A  holistic health practitioner from Brooklyn, Queen Afua, inspired Kay Pierce to go vegan.

Pierce attended one of Afua’s “sacred woman” conferences in which Afua led a yoga class. The older woman was lithe and nimble.

“I realized how much grace and flow she had about her,” she says. “I was 33 and breathing heavy and sweating. And she’s about 60, and she was moving like it was nothing. I thought, ‘I want the ease of being able to breathe and move like that when I’m 60.’”

So she followed the path of veganism, which also brought her closer to her spirituality.

Pierce started a private chef and meal prep business about three years ago, against the advice of her adviser at the Art Institute of Dallas’ culinary school.

“He said, ‘This is Texas. People like meat,’” Pierce recalls.

Pierce grew up in the Chicago suburbs, where she worked in restaurants starting at age 16, and moved to Dallas about five years ago because of her then-husband’s job.

Her adviser was wrong.

Sirius Vegan took off without much marketing, and now she also holds pop-up dinners once a month at the vegan restaurant Recipe Oak Cliff on South Ewing Avenue.

The dinners are called “eat your colors,” and Pierce believes that colorful food can align the chakras, energy points throughout the body used in meditation practices.

The minerals that make squash yellow, for example, are good for the solar plexus, she says.

“It’s basically metaphysical healing through food,” she says.

That might sound hippie-dippy, but the benefits of a plant-based diet are physical as well as spiritual.

“We’re the ones with the heaviest rate of diabetes and high blood pressure,” she says. “Diabetes alone is a really heavy thing that takes out the black community today. And a lot of it has to do with food.”

Pierce also teaches gardening and cooking classes for the Oak Cliff Veggie Project, a nonprofit that gives away fresh food to people in the southern Dallas food desert.

Sirius Vegan took off so fast that Pierce went part time at her job at V-Eats Modern Vegan in Trinity Groves, and her services are in high demand.

“I think Dallas is going to outpace Austin because it’s a really fast-growing city,” she says. “There are people coming here from New York and Chicago every day, and they are used to having these things.”