Chef Nina Curtis: Breaking Bread Together. A Vegan Chef's Journey to the White House.

At the Podium with Patrick Huey

Breaking Bread Together, Building Human Connections & Honoring the Ancestors.
Nina Curtis is a world-renowned Vegan Chef. Her dishes have been savored on the palates of presidents and prime ministers, foreign dignitaries and political powerbrokers, and first grade students. Most recently she made history by becoming the first chef to prepare and serve an all plant-based meal at the White House’s State Dinner for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. When we talk about what led her to a life and a career built on veganism, her somewhat improbable journeys merged on the Venice Beach bodybuilding scene. Where eating a plant-based diet helped her performance and recovery in competitions. But the seeds for her love of food, ingredients and the process of curating and preparing a meal were planted within her by her parents. Her father is a technically trained French Chef, and her mom (whom Nina describes as the best cook she knows), is a formidable cook in her own right.

Chef Curtis’ ethos today in the kitchen isn’t ego-driven or based upon her celebrity chef status. Instead, her guiding forces are the examples of her father and her mother. And her ancestors. Those black men and women who came before her who did not have the platform, the access nor the reach that she enjoys today, but who took the worst of ingredients they had to make tremendous food for their survival. And more importantly, they used the ingredients of life and food to build a culture.

It’s the ever-present voices of her parents and the legacies of her ancestors of whom she says, “I’m always working to be quiet enough to hear their whispers and their guidance.” And their whispers tell her to humbly do your work, keep your head down and use food to build ally-hood and brotherhood and sisterhood among people, among governments, among nations. And to remember that the seeds she plants today, will have reverberations for centuries to come.

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