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• 1 2023-05-06T00:57:09-07:00 About the author 39 plain 2024-03-08T12:34:03-08:00

  Avery Yale Kamila is the long-running author of the Vegan Kitchen column in the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram newspaper, which she began writing in 2009 under a different column name. In early 2020, she discovered a clue from 1838 which led her to unearth 300 years of buried vegetarian history in Maine. All of it is excluded from Maine’s history books. To recover this cultural history and undo the deliberate erasure, she began publishing bits and pieces of her discoveries in the newspaper and created the open access Maine Vegetarian History Project site. 
  
  Kamila has been invited to speak about this history at vegetarian festivals and for historical societies and library audiences. She has written about pieces of this culinary history for the Maine Sunday Telegram and the Maine Community Cookbook, Volume 2. The Maine Historical Society hired her as an advisor for a past show and tapped her to help plan an exhibition of this lost history, tentative opening date Fall 2024. Its bookstore in Portland sells a collection of Kamila's vegetarian history columns titled Maine's Hidden Vegan & Vegetarian History, which was published with funding from VegFund. She was retained by The Vegan Museum in Chicago to write about U.S. vegan and vegetarian history for an online exhibition.
  
  Kamila grew up in Litchfield, Maine, at Sunshine Farm, a small, organic farm and one-time vegetarian commune, where in 1988 she joined the vegetarian movement while she was a high school sophomore working as a Burger King cashier. She graduated from Oak Hill High School in Wales, where she wrote for the school's newspaper. In 1991, while a freshman at Syracuse University and a member of Syracuse University for Animal Rights, Kamila read John Robbins' book Diet for a New America and became an instant vegan, thanks to a well stocked dining hall and a campus health food store.
  A magna cum laude graduate of the State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse University with a degree in environmental policy and management, Kamila in 2015 co-founded the grassroots environmental group Portland Protectors, which convinced the Portland City Council to pass the nation’s strongest organic land care ordinance banning cosmetic pesticide use in the city. Since then, Kamila and the group successfully lobbied the Portland City Council to invest significant funding in a tree equity program to increase the tree canopy in city neighborhoods that were subject to historic de jure discrimination and now have the least equitable tree canopies. 
  
  Kamila is a former staff writer in the features department of the Portland Press Herald. While at the newspaper, she covered food news, society events, and worked as part of an award-winning investigative team that explored a large ground beef recall at a local supermarket. Prior to her time at the Portland Press Herald, she worked as a staff writer for weeklies owned by the Blethen Maine Newspapers group. In 2003, Kamila participated in the Stone Coast Writers' Conference hosted by the University of Southern Maine. Before working as a journalist, Kamila worked in community relations for Maine Medical Center and the Institute for Global Ethics. 
  Kamila lives with her husband and young son in a 200-year-old downtown Portland home, which survived the Great Fire of 1866 by a mere five tightly-packed houses. Outside, the tiny courtyard garden is now a certified wildlife habitat providing shelter and food to bumblebees, sweat bees, monarch butterflies, chickadees, cardinals, sparrows, gray squirrels, cottontail rabbits, and many other unseen visitors.