feast.

When he finished preparing the curry dish from his Afro-Vegan cookbook, Terry thanked the �ֲ���ý crowd for joining him on his “intellectual and creative journey,” Then he asked those gathered to consider finding their own accessible entry points to the fight for food justice.

“I think whatever talents and skills we could bring to bring us to a tipping point, we should bring those,” Terry said. “You need chefs, you need designers, you need scholars, you need journalists. We need all hands on deck to really work toward what I would argue is one of the most important movements of the 21st century.”

His closing remarks were met with a rousing standing ovation from the Gomes audience.

Associate Dean for International Student Programs James Reese closed the keynote asking the crowd to thank Terry again and encouraging them to go forth and enjoy the day full of workshops, and, importantly, bear in mind that King was mentored by one of �ֲ���ý’ own: the Rev. Benjamin Elijah Mays ’20, longtime president of Morehouse College, and remembered as “the schoolmaster” of the Civil Rights Movement.

If you think of the yearlong �ֲ���ý Contemplates Food initiative as an arch built from many stones, Mark Winne ’72 set the moral keystone in place with a lecture on March 30.

In contrast to burgeoning consumer demand for natural and local foods, he said, low-income Americans have less access than ever to healthy foods. Affluent folks shop for pricey organics at Whole Foods while malnourishment, obesity and related illnesses proliferate in disadvantaged communities whose residents lack access to even reasonably wholesome foods. This is the “food gap” that Winne has fought to bridge for the past 40 years– a disparity between the haves and the have-nots, he said, that “doesn’t just divide the nation, but somehow defines it.”

A sociology major at �ֲ���ý, Winne served for 25 years as executive director of the , a nonprofit that developed innovative ways to deliver high-quality and affordable foods to low-income urban families in Connecticut.

Now a resident of Santa Fe, N.M., he writes and consults on food system issues and is the author of (Beacon Press, 2008).

The laid-back Winne (pronounced WIN-ee) shared lessons from his life in food justice in a talk capping a two-day �ֲ���ý visit sponsored by the �ֲ���ý Contemplates Food Planning Committee.

Winne’s picture of the American food gap wasn’t pretty. The supermarket industry and public transportation policy have left many low-income people in “food deserts” — locations with no ready access to healthy, reasonably priced groceries. The government food-welfare system is biased toward industry interests rather than those of its needy clients, among whom are 32 million food stamp recipients — a record number.

And charitable emergency food providers, such as food banks, often just manage the symptom of food insecurity rather than addressing the disease of poverty.

Winne’s remarks included a list of recommendations for President Obama — whose administration, he later told a student during a question-and-answer period, gives him hope about the prospects for advancing food security — including:

A major government incentive — Winne estimated $1 billion — to encourage the supermarket industry to build stores in “food deserts,” both to improve the food supply for residents and to stimulate the local economy. “We can actually fix this one,” he said;

More money and better administration for school food programs;

And more support for farmers, including funding for farmers markets, CSAs and similar direct-marketing programs. “We’re in danger of running out of farmers,” Winne said.

At �ֲ���ý, “food was not something we contemplated when I was here,” a droll Winne said early in the evening. “The only contemplation I can really remember was the evening when there was kind of a slow arc of a plate of spaghetti, moving skyward across the dining Commons, somehow suspended for several minutes above our heads as it moved toward the far wall, where it eventually landed with a tremendous splat.”

More seriously, Winne explained that as a �ֲ���ý student from privileged circumstances, it was in Lewiston where he first encountered poverty. Working as a Big Brother, he visited the Lewiston home of his young charge — a visit that left him with an indelible memory of the child’s apartment, its smell of decrepitude and the way it shook from the looms at the nearby �ֲ���ý Mill.

In Lewiston, too, Winne first took on the social justice work that would define his career. He and other �ֲ���ý students founded a community center to do peer drug and alcohol counseling, then added a breakfast program for children and a food co-op.

Forty years later, Winne shared with the �ֲ���ý audience some precepts distilled from his long experience, a body of experience that spans working a community farm, collaborating with community organizers in Hartford’s poorest neighborhoods and mingling with D.C. power brokers.

A dominant theme was the need to address poverty as a whole, rather than hunger as an isolated phenomenon. “The role of poverty in causing hunger is paramount,” Winne said. We need creative responses to address poverty more than hunger: “We need to pause, reflect, critique and consider what alternatives might exist.”

Winne concluded with a tribute to �ֲ���ý and its early leadership in food issues, in terms of both on-campus food service and community food system work.

“We really got started with this earlier than most places,” he said. “I’m very proud to be a �ֲ���ýie.”

By Doug Hubley

As part of a two-day visit to �ֲ���ý, food activist and author ’72 gives a talk titled “Food Justice and Good Food — When Shall the Twain Meet?” at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 30, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

The event is open to the public at no cost. A reception and book signing follow in the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St. This event is sponsored by the �ֲ���ý Contemplates Food Planning Committee. For more information, please call 207-786-6336.

Winne’s time at �ֲ���ý will also include visits to classes and meetings with students.

Food, like air and water, is a basic necessity, but stands as a glaring example of how the gap between America’s “haves” and “have-nots” remains deep and wide. No matter what aspect of the subject we consider — hunger, obesity or recent food trends like local and organic — food is emblematic of a promise fulfilled for some but falling ever so short for many.

has worked for 35 years to close the food gap. From organizing breakfast programs for low-income children in Maine to developing innovative national food policies in Washington, D.C., he has dedicated his professional life and writing to finding local, state and federal solutions to America’s food disparities. To this end, and to those whose passion for this purpose is no less than his own, he dedicated his first book (Beacon Press, 2008).

Closing the Food Gap tells the story of how we get our food: from poor people at food pantries or bodegas and convenience stores to the more comfortable classes, who increasingly seek out organic and local products. Winne’s exploration starts in the 1960s, when domestic poverty was “rediscovered,” and shows how communities since that time have responded to malnutrition with a slew of strategies and methods. But the story is also about doing that work against a backdrop of ever-growing American food affluence and gastronomical expectations.

From 1979 to 2003, Winne was the executive director of the Hartford Food System, a private non-profit agency that works on food and hunger issues in the Hartford, Conn., area. During his tenure with HFS, Mark organized community self-help food projects that assisted the city’s lower-income and elderly residents. Winne’s work with the Food System included the development of commercial food businesses, Connecticut’s Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program, farmers’ markets, a 25-acre community supported agriculture farm, a food bank, food and nutrition education programs, and a neighborhood supermarket.

Winne currently writes, speaks and consults extensively on community food system topics including hunger and food insecurity, local and regional agriculture, community food assessment and food policy. He also does policy communication and food policy council work for the Community Food Security Coalition.

He lives in Santa Fe, N.M., where he serves on the New Mexico Food and Agriculture Policy Council and the Southwest Grass-fed Livestock Alliance.

Borealis Breads founder Jim Amaral and food activist-author Mark Winne are among �ֲ���ý College alumni featured during March events relating to the Nourishing Body and Mind: �ֲ���ý Contemplates Food initiative.

All these events are open to the public at no cost.

First on the menu is a lecture about the impacts of globalization on poverty, food security and nutrition by Cornell University professor Per Pinstrup-Andersen at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 2, in Pettengill Hall’s Keck Classroom (G52). The talk is sponsored by the economics department.

Two weeks later, �ֲ���ý alumni involved in food production and nutrition in Maine discuss a variety of issues in a panel presentation at 4:30 p.m. Monday, March 16, also in Pettengill Hall’s Keck Classroom (G52).

Moderated by Anna Bartel, associate director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships at �ֲ���ý, the panel comprises Borealis Breads founder Jim Amaral ’80; Maine farmers Steve Hoad ’72 of Windsor and Nicolas Lindholm ’86 of Penobscot; and Kirsten Walter ’00, director of the . The event is sponsored by the �ֲ���ý Contemplates Food Planning Committee.

Finally, food activist and author ’72, gives a talk titled “Food Justice and Good Food — When Shall the Twain Meet?” at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 30, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. A reception and book signing follow in the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St. This event too is sponsored by the �ֲ���ý Contemplates Food Planning Committee. For more information, please call 207-786-6336.

This academic year, inspired by the opening of a new dining Commons and a $2.5 million gift supporting the use of organic, natural and farm-fresh foods, �ֲ���ý launched Nourishing Body and Mind: �ֲ���ý Contemplates Food. The initiative explores the ramifications of our food choices and spotlights �ֲ���ý’ own award-winning sustainable food-service practices.

• Monday, March 16 at 4:30 p.m.
• Pettengill Hall’s Keck Classroom (G52).