Tracye McQuirter, MPH

author, By Any Greens Necessary

former Dir., Eat Smart Prog., Washington DC

Tracye McQuirter, MPH, regarded as a vegan trailblazer, received her Master’s degree in Public Health Nutrition from New York University and a Bachelor’s degree from Amherst College.  She is the author of the widely read and acclaimed By Any Greens Necessary, described as the #1 recommended vegan book on The Huffington Post.  Vegetarian Times has called her a national food hero who is changing the way America eats for the better.

Ms. McQuirter served as Program Director of the nation’s first federally funded vegan nutrition program, the Vegetarian Society of DC Eat Smart Program, which focused outreach primarily upon low-income African American women but served women and men of any income level.  This program, showing a 250-person waiting list after its first year, provided cooking demonstrations, instructional grocery shopping trips and guest speakers, and surpassed all of its outcome measurement goals, while receiving numerous anecdotal indicators that participants had lost weight and lowered blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

Over the course of her 30 years personally as a vegan, Ms. McQuirter co-founded one of the first vegan websites 17 years ago, and the first ever vegan website by and for African Americans.  Her public health activism and lecturing have been motivated by a goal of reducing chronic diseases among African American women using plant-based nutrition, and she has been one of the individuals credited in part with increasing the number of African American vegans and vegetarians to an estimated nearly 3 million people.

Ms. McQuirter served as a policy advisor for Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine in helping to develop the strategy for a groundbreaking lawsuit proving racial bias and food industry conflict of interest in the formulation of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines.  She also developed curricula for the DC Public Schools System aimed at preventing and reversing childhood obesity, in funding partnership with the USDA and First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move Initiative.  She was co-founder of the Black Vegetarian Society of New York, was a four time A Well Fed World award recipient, and was an Honorary Delegate to the United Nations World Conference on Women, in China.