Kimberly McNair Brock carries Birmingham’s history in her bones. Born and raised in the city, she grew up in a civil rights family whose story is woven into the fabric of one of America’s most pivotal moments. Her sister, Carol Denise McNair, was just 11 years old when she was one of four girls killed in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church—an act that galvanized a nation and became a defining turning point in the Civil Rights Movement.

That legacy of loss, and of resilience, lives at the center of everything Brock does today. Through Bitty’s Living Kitchen, her Birmingham-based plant-based food and wellness company, she has spent years turning grief into purpose and food into medicine.

A Winding Road to the Kitchen

Brock didn’t arrive at food entrepreneurship in a straight line. After growing up in a household where her mother was the heart of the kitchen—baking, cooking collards with smoked turkey, roasting chicken instead of frying it, serving vegetarian meals long before they were fashionable—she went to Auburn and then felt a pull she couldn’t ignore.

“I was getting ready to go on vacation to Charleston,” she recalls, “and I was looking through a Birmingham magazine. They were doing a story about Birmingham chefs and where they had gone to school—and so many had gone to Johnson & Wales.” The next morning at her Charleston hotel, the bellhop mentioned there was a culinary school nearby. It was Johnson & Wales. She toured it, came home, and started looking at plane tickets to the Denver campus.

Then something far beyond coincidence happened. The school came to her. “Oddly enough, they were coming to Birmingham to scout for students. I got there maybe 30 minutes before they were about to wrap up and hobbled in there in my boot with a broken ankle.” She started talking with the recruiters, they encouraged her to enroll immediately, and she made the decision on the spot.

Getting there was one thing. Staying was another.

“I flew in with my luggage, looking for ways to pay, and I said a prayer. ‘I know I’m supposed to be here. If I’m meant to be here, you’re going to have to show yourself, God.'” She took a position working weekends at an assisted living facility, wheeling meal carts from house to house, cooking from scratch in the most fundamental sense. “It was hardcore cooking,” she says simply.

Food as Medicine

When Brock returned to Birmingham after culinary school, she worked at The View at the Club, a bed and breakfast in Vincent, and eventually landed at Southern Progress, operating out of a space called the Waterfall Café as an independent contractor. But life shifted again around 2010. With jobs lost and roots temporarily replanted at her parents’ home, she found herself in unfamiliar territory.

It was during that season that a nurse practitioner asked her a simple question that changed her trajectory.

“She started asking me questions: how do you feel when you eat the french fries? After a few questions, I realized she really cared. She was concerned about me.” At the end of the appointment, the nurse mentioned a health coaching certification through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition out of New York. Twelve months—and a new direction.

Meanwhile, Brock had been watching something remarkable unfold in her own home. Her mother had Alzheimer’s disease, progressing to stage six—and then began to reverse.

“I would go to the farmers market, roast chicken, make tons of vegetables, and do this a couple of days a week. They were able to eat full meals.” The real food, sourced fresh and prepared with intention, was making a visible difference. “Food has been a proponent of a lot of healing in our family,” she says. “A lot of the healing journey of my mom was education for what I do today.”

That revelation crystallized into a question she hasn’t stopped asking since: What if I could help heal people through food?

From Back Porch to Living Kitchen

The name Bitty came from her father, who called her by the nickname until the end of his life. It started as Bitty’s Back Porch before evolving into Bitty’s Living Kitchen —a name that better captured the mission.

After a stint with a stall at The Pizitz Food Hall, the brand and its ethos fully clicked into place. “We had a lot of produce from local farmers, whatever was in season. We made soup from scratch. People would come back and tell us it was the best salad they’d ever had.” The tagline she landed on said it all: Fresh. Healthy. Delicious.

“We eventually changed it to ‘where healthy is delicious,'” she says.

From there came seven years of meal prep services: no MSG, non-GMO, and “prepared with TLC,” as Brock says. During the Covid pandemic, like many food businesses, she pivoted. An unexpected product, sea moss gel, became her number-one seller.

“Everyone was talking about sea moss, so I bought it and tried it.” Sea moss, an algae that’s been sun-dried and reconstituted with alkaline water, is packed with nutrients the body craves. Brock worked closely with a health foods store going through three to four cases a week. “I usually put it in my hot tea and it’ll lightly dissolve. Ours is very smooth.” She started with the original formula and kept building. Today she offers flavors and formulations including a pain relief blend and CinnaBoost, created after the second wave of Covid.

The product line has grown to include hand-crafted salves: a ligament love balm, an arthritis salve, a shoulder formula she created for herself after years of constant stirring. “I make these so that you don’t have to buy them for the rest of your life,” she says. “I really make things to heal you.”

Teaching the “Reverse Your Palate”

Through FEAST Birmingham, Brock is running a three-part series called “Reverse Your Palate” —held on the last Friday of the month through the summer. The first class, Plant Based Meat Foundations, is May 29, followed by Dairy Free Swaps on June 26, and Eat to Live: Nourishment and Reset on July 31.

“We make our vegan chorizo out of mushrooms, walnuts, sun-dried tomatoes, and herbs and spices,” she says. “It’s flavorful.” The three-class series covers plant-based meats (mock tuna, walnut meat, cajun pasta with vegan chorizo), dairy alternatives, and healing foods including juices and teas.

She describes two kinds of customers she serves, and she loves both of them.

“There’s the person who’s seeking knowledge—they have something going on, they come wanting information, want to taste and educate themselves. For that person, I want them to feel empowered to continue on in their journey. They’re determined to be well, and I want to encourage them in their fight.”

Then there’s the skeptic. “The non-believer—it’s almost a joke to them. They taste samples, try to stump you with questions. I give them answers they don’t expect. They leave and buy something, or they leave, look at other tables, and come back. But they leave with that lingering idea—to give something holistic a try.”

Both, she says, deserve the same investment.

Shaped by Birmingham

Brock’s father was a professional photographer for many years, and she notes that a lot of Birmingham’s history lives in his files. It’s a fitting metaphor for who she is: someone who carries the city’s past forward into the present, building something that honors where she came from while feeding where her community is going.

In June, she heads to Henry Ford as a chef in residence for a week-long engagement, June 11 through 15. Bitty’s products—sea moss gels, salves, juices, and teas—are available on-site, for delivery, and for shipping.

“Healing, community, and legacy are inseparable,” she says. In Kimberly McNair Brock’s hands, food is never just food. It is memory. It is medicine. It is love made tangible, and it has been feeding Birmingham back to life, one meal at a time.

For more information about Bitty’s Living Kitchen or to sign up for a class, visit their website here.

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