Tracye McQuirter
Tracye McQuirter is an American public health nutritionist, vegan activist, author, and speaker.
Background
McQuirter grew up in Washington D.C. and graduated from Sidwell Friends School in 1984. She received her B.A. from Amherst College in 1988 and her Masters in Public Health Nutrition from New York University in 2003.Career
McQuirter grew up as an omnivore, and while her family ate meat and dairy, they did not have sodas, sugary cereals, candy bowls or cookie jars in the house. Despite her mother's best efforts, McQuirter did not particularly like healthy food or vegetables and preferred the sodas, sweets, and snacks at the homes of her relatives.She was introduced to vegetarianism by two of her 7th-grade teachers at Sidwell Friends School. They wanted the annual class camping trip to be all vegetarian and McQuirter wrote a petition against it. She got many of her classmates to sign it, but she was overruled.
When McQuirter was a sophomore at Amherst College in 1986, the Black Student Union brought global human rights activist and Civil Rights Movement legend Dick Gregory to campus to talk about the state of Black America. Instead, he talked about the plate of Black America — the health, politics, economics, and culture of what Black people ate, and why they should become vegetarians. McQuirter, who had gained 25 pounds during her first year in college because she was away from home and could eat all the unhealthy food she wanted, was so impacted by the lecture, that she immediately gave up hamburgers and hot dogs - but it only lasted a week. She couldn' t get what Gregory said out of her mind, so she began reading everything she could about vegetarianism when she went home for the summer a few months later. Her mother and one of her sisters read them, too. By the end of the summer, they all decided to become vegetarians.
McQuirter spent the following fall semester abroad at the St. Lawrence University Semester in Kenya Program during her junior year, and could not eat vegetarian-only food in the program. But she had two experiences there that made her know she would be a vegetarian again when she returned home. The first was when she saw a goat being born one night, then the next day saw another goat being killed, skinned and cooked into goat stew, which she ate, while another goat was tethered to a tree near her, to be eaten the next night. The experience made her feel guilty about eating the animal.
The second incident happened while she was on safari. The group spent a week studying animals at Masai Mara Game Reserve. On the last night of the safari, they ate at the Carnivore restaurant, where they were served a large animal from the game reserve that had been killed and roasted whole over a pit. When the waiters brought the animal to the table and began carving it, McQuirter was repulsed and did not eat it, and vowed never to eat another animal again.
During her second semester, she went to Howard University and found out about the large Black vegan and vegetarian community in Washington D.C. that had opened the first all-vegan health food stores and cafes in the city. There were at least 14 such establishments, starting in the 1970s, including Brown Rice, Blue Nile, Garrison's Natural Foods, Soul Vegetarian, Everlasting Life, Delights of the Garden, Green Cafe, Da Place, Secrets of Nature, Senbeb, August Moon, Sweet Jasmin, Yours Naturally, and Body Ecology vegan food trucks at Howard University.
This diverse Black vegan community included longtime activists from the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Liberation Movement, natural health entrepreneurs, raw foodists, Black Hebrew Israelites, the Ausar Auset Society, Muslims, college students, artists, and many more. And their influence was felt throughout the city at cultural festivals, Kwanzaa celebrations, and social justice rallies, where vegan food was the main fare.
McQuirter immersed herself in this community, soaking up their knowledge, going to lectures, taking cooking classes, and learning where to shop, how to make vegan food affordable, healthy and tasty, the politics of food, and much more. By the time she returned to Amherst for her senior year, she was a confident and committed vegetarian. She was still eating cheese, so she was not yet a vegan, but was able to finally let go of cheese during her senior year.
During her senior year in college, McQuirter co-founded We Feed Our People in 1988 with her sister, Marya McQuirter, and friend Water McGill, to feed unhoused residents living in front of the Martin Luther King, Jr, Memorial Library in downtown Washington, DC, who would not be able to receive food from organizations that were closed during the holiday, thus harming the people that King spent his final years serving the most - impoverished people. With the help of friends and family, We Feed Our People was able to feed hundreds of unhoused residents that first year. During the past 30-plus years, We Feed Our People has since become Washington, DC's flagship day of service event honoring the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday each year.
McQuirter began her career as a museum director at the Mary McLeod Bethune National Historic Site in Washington, DC, from 1990–1996. While there, she served as an honorary delegate to the United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing, China, in 1996, in recognition of Mary McLeod Bethune's role as a co-founder of the United Nations.
During her free time, while working at the museum, McQuirter and her sister were also teaching vegan cooking classes at health fairs, churches, and community events around Washington, DC. They created "BlackVegetarians.com" in 1997, one of the earliest vegan websites, and the first vegan website by and for African Americans. They also co-founded Justice for All Species with two friends in 2000, an animal rights organization for people of color.
McQuirter served as a public policy liaison for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine from 1999 to 2000, where she was a strategist for the successful lawsuit against the USDA proving racial and food industry bias in the formation of U.S. Dietary Guidelines.
McQuirter co-founded the Black Vegetarian Society of New York in 2002, while in graduate school at New York University.After returning to DC, McQuirter directed the first federally funded vegan nutrition program in the U.S., the Vegetarian Society of DC Eat Smart Program, from 2004 to 2009. McQuirter also created the first vegan cooking and lecture series at Whole Foods stores in the Washington, DC, area, titled from Soul Food to Whole Food during that time.
She was also an adjunct professor at the University of the District of Columbia Center for Nutrition, Diet, and Health in 2009, where she developed and taught a plant-based nutrition program to help prevent and reverse childhood obesity for the DC Public Schools System. She also served as a nutrition adviser for the Black Women's Health Imperative, where she developed the plant-based nutrition curriculum for the African American Healthy Lifestyles obesity prevention campaign.
According to the New York Times, her 2010 book, By Any Greens Necessary was a key book that contributed to the rise of veganism among African-Americans between the time of its release and 2017.
In addition, McQuirter created the first-of-its-kind in 2016 with Farm Sanctuary.
Vegetarian Times magazine named her a "New Food Hero" in 2017, changing the way Americans eat for the better.
She wrote her second book, Ageless Vegan, with her mother, Mary McQuirter in 2018, to celebrate their 30 years of being vegan. Library Journal gave Ageless Vegan a starred review, stating it "raises the standard of plant-based cuisine" andSelf Magazine
In 2019, she was inducted into the U.S. Animal Rights Hall of Fame, and PBS named her a "Woman Thought Leader." In 2018, she received the "Distinguished Alumni Award" from Sidwell Friends School, the "Vegan Soul Superstar Award" from Vegan Soulfest and the "Compassionate Vegan Living Award" from Farm Sanctuary.
In 2020, she launched the 10,000 Black Vegan Women movement, in celebration of the 10th anniversary of By Any Greens Necessary, to help 10,000 Black women go vegan in one year.