Black History Month – Highlighting Families Building Legacies Rooted in Love.
Happy Black History Month, Fam! This year, we’re paying homage to the rich history of the past while celebrating the change-makers of the future. For the entire month of February, we’re highlighting couples, siblings, and families building a legacy rooted in Black love that are making history in their own way. Support these business owners and also let us know in the comments if there’s anyone you’d like for us to highlight next year! Wishing you a month of Black love, Black pride, and reminders that Black History is truly happening every day.
Meet the Co-Founders of Seasoned Vegan
Chef Brenda and Aaron Beener
Location: Harlem, New York
Their Story: After Chef B’s husband went plant-based, she began to experiment with recipes that were tasty for her children but still nutritious. Years later, with a burning passion for cuisine, she founded Seasoned Vegan with her son, Aaron. Together for over a decade, they’ve served Harlem and changed the conversation around plant-based eating.
Black Love: How did the concept of Seasoned Vegan come to be?
Chef B: For a very long time, I wanted to start a restaurant, and I’d ask my Mom, and she didn’t want to, but I still had the desire. I was concerned about my community. After speaking with neighbors and friends, I started to see that they didn’t like vegetables, and I wanted to show them that vegetables could taste good and were healthy for you. So many of them were suffering from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc., and I wanted to make a difference.
Aaron: My earliest memory of Black History Month was honestly school and feeling frustrated with learning about the same leaders every year, and wanting to learn more about new people to feel empowered in different ways.
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Black Love: How long have you been vegan?
Aaron: I’ve been vegan for nine years, and my mom is going on twenty years. My Dad was the first person to go plant-based in the family. I was ten at the time; this is another part of Seasoned Vegan’s origin story. My Mom was faced with the challenge of creating plant-based meals for her husband that her young children could also enjoy. Over the years, people started showing up at our house around dinner time, and everyone would say, “If I could eat like this all the time, I would go vegan,” and that was one of the driving points to creating Seasoned Vegan.
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Black Love: How has Seasoned Vegan impacted Harlem?
Aaron: I feel like Seasoned Vegan continues in the tradition of Harlem as being innovators and leading the pack. In New York, there’s this energy of recognizing a problem and facing it head-on. Being plant-based and observing that we had to leave our neighborhood and sometimes drive for miles to find a plant-based neighborhood was something we wanted to address. Our heritage as melanated people is agriculture, we created it so the idea that we couldn’t find places in our own neighborhood to find healthy meals was a problem, so who better than people from the community to address it. We’ve become a beacon for healthy living and healing through nutrition and community. We’ve really been able to be effective to the people in our community.
Chef B: I also wanted people to see that a vegan lifestyle is possible, and it can be tasty. So many people have told us that we have changed the face of our community, and people who would not normally want to experiment with vegan food because they were set in their ways, gave us a visit and were happy they did. We’ve set an example and the ambiance of the restaurant is welcoming and the love that we share we give to each person who enters. People have a sense of home and being in an environment where people really care about them.
Black Love: What does it mean to you to build a legacy alongside each other?
Chef B: Deep down inside, I always wanted something that my family could own, and I couldn’t have it any better than to have this with my son. It was challenging at first to learn and understand, but having this business with my son has been extremely rewarding. He’s been the backbone of Seasoned Vegan — it’s a wonderful experience having a business with someone that you love. I’m very happy to have a legacy to leave to my children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and I hope it continues even after that.
Aaron: Cooperative economics can drastically allow our people to create an environment where we can thrive, and it starts with the smallest units and that’s family. Part of our example of healthy living is how family can work together to create economic opportunities for themselves that expand out to the greater family and community as a whole. Our bond as Mother and Son is powerful, and there’s an immense amount of love there. That makes it easier to share that love with our employees, into the food, and to our customers and the neighborhood. And speaking on legacy, my daughter grew up at Seasoned Vegan. She was five when we opened the restaurant – her name is in the floor, and so is my nephews. Our family has grown up there, four generations we’ve all put energy into Seasoned Vegan. It’s a family affair.
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