Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast - Bryant Terry

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

Bryant Terry – cookbook author, chef, food activist, conceptual artist and publisher – joins Michele at his University of California Berkeley art studio to discuss one of the biggest influences behind all of his work: his grandmother, Margie Bryant; or, as his family affectionately called her, Ma’dear. In Ma’dear’s Memphis, Tennessee kitchen, Bryant spent hours helping her shell peas, peel potatoes or pour sugar into the pot for her sweet fruit preserves. It was in her kitchen that Bryant learned how Ma’dear’s love for her family came in the form of what she made there, and it's that love that stays with Bryant today and drives his work.When Bryant is not penning one of his acclaimed cookbooks, like his most recent work, Black Food, he is touring the country, educating Americans about the ways in which our food system is broken, how we as consumers can make choices that help local producers and farmers get the resources they need to continue their valuable work, and about what many of us often get wrong about Black Food – a cuisine that is far more varied, healthy and complex than many people are led to believe.   In this episode, Bryant recounts how a very specific 90s hip hop song led him to veganism, he shares his recipe for Ma’dear’s savory, slow-cooked leafy greens, and he sings the haunting, beautiful song Ma’dear would sing as she cooked them down until they were meltingly tender.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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18 Plus subscription required T's and C's apply. I think it's easy for me to romanticize the time that I spent in my grandfather's backyard, urban farm and my grandmother's kitchen and her kitchen garden. But it was labor. I don't know if it was necessarily fun, shelling peas and shucking corn and weeding in the garden and harvesting the vegetables.

But I do, when I ruminate on those moments, I feel happy. And so I have to believe that it was joyous. And I think it was more about spending time with my grandparents and being able to connect with them. ["The Pigeon of the World"] Welcome to Your Mama's Kitchen, the podcast where we explore how the kitchens of our youth shape who we become as adults.

I'm Michelle Norris and in today's episode, we're joined by Bryant Terry. Ever heard of that term multi-hyphenate? A label for people who do a long list of things? Well, that label certainly applies to Bryant Terry. He is a chef, conceptual artist, food activist, musician, highly praised and critically acclaimed cookbook author with titles like Vegetable Kingdom, Vegan Soul Kitchen, and most recently, Black Food.

Bryant is also a publisher in his own right with his imprint called Four Color at 10 Speed Press. That's the numeral four. Currently, he's pursuing an MFA at UC Berkeley, where his work combines studies in the art and black studies department. Phew. Just hearing about all that make you tired.

Bryant obviously has some sort of magical, supercharged, high gear that lets him keep all his burners on high, because in addition to all of that, he's a devoted husband and father who believes in active hands-on parenting for his two beautiful girls. When we spoke with Bryant, we found him working at his art studio in the Richmond Field Station. It's a remote part of UC Berkeley's campus where the buildings look like military barracks. His studio is an homage to his grandmother's kitchen. And that's because the foundation for all of Bryant's work and food justice

can be traced back to that kitchen in Memphis, Tennessee, where his grandmother, Margie Bryant, held court. Bryant and his family affectionately called her Medea. And when Bryant was young, he spent hours in Medea's kitchen, helping to prepare the syrupy bases for Medea's preserves, shelling peas, or peeling potatoes. Bryant saw how Medea's love for her family came in the form of what she made in that kitchen. And it's that love that stays with him today and drives his work. In this episode, we'll learn more about Brian's journey to becoming a lauded and boundary-pushing chef and artist how a very specific 90s hip-hop song led him to veganism.

Yep, you heard that right. A hip-hop song made him put down red meat. And we hear how the magic of Medea's slow-cooked, soul, soul nourishing greens, along with the song, she hummed as she made them, have been an anchor through it all. That's coming up. We want you to close your eyes and imagine your mama's kitchen and then describe it for us.

A few sentences, what it looked like, smelled like, sounded like? Let me ask you this, can I take it in a different direction and describe my mother's mother's kitchen? You can. Okay. So when I think about some of my favorite food memories, I think about the kitchen of my maternal grandmother,

Margie Bryant. The first thing that always comes to mind is her cupboard. It was about seven foot tall and a foot deep, each shelf crowded with glass jars full of preserves, pickle pears, peaches, carrots, green beans, figs, blackberry jam, sauerkraut, chow-chow. I think about her humble stove, on which she would often slow simmer her dark leafy greens from her kitchen garden. I think about the window looking out to the backyard.

I see the mini orchard with pear trees and peach trees and nectarine trees. I see her kitchen garden with dark leafy greens, tubers, fresh herbs. Those are memories of Madea as we call her, Madea's kitchen. What did Madea's kitchen smell like? Madea's kitchen smelled like cornbread with pecans, slow simmered collards with a piece of fat back. Madea's kitchen smelled like sweet tea with lemon slices. Madea's kitchen smelled like pound cake. Madea's kitchen smells like pecan pie, sweet potato pie. Madea's kitchen smelled like earth.

Madea's kitchen smelled like love. How did that kitchen shape the man that you've become? My grandmother's kitchen, in terms of the work that I've done over the past two decades, I would say that I am mostly inspired by the time that I spent in my grandmother's kitchen, supporting her in whatever kind of age-appropriate ways she would allow me to support, whether it was helping to wash some dark leafy greens or turning the lids on the jars for her pickles and preserves.

Is that when her hands got a little weak and she couldn't do that herself? She needed your help? She did. She was older. She was, you know, spry and robust, but she needed support when she needed to support. And that was one of my favorite things to do. I loved pouring the sugar one of my favorite things to do. I loved pouring the sugar into the pot when she was making whatever kind of base she needed for her preserves. Big pot. Yeah, so I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the cast iron skillets. She had several of them and those were her primary things she used for, you know, frying and sautéing and braising. But she had a big, I don't know, it was like a vat.

Where she would cook her greens or, you know, boil her black eyed peas. The audio guides often serve up interesting sounds when you're doing an interview and you're talking about this distant space and there's this train in the distance. Did you hear that? Mm-hmm. Is that the kind of sound you might hear

if you're at Madeira's house? Yeah, definitely because that neighborhood was one of those neighborhoods that was on the other side of the tracks, the black side of the tracks. And I do recall hearing the train in the distance when I was spending time with her, especially at nighttime. A quick word here. Bryant spent the first part of our conversation speaking with his eyes closed. He shut his eyes as he described his grandmother's kitchen and kept them closed for almost 15 minutes,

as if he wanted to stay in that space he described so beautifully. As I listened to him talk about that sacred space, I understood why. Was there a kitchen table? There was. It was a wooden table that was not big enough for extensive family meals,

probably fit about four to six people, but it was definitely, I mean, the kitchen, the hearth, that was the main gathering space at my grandmother's house. And I remember sitting there often supporting with the kitchen tasks tasks of tearing the leaves of collared greens from stems, of shucking corn, of shelling black eyed peas. I remember that was a place where my mom and her siblings would play cards, trash, sing, connect. They played spades, bidwiss, what was the game? Pee-nuckle?

Hall of the Above. But I feel like Spades was kind of like the go-to game for mom and her siblings. How did you wind up pulling so much kitchen duty and spending that much time with your grandmother? I mean, so I think about this often. So when I think about the biggest influences for me, it's my paternal grandfather, Andrew Johnson Terry,

my maternal grandmother, Margie Bryant. And I think it's easy for me to romanticize the time that I spent in my grandfather's backyard, urban farm, and my grandmother's kitchen and her kitchen garden. But it was labor. I don't know if it was necessarily fun, shelling peas and shucking corn and weeding in the garden

and harvesting the vegetables. But I do, when I ruminate on those moments, I feel happy. And so I have to believe that it was, you know, joyous. And I think it was more about spending time with my grandparents and being able to connect with them. I relate to this because I was raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And I was sent to Birmingham, Alabama every summer until I went to junior high.

I mean, really every single summer. And I think about the family dynamics at work. Was I there to get me out of the city? Was I there to help grandma and grandpa as they got older? Was I there because my parents were pulling so much over time that it was easier to send and a bunch of us went down south, you know, the cousins went down south. In your case, you went across town.

Do you understand what was going on in your family that you were sent to spend so much time with your grandmother or was it just that she lived around the corner and that's where you really wanted to be? I know that part of it was the fact that my parents were young. I think my parents, my mom was 21 and my dad was 20 when they got married. And so when I think about being a parent now in his 40s and how so often we just, my wife and I just need a weekend alone. And you know, obviously grandmother is more than happy. Send them over here.

I'll take them. Send them over here. I'll take them. Send that baby over here. Yeah. No, it's all love. But I know that part of that was my parents just needing their space. And no judgment now.

One of the most prominent memories of my paternal grandfather was my parents dropping us off on Friday. My sister and me, I have a younger sister. And I just remember getting upset. I was really mad because I just wanted to be with my parents and I didn't want to be with my granddad that weekend. And I remember I used to have, you know, the little wrappers where you can wrap pennies and dimes, you know, and- Those little sleeves?

Those little sleeves, yeah. The money inside? Exactly. My dad would encourage me, you know, with all the loose change, you know, like organize it, keeping in those, and then we could take it to the bank and you can convert it into some greenbacks and we could put it in your account. And I just remember, I got so frustrated

that I threw one of these little penny sleeves at the fireplace and it broke all over the ground. And my grandfather came in and he didn't get upset with me. And this is, this was such an amazing modeling in terms of child-rearing, parenting, because he sat me down and he explained to me that, you know, your parents work hard. They're working every day.

They're putting a lot of energy and effort into ensuring that you and your sister are well-educated and safe and they need time, they need space. And I remember he kept saying to me, I just want you to know, I'm not fussing at you. I just want to explain to you what these dynamics are. And I think about that a lot when I am kind of engaged in child rearing, in those moments

when I'm not in my reptilian brain and I'm just like, ah, but when I can be rational and I repeat that often to my daughter. So you know what? I'm not fussing at you. I'm not upset, but I just need you to know that this is what's going on. And I'm just trying to help you, you know, be a good parent and this is my job. So I love that train. It's like an exclamation point, youlamation point at the end of your thoughts. That was great, Addy saying.

Yeah, that was right on cue. That train has a little rhythm section going on in the conductor's car. Thank you for that punctuation, Poppa. It's winter and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost almost anything. So no, you can't get snowballs on Uber Eats. But meatballs, mozzarella balls, and arancini balls? Yes, we deliver those. Moose? No, butancini balls? Yes, we deliver those. Moose? No.

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Death is in our air. This year's most anticipated series, FX's Shogun, only on Disney Plus. region. See app for details. You'll never live to ban a life. FX is Shogun, a new original series streaming February 27th, exclusively on Disney+. 18+, subscription required, T's and C's apply. You are a culinary ambassador, and an historian, and an artist. And you explore black food that you have published a book called Black Food. And one of the things that you do is you remind us that when we think about black food, soul food,

we often think about big food, heavy food, holiday food, collard greens, candied yams, mac and cheese, smothered chicken, fried chicken, fricasseed chicken, gumbo. I can go on, I'm getting hungry. But that was not what we ate every day of the week. What did you eat every day of the week? And what do we get wrong? We, you know, America, the capital, we, what do people get wrong when they think about soul food,

when they think about black food? Okay. One thing that I've been pushing back against for more than two decades, as I've been engaged in this work around health food and farming issues, other very reductive ways in which people think about and imagine, talk about, write about black food.

You know, in terms of my own family, I always say that we were eating food that was local as our backyard gardens. It was always in season. And oftentimes, we would literally go harvest food right before the meal, going out and picking some shirr snap peas and preparing them. And that was the meal. And so that was a part of the way that we ate.

I often think about this slow food movement that came from Western Europe, Carlo Petrini, the organizer and activist in Italy. But I feel like when people hear that, they often imagine like this kind of like European or even like an American context. It's very affluent white practices. And I tell people, look, when my grandmother was in the kitchen,

cooking all day for Sunday supper the next day, that was slow food practices right there. And so I just, I really try to help people reimagine the brilliance and the practices that were done because they were survival practices. Like I don't think my grandmother thought anything about, you know, I'm canning and pickling and preserving. I mean, that's what you did with all the bounty. Because you didn't waste anything. You didn't waste it. You were never going to waste anything.

And it's interesting, I'm talking to you, you've got all these jars up here on the wall displayed so beautifully as part of your sacred larder. Yeah. I mean, those were the things that, because you know, on the leaner months, we're not in California. Like in Memphis, where I grew up,

in the wintertime, it was wintertime. Things froze over. You didn't have a garden in the wintertime, it was wintertime, things froze over, you didn't have a garden in the winter. And so you were able to take a lot of the bounty, the okra, the peppers, the cucumbers or whatever it was, and you could preserve that. So you can have a lot of that bounty from the more abundant months and the leaner months

when everything was kind of like resting. My parents, they had gardens, but they weren't as extensive. You know, I think my parents would grow some tomatoes and they would grow fresh herbs and- If they were working, it's hard to maintain a garden. A garden is a lot of work. You have to be a constant gardener. You have to be a constant garden. You have to be present with it. They were doing what

they needed to do. And so they were busy, but there was this moment where industrial food was kind of having this ascendancy. And so it's not like it was just this kind of purist. We only ate from the earth, you know, we would eat convenience food sometimes, but my mom was very intentional. And to this day, my mother makes meals from scratch. Maybe she incorporated some canned vegetables if she was in a pinch, but it was this mixture of the best kind of like farm fresh and then the things that make sense for busy working parents trying to get food on the table for their busy kids. But I think in most people's mind when they hear black food or if they think, you know,

the food that black people eat in their mind, it's often synonymous with soul food, you know, in the popular imagination. What I found is that they're kind of like two different threads. So people often think about the kind of antebellum survival foods upon which many enslaved Africans had to rely, you know, often here, pejoratively described as slave food. The worst parts of the vegetable, the discarded parts of the vegetables, or the worst parts of the animals, the parts that the plantation owners would discard, you know, the leftovers. And oftentimes people romanticize it, you know, this is showing ingenuity. We know how to take, you know, something that was discarded and make something of it. But

there's just a lot of historical inaccuracy. I mean, first of all, let's start by saying that every person of African descent wasn't enslaved. There were free blacks in this country, you know, in the antebellum period. But even to flatten this idea of what enslaved Africans were eating doesn't recognize that the institution of slavery wasn't a monolith. The way that enslaved Africans might grow food, cook it and eat it in the black buttock of the South, look different than it did in the coastal Carolinas, look different than it did in Louisiana, look different than it did in Bahia, Brazil.

We're talking about a vast diaspora. That's the first point. But then the other thing that I find people imagine, black food food soul food They're thinking about the kind of big flavored meats the overcooked vegetables the sugary desserts and one might find and a soul food restaurant and As if black folks are just eating red velvet cake every day and mac and cheese and ribs on a daily basis You know and so here's my thing. I'm not denying that either of those strains are part of this larger, more diverse and complex cuisine. Yes, when you talk about chitlins

and pig feats and hog butt, all those things, that's a part of the cuisine. And so are macaroni and cheese and ribs and red velvet cake and over sweetened sweet tea. But what about collards, mustards, turnips, kale, dandelions, sugar snap peas, pole beans, sweet potatoes, butternut squash. These were all the foods that my family and many other families in that community were eating. The foundation of traditional black diets. We're talking about just simple vegetable-driven meals Because the reality is that before our food system was industrialized, most black folks who are working class or working poor couldn't afford to have meat at every single meal. This was something that was earned for holidays and special occasions. But one thing I also don't want to do is to vilify the way that black people traditionally ate. We can look at

many diets in western central Africa and the Caribbean, Latin America and the American South, and many of them were largely vegetable based, obviously depending on the geography, right? But the fact that people put a piece of fat back in the greens, was it vegan? No, but what did that do? It was a quick way of adding a lot of nutrient density, a lot of flavor, and I'm not mad at that. I'd rather have some slow simmered collard greens with a little piece of fat back put into it to give it flavor and nutrient density and removed than some Frankenberger that is made in a laboratory. A manufactured plant-based meat product. That's what we're talking about when you say Franken-er. That's what, in case people didn't pick up on that term, I just want to explain it.

Yes. This trend of creating these meat analogs. Okay. The train didn't like that. There's the train again. That's your grandpa. I wouldn't I stay away from that. You don't know what that comes from. Listen, I get it. For ethical reasons, I'll say that I understand that people who are trying to avoid eating animal products, how that can be an alternative. But I think all that to say, I encourage people to diverse us as black people in our fullness and our

complexity, our diversity. We are in a monolith in the way that we've eaten traditionally, the way we've grown through, the way we cooked it, the way we've eaten it traditionally, it's diverse and complex as well. And I want us to embrace all of it. Brian Terry, I want to talk to you about your vegan journey. Because you grew up eating meat. Meat was on the dinner table at your parents' house at Madeer's house, just around the corner, across town in Memphis.

The way the story is told is that you heard a certain song and you had an epiphany and you said no more meat for meat. Is that too simple a telling of that story? I think that's a fair telling. It wasn't just a clean break. I always say that's when the journey started. Okay, tell us about the song, what were the lyrics? What happened inside you? Was it a hamburger on the table when you heard the song? What happened?

Well, I grew up, can I talk a little bit about my family and their musical kind of like, if you stream? Sure, which of course you will because your cookbooks include playlists. So of course you're gonna talk about music. There's a turntable to our right as we're having this conversation. A turntable right next to a induction heating. I don't know where one could make food.

Music has just been central to my practice, but it's because I come from a musical family. My maternal grandfather, Margie's husband, Edward Bryant, started traveling gospel quartet in the 30s in Memphis. Eddie Bryant and the Four Stars of Harmony was the name of the group. And because of... Can we just linger in that for a minute? Eddie Bryant and the Four Stars of Harmony? Oh yeah. What kind of music was it? It was gospel. They were a traveling gospel quartet. And they were, in fact, one of the first, if not the first, black groups to play on Memphis Radio.

So because my grandfather loved music, all of his children were brilliant musicians. From my mother, who is the director of her choir, to my late aunt Tina, who used to sing at a lot of regional jazz clubs, to my uncle Don, who is the breakout star of the Bryant family. And so there's just that history, but in terms of like the way that we gathered as a family, music was always present, you know, and that's why for me, music, art, culture, food, they're inseparable because when we had family gatherings, uncle Don would be playing a piano, his brothers would be harmonizing, Mom and her sister would be singing. And so it was just so central to the way that we built community.

And that's why it's been so central to my practice, because food is so much more than just something that we just stuff our faces with for energy. But this is a big part of the story. I'm going to get to the hip-hop song that inspired this vegan journey for me. My cousins and I were all hip-hop heads. So we were hip-hop aficionados, we collected vinyl. And growing up in this period, this often described as a golden age of hip-hop in the 90s, where a lot of hip-hop music was politically charged and socially conscious and talked about

issues. For me and so many of our generation, we were politicized. We were activated hearing groups like Public Enemy and the X-Clan and Boogie Down Productions. And so Boogie Down Productions have this song, Be From Their Album, Edutainment. When was the first time you heard it? I guess 1990.

I feel like my best friend, Sean Jacobs, introduced me to that song. He played it for me and I listened to it like 50 times. I feel like to this day, it's still one of the most succinct and articulate ways of talking about the ills of factory farming and the violence that animals endure, the impact it has on the environment, on human health.

But it goes like this, beef, what a relief. When will this poisonous product cease? This is another public service announcement. You can believe it or you can doubt it. Let us begin now with the cow, the way that it gets to your plate and how. The cow doesn't grow fast enough for man. So through his greed, he creates a faster plan.

He has drugs to make the cow grow quicker. Through the stress, the cow gets sicker. 21 different drugs are pumped into the cow in one big lump. I'll stop there. It gets a little more graphic. You can go on. I was right there with you. It gets more graphic. But, you know, I think a lot of people had this idea that animals are just running around the field and they just kind of like go to sleep and end up on our plate.

So it was a shock to me that animals had to endure so much violence in our industrialized food system. For me, once you hear that, there's no turning back. So that's where my vegan journey started. As you continued your vegan journey, you are now, as I say, an ambassador, an educator. You don't tell people, you're not dogmatic, but you introduce them to another way of thinking. And you use your cookbooks and you use all of your various media platforms, your work at the Museum of the African Diaspora to teach people in a different way. What is the message that you want people to take from your work overall? I guess to start with, we have a broken food system.

We have a food system that's inequitable. There are over 800 million people globally who are dealing with hunger and food insecurity issues. Here in the United States, there are communities across the country that historically have been described as food deserts, but that term has largely been replaced for a lot of food justice activists by the term food apartheid. Because food deserts suggest that it just happened in an anaerobic fashion. Food just never showed up here. Yeah, and you know, I mean, not to mention, I mean, deserts are thriving ecosystems, but you know, they almost paint this vision that it's just like there's nothing there.

And I think it erases a lot of the kind of activism and activity that's been happening in these communities, even in the kind of like face of the ascendancy of the kind of industrialized food system. People are still growing their own food. You have immigrants from different parts of the world coming from different shores who are staying connected with their cultural foods by growing fresh herbs

and vegetables and people who have migrated from the South to the West Coast or up North who are still holding on to those traditional foods from the South. And so to call them food deserts, I think just gets around. But food apartheid puts squarely in our faces many of the physical, the economic, the geographic barriers that prevent many people in these communities

from accessing healthy, fresh, affordable, and culturally appropriate food. And so I guess one of the big things is I want people to know that it's not your fault, because a lot of people like to blame the victim. When we think about the high rates of preventable direly illnesses among African Americans, you know, it's almost, because of this narrative, like, if y'all just start eating better, if you just get rid of that soul food, but what about access? What about the fact that you have people who have to travel outside of their own neighborhood

just to get fresh, healthy food oftentimes? But I also want people to know that there are ways that we can resist, whether it's growing food in our home if we have the green space or connected with urban farms or community gardens. So we're in a good place. home if we have the green space or connected with urban farms or community gardens. So we're in a good place. I'm excited about the fact that more people understand the way in which our actions as consumers can change these realities, knowing that when you go to the corporate-owned supermarket,

typically 90 cents on every dollar goes to the corporation. When you go to the farmer's market, it's the actual inverse. Every dollar that you spend with these local farmers who care about their customers and who are growing food with integrity and care for the earth and care for our health, they're getting like 90 cents on every dollar. But what's troubling is that so often people stop at consumer action. And I think that people need to understand that we have to be involved as community members in supporting these groups, the master gardeners and the urban farmers and the people who've been really trying to ensure that we have thriving local food systems for decades.

Give them your money, give them your time, give them your support so that they can do the work well. I'd be remiss if I didn't say that so many of these issues are structural. We know that there are public policies that prevent many small farmers, small to mid-sized farmers from thriving. There are public policies that make the choice not to give funding to these kind of community groups that are doing work educating young people around food systems and growing food.

And so we have to be active as citizens as well. I would say even more on the local and state level, even more than the federal level, and ensuring that policies are in place that are in the best interest of everyday eaters even more on the local and state level, even more than the federal level, and ensuring that policies are in place that are in the best interest of everyday eaters and not just the multinational corporations that largely run our food system. So when you think back on all those hours you spent

in your grandma's kitchen, what is the strongest food memory that would lead you to a recipe that we might be able to gift to our listeners? Oh, that's easy. It's just slow cooked mustard greens or collard greens, any type of dark leafy greens. I love eating greens that have been cooked into the meltingly tender and then adding like some hot pepper vinegar because that was always on the table because my friend Samine knows rat as she reminds us salt fat acid and heat you have the kind of savory salty umami flavor from the greens the hot pepper vinegar would give it that heat and that bright

pop of acidity. And the thing is the elders know that when you ate your greens like that, you have to also. Drink the pot liquor. That's where all the magic was. Never threw away the pot liquor was always in a big mason jar. Did she do collards or mustards or did she sometime mix? I'm not sure if it was like a mellange of greens or if she just had like

different ones that she would cook. I remember the big vat of greens and she would put a piece of fat back in there and cook them all day. Onions? Oh yeah, you know, she'd have like her base of like some onions, a little garlic. It's so interesting to listen to you talk

about Madeir in the space because she is all around us. And over your shoulder, there's this wall of, are they ball jars or mason jars? They're ball jars. They're ball jars because you know you chose either as mason or ball. So there's all these canned items, these jars on the wall, and it's part of what you're calling your installation called the Sacred Larder. You're trying to hold on to those memories

in any way you can. Holding on to so many other memories with the preserves, with the soil. And you're talking about her canning and her singing and her work in the kitchen. Madeira was probably listening to music. There's a radio in her kitchen probably. She was always singing.

When I'm presenting, I often will recite the song that I remember vividly her singing so often. Glory, glory. Hallelujah. When I lay my burden down, Burnin' down, no more Monday, no more Tuesday, when I lay my burden down. So I know you have to run, so I just want to play one snippet for you because, so I just happened to be giving a talk at the Birmingham Museum of Art and my parents live in Huntsville, so I invited them to come and they did. And then I went back and spent a couple of days with them. But I convinced my mom to embody my grandmother and record her in the kitchen.

And she was really channeling. And it was funny because she was like, well, so the version I want to sing, it's not like the one that you typically sing. And I say, mama, do the one in you and Medeal would sing. And she sang it. It is just angelic. The first thing I want to sing, it's not like the one that you typically sing. And I say, mama, do the one that you and Medea would sing. And she sang it, it is just angelic. What am I hearing in the background? Something's on the skillet.

What is it? That's mom sautéing onions for a dish. Similar way that Medea would be at her stuff. Yeah, since I lay mine, burning down. No more sickness, no more dying. When I lay mine, burning down. Glory, glory, I lay mine. You know, this is your mother remembering her mother. But I think anybody who listens to it, no matter where you come from, California, Korea,

or you think of your mother and the language of love that is so unique to the kitchen, that you really only get in the kitchen. And I don't know, that's a powerful elixir you have there in that song. I don't know if it's just, it's not just the music, it's the, it's the onions, it's that, that busy work, that hands always at work with utensils. And I don't know if she's cleaning or scraping, but I was in a kitchen, I remember when I listened to that. Hmm. The kitchen, our kitchen, I, I'll end by saying you hear a lot about what your love language. And I know that for the women in our family and to the certain extent to men as well, which I can talk for days about that, cooking for people and feeding them was our love language.

Yeah, that's how you say I love you without words. Thank you, Brian. Thank you. And I'm gonna get you for ruining my mascara. Came in here looking cute, now my mascara is all over the place. So, Brian, I've love talking to you.

Thank you so much. Thank you. It was delicious. Always good to connect, Michelle. Ooh, Lord, that music got me. It made me think of my own grandmother's kitchen and tugged on all kinds of emotions. What a beautiful conversation. Bryant learned early on how the power of food,

the power of song, and the power of family all combined give us the sustenance we need to live our healthiest and most just lives. I'm so honored to have learned more about Medea and the art she created with her stove and her jam-packed pantry and through that haunting, rhythmic song channeled by Brian's mother. I know we can all take for granted the meals we eat throughout our days, but Brian reminds us that behind each of those meals are entire ecosystems that are sadly

sometimes invisible to us. I want to thank Brian for reminding us of that reality and serving up information that can help make sure that we make good choices to nourish our plates and our souls. If you want to fill your plate with Medea's very own slow-cooked greens, make sure to check out our website, yourmommaskitchen.com, to get step-by-step instructions. We'll also have some tips on my Instagram page at michelle underscore underscore Norris, that's two underscores. And I don't know about you,

but I might just be humming that tune when I'm at my stove. Thanks for listening to Your Mama's Kitchen. I'm Michelle Norris. See you next time, and until then, be bountiful. Beautiful. This has been a Higher Ground and Audible Original produced by Higher Ground Studios, Senior Producer Natalie Wren, Producer Sonia Tung, Additional Production Support by Misha Jones, Sound Design and Engineering from Andrew Epen and Ryan Koslowski. Higher Ground Audio's editorial assistant is Camilla Ferdicus. Executive Producers for Higher Ground are Nick White,

Mukta Mohan, Dan Fearman, and me, Michelle Norris. Executive Producers for Audible are Nick DiAngelo and Ann Heperman. The show's closing song is 504 by The Soul Rebels. Burdened down, the song Bryant Terry shared that so beautifully captured his mother's singing is by St. State Street with Bryant Terry and Joshua Gabriel. Editorial and web support from Elisa Bear and Say What Media, talent booker Angela Paluso. Special thanks this week to Clean Cuts in Washington, D.C.,

Chief Content Officer Rachel Giazza, and that's it. Goodbye, everybody. Copyright 2023 by H Ground Audio, LLC. Sound recording copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC. It's winter and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get snowballs on Uber Eats. But meatballs, mozzarella balls, and air and chini balls? Yes, we deliver those.

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