Fueling the Resistance
For the Vegan Hood Chefs, Black liberation and what’s for lunch go hand in hand.
Ronnishia Johnson-Hasan and Rheema Calloway of The Vegan Hood Chefs, photographed by MiLKY/Kate Buenconsejo.
As part of REP CO’s mission to disseminate and elevate the stories of our subjects, we are proud to partner with the new magazine, MOTHER TONGUE, on the publication of this piece. You can find this story in the print edition of Issue 2, available for purchase here.
“We were just cooking—we didn’t think we were gonna be chefs,” says Rheema Calloway, who is sitting on the edge of her bed inside the house she’s occupied most of her life. It’s a classic San Francisco house. Not one of those Candy Land numbers you see in postcards, but the mostly flat-front, two-story homes lined up cheek to cheek, their rows rolling over the hills, like so many stalled boxcars. If you grew up in the Bay, like Calloway did, these are “SF houses”—complete with illogically spacious ground-floor garages (rarely occupied by a car) and topped with a cluster of rooms you can count on one hand.
Calloway is a 31-year-old community organizer and one- half of the Bay’s most sought-after culinary pop-up, the Vegan Hood Chefs. Today she has 300 dishes to prepare in less than 24 hours. Her small but nimble crew of prep cooks is already in the commercial kitchen a few miles away, bent over steaming pots of brown stewed jackfruit and Cajun mac and cheese. In a few hours, Calloway will join them and nest the roasted sweet potatoes into the salad greens, then help pack every- thing up. Tomorrow, the people who come from miles around to line up at their food truck will score a feast unlike any they have experienced before: crispy yellow potatoes smothered in vegan gumbo, konjac root “shrimp” burritos stuffed with dirty rice and Cajun roux, peach cobbler pancakes piled high with graham cracker–crusted peaches and finished with coconut drizzle. All the things. All vegan.
From her bedroom, Calloway points to a blue house across the street: “That was my great-grandma’s house,” she says. Her uncle still lives three doors up. Calloway’s grandma, Dorothy, bought this place in 1962. She’s 87 now, and occupies one of the home’s two bedrooms. “This is Dottie the Hottie,” says Calloway, opening the bedroom door. She crawls into the hospital bed in the corner, spooning the frail woman who occupies it. A home health care aid steps back from the bed and turns her attention to the fourth woman in the small room. “My auntie, Kam,” says Calloway by way of introduction. Dorothy’s daughter, Kamala, was born with cerebral palsy and has been severely disabled her whole life. Now Kam is 54. And since Dorothy fell down the stairs, in 2019, her dementia has gone from a whisper to a shout. “Then she got COVID, had some strokes,” says Calloway, who now cares for them both, having moved back into her childhood home during the pandemic, when those three miles between her own apartment in Bayview and her grandma’s house in Ingleside Heights were no longer just a few clicks on the odometer, but a possible death sentence for the two compromised women inside. Calloway is the one holding it all down, but she is still unequivocal about who heads it all up: “Dottie’s our matriarch. I wouldn’t be where I am without my grandma,” she says.
Photography by by MiLKY/Kate Buenconsejo.
Her grandmother is also known for her mean mac and cheese and the Vegan Hood Chefs’ famous Cajun mac is based on that recipe—with some notable tweaks. Plant-based cheese, vegan milk alternative. The same Southern spices. The same feeling of hanging around grandma’s kitchen as a kid, testing scoops of hot, gooey noodles to make sure the sea- sonings were just right. “How do we preserve our culture and what’s recognizable and familiar to our communities?” asks Calloway. “How do we encourage people to eat better without sacrificing where they are from?” The answers to these questions are many: the sucka-free po’ boy made with deep-fried oyster mushrooms and creamy chipotle aioli, bourbon BBQ jackfruit wings with a crunch to rival any Popeye’s bucket, jerk corn ribs slathered in no less than three sauces. Damn good food to anyone with a pulse—but meals loaded with meaning and memory for folks from a specific community and culture.
Back in her own bedroom, Calloway taps the TV remote and the flat screen on the wall fills with grainy footage of young people dancing. The cuts are quick, but the scenery is familiar to anyone with deep San Francisco roots—Third Street in the Bayview, Burton High School in Visitacion Valley, 24th Street in the Mission—as is the music: E-40’s “Tell Me When to Go,” Yung Joc’s “It’s Goin’ Down.” It’s the early aughts in the Bay, and suddenly a young Calloway with her signature toothy grin and smiling eyes flashes on the screen. “We were turf dancers,” she explains. “We would dance and represent the neighborhood where we were from. It was about stopping the violence—getting kids to dance instead of fight.” Now another girl appears on the TV, popping and locking, then tossing herself into a split like it’s nothing. “That’s Ronnishia.”
Ronnishia Johnson-Hasan. The other half of the Vegan Hood Chefs. The two girls met in Spanish class, two of the only Black kids in a primarily white high school in Pacifica, a middle-class, fog-soaked beach town just south of the city. “She turned around to smile at me and I mugged her,” Calloway says. The options were camaraderie or competition. Calloway chose the latter.
“But Ronnishia, she knew the culture. She was like, ‘bitch we need each other,’” recalls Calloway, who quickly softened, as it didn’t take long for her to admit they were stronger together. When their Spanish teacher made a racist remark, Calloway and Johnson-Hasan staged a protest, shutting down the class for an entire week until an apology was issued. Those who know the pair well call this their first revolution. There would be many.
Calloway taps her phone and dials Johnson-Hasan: “We are coming to you.” A 10-minute drive down the I-280 and Calloway is parked in front of the 3rd Street Youth Center & Clinic in Bayview, where Johnson-Hasan, 31, works as a thera- pist and social worker. The nonprofit is located on the ground floor of a senior housing complex where Johnson-Hasan’s grandma Beverly lives with her two dogs, Brownie and Oreo. Though Johnson-Hasan currently lives in the East Bay with her partner and their new baby, she spends the bulk of her days somewhere in this building, across the street from the K. C. Jones Playground and the Martin Luther King Jr. Pool.
Beverly’s king-size bed takes up most of her second floor apartment’s main room. She’s propped up on pillows, chat- ting back to her yapping dogs and cradling in her arms her 4-month-old great-granddaughter, Freedom—Johnson- Hasan’s baby girl. The two women pass Freedom between them wordlessly and without fuss. Beverly doesn’t get out as much as she used to. For over 30 years she worked as a nurse at the University of California, San Francisco. These days her regular haunt is the dialysis clinic. She’s been getting four- hour treatments, three times a week, for the past 21 years. “My grandmothers on both sides have lots of health issues,” says Johnson-Hasan. “Breast cancer, kidney failure, high blood pressure—I have always been told that it’s hereditary.”
Beverly, photographed by MiLKY/Kate Buenconsejo.
Johnson-Hasan was barely 20 years old, sitting in the school health clinic at Texas Southern University, when a nurse told her that her newly diagnosed high blood pressure was basically a foregone conclusion. Johnson-Hasan was skeptical. Maybe it was just stress from exams. Either way, she didn’t want to be on blood pressure meds for the rest of her life. “They gave her hella pills, and she didn’t want to take pills,” remembers Calloway, who shared a Houston apartment with Johnson-Hasan at the time. The two women—nearly inseparable since Spanish class—had headed off to college together. But after that visit to the health clinic, Calloway noticed a change in her friend. “I would be in the kitchen frying, and she would be making veggies,” says Calloway. Then there were the pictures. “Ronnishia started to paste brochures on the fridge with animals in cages and chickens in coops—I was like, this bitch is losing it.”
Except maybe not. The more the women learned, the more they began to ask: Was it hereditary, or was it decades of big soda targeting Black communities? Was it hereditary, or was it growing up in Bayview–Hunters Point next to a toxic Superfund site? Was it hereditary, or was it food deserts and the intentionality of Black and Brown communities not having access to fresh foods?
Ronnishia Johnson-Hasan and Rheema Calloway of The Vegan Hood Chefs, photographed by MiLKY/Kate Buenconsejo.
On November, 28, 2014—Black Friday—Johnson-Hasan and Calloway set out for the West Oakland BART station. Dressed in all black, they carried heavy-gauge metal chains, titanium bike locks and two-foot-long segments of black pipe, wide enough for human arms to slide inside. As a pair of trains pulled up to the platform just after 10 a.m., the two women, along with a dozen others, linked hands, closed the locks and formed a fortified human chain. “Black lives matter!” they chanted, over and over. Outside the station hundreds more had gathered, shouting the same. Four hours. That’s how long they hoped to shut down the trains—disrupt the mind- less flow of human bodies from one place to another, shake people from their complacency. Four hours. The amount of time 18-year-old Michael Brown’s corpse lay in the street in Ferguson, Missouri after a police officer fatally shot him earlier that summer.
They managed to hold their ground for more than two hours before police with high-powered concrete saws forcibly removed them, handcuffing and arresting all 14 protestors. Johnson-Hasan told a local TV reporter at the scene, “It’s a very thick chain, but my ancestors were in chains worse than this, so this is nothing.”
“You all were revolutionary,” says Beverly proudly. She’s still in bed, covered up to the waist with a heavy black comforter. But her shirt is plainly visible: a red and blue tie-dye tee with “Supreme Queen” across the front in gold letters. Tucked under Beverly’s bed is a pair of slides emblazoned with “Too Many Bitches, Not Enuf Queens.” Beverly admits the shoes have received eyebrow raises at church. She wears them anyway. Both slippers and tee are part of a fashion line that spun off into Conscious Queens, an organization Calloway and Johnson-Hasan founded just out of college. They would bring together groups of young Black women and initiate discussions about “why we are pitted against each other, what we are holding, how are we going to flip that,” explains Johnson-Hasan. They eventually brought the program to teen girls at the neighborhood high school. They hosted healing circles. They built altars. They flipped it. That’s the thing with Calloway and Johnson-Hasan: It might look like fashion. It might feel like dancing. It might taste like food. But it’s actually an invitation.
Photography by by MiLKY/Kate Buenconsejo.
By the time the women left college, they were clear eyed about the effects of food injustice on their communities. They moved back to the Bay. They became organizers. They helped redesign three corner stores in Bayview to offer fresh fruits and produce. They worked with the Food Guardian Project, training fellow Bayview–Hunters Point residents to educate and mobilize around nutrition and awareness—supporting urban agriculture and advocating for food security and justice. “We are both very intentional about our communities and improving them. When you get awoken it’s your duty to give back,” says Johnson-Hasan, who has been vegan since 2014 and has seen her health improve markedly. Her high blood pressure disappeared; her weight dropped. Calloway, despite her early skepticism about her friend’s fridge-art activism, swore off animal products shortly after.
“Veganism has always been popular, but it has always been looked at as a white thing,” says Calloway. “When we started having conversations around who veganism is for, it really woke up our spirit.” It also reawakened old family recipes, reworked with meat- and dairy-free ingredients. That “chick’n” with biscuits and gravy made with deep-fried jackfruit. Those pineapple upside-down donuts with coconut whipped cream.
Some have questioned why a pair of vegan chefs with a mission around health would choose to serve up such indulgent dishes, but, like any effective activists, Calloway and Johnson-Hasan know that meeting people where they are is key. “When you are working with the Black community you have to allow people to start somewhere, and we do that,” says Calloway, who adds that almost every new customer comes back to them with a question about the ingredients. “The majority of our customers aren’t vegan, they are just people who want to try the food. The practice of asking and being curious about what we put in it—that’s a step.”
Photography by by MiLKY/Kate Buenconsejo.
And curiosity is growing: A 2020 Gallup poll on consumers’ meat-eating habits revealed that 31% of people of color reported eating less meat in the previous 12 months, while only 19% of white people cut their meat consumption. A 2016 Pew Research Center survey found that 3% of all American adults identified as vegan or vegetarian, but that number jumped to 8% among Black adults.
As the writer Amirah Mercer points out in a 2021 essay for Eater, “Plant-based eating has a long, radical history in Black American culture, preserved by institutions and individuals who have understood the power of food and nutrition in the fight against oppression.” She highlights the vegan foundations of many Black religions and spiritual practices— Seventh-day Adventists, African Hebrew Israelite Nation of Jerusalem, Rastafarianism and the Nation of Islam—as well as countless, high-profile Black celebrities and activists who have embraced and extolled a plant-based diet (including Dick Gregory, Angela Davis, Venus Williams, Kyrie Irving, Senator Cory Booker and Colin Kaepernick). Even Beyoncé and Jay-Z offer their own vegan meal delivery service. Today, there is estimated to be more than a million Black vegetarians and vegans in the United States, with Black people representing the fastest-growing vegan demographic in the country.
“Changing what we put into our bodies—to me, that is activism,” says Calloway, who emphasizes that protests are just one of countless ways people can advocate for change. “I could try and convince a single mother who has to be at work at 3:00 a.m. to come to an action, or I could teach her to cook healthier for her family. Which is more tangible?”
A line snakes down the 2300 block of Broadway in Oakland. The Vegan Hood Chefs have come to serve Sunday brunch, and at noon, the steel windows of the truck roll up, revealing Johnson-Hasan, Calloway, and their two cooks, standing in what is essentially a narrow, six-foot-long hall- way, surrounded by blazing cooktops and sizzling vats of oil. Calloway takes orders while Johnson-Hasan composes meals, shaking white powdered sugar on top of the peach cobbler french toast and piling the avocado toast high with pickled onions, microgreens, tomatoes and “parmesan.” The baskets of food get passed to the back of the truck, where cook Zane Drew, who has been furiously dropping battered jackfruit “chick’n” into the fryer, takes the completed orders and shouts recipients’ names into the crowd. One customer, a man who works a chair at the barbershop in the alley, brought his lunch from home, but abandoned it once he saw the truck. In between bites of mac and cheese he asks aloud—to no one in particular—what many others have been saying: “How?”
“Everybody has talents,” says Johnson-Hasan. “If you can wake up every day and use your talents to fight against the system, you are making a difference.” Despite holding down full-time jobs and serving as caregivers to babies, grand- mothers and aunties, Calloway and Johnson-Hasan typically take out the food truck at least twice a week—Fridays at Speakeasy’s Bayview/Hunters Point taproom and Sundays outside the new Chase arena where the Golden State Warriors play. “What I have learned through organizing is that so much of our experience is fighting back,” adds Johnson-Hasan. “But it often feels unsustainable. What’s just as effective is how you design your everyday practices. Where do you spend your money? How do you feed yourself? It’s a revolutionary act—what we put into our bodies helps us heal.”