LEWISTON – For Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Bates College decided to call attention to the need for greater food justice.

It proved a tasty topic.

Keynote speaker Bryant Terry, a chef with a penchant for activism, cooked up at least four different vegan meals during the day: a curry tofu with collard greens, mashed squash, a citrus and garlic-herb braised fennel and a New Orleans-inspired dirty cauliflower.

Sabeeh Khan, a senior majoring in economics, got to taste most of it.

“This was wonderful” and eye-opening, he said, adding that he’s sure he could make some of the simpler dishes in his dorm.

Between cooking, and sometimes while stirring a pan, Terry offered thoughts on a wide variety of food-related issues, from what he called “food apartheid” that squeezes poor Americans to the growing popularity of plant-based, corporate-created alternatives to meat.

Several speakers, including Terry and Bates President Garry Jenkins, pointed out that King saw food as a basic necessity for everyone that he often mentioned when he called for a more just world.

“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits,” King declared during his 1964 speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.

Tyler Harper, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates, who helped organize the King Day events at the liberal arts college, said, “The right not to be hungry is more than a human right. In some basic sense, it is a necessary precondition for every right.”

“We cannot learn if we are hungry,” Harper said. “We cannot be fully free if we have nothing.”

Terry, a bestselling cookbook author and artist, traced his interest in food to his grandmother in Tennessee, who had 7-foot-tall cupboards in her kitchen, each a foot deep, with shelves crowded with glass jars full of preserves, peaches, carrots, figs, sauerkraut and more.

“My grandmother could work magic in the kitchen,” he told hundreds of people gathered in Gomes Chapel for a keynote address Monday. “My fondest recollections of being in the kitchen involved spending time with my maternal grandmother, from whom I gained a love of cooking.”

“My work has always had the texture of autobiography,” Terry said, “and it’s important that I ground all my practices in history and memory.”

What he wants is for people to cook “whole foods, real foods” instead of the highly processed choices that fill grocery stores.

Terry hailed “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,” against the handful of corporations that “control our food system” and invest billions of dollars to persuade customers to rely on supermarkets and fast food instead of time-honored cooking in their own kitchens.

Terry said he hopes his books “empower young people to get into the kitchen” and to take the time, at least on weekends, to make meals they can share with friends and family. He called it “highly political” to cook together.

He urged people to buy organic fruits and vegetables when possible, especially ones that lack thick skin like bananas and oranges, which don’t absorb as many pesticides.

Terry also said everybody can cook.

Showing the crowd how to make a tofu curry, he insisted, “If you can boil water, then you can make this dish.”

Terry said it is “kind of lazy” for people to use tofu by simply turning to it as a meat replacement in existing recipes. The trick, he said, is to be more creative.

He dismissed the many companies marketing plant-based meat substitutes these days.

“I like to think of them as Frankenfoods” that are “bland, weird stuff,” Terry said, though he allowed that as an occasional stand-in for meat, they’re fine.

Terry said he doesn’t expect students to abandon their majors or change their whole lives.

But, he said, “we all eat, right? We all should be concerned with creating a more just, sustainable food system.”

As we approach “a tipping point” for the planet, Terry said, the world needs “all hands on deck” to “really work towards what I would argue is one of the most important movements of the 21st century.”

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