The Soundtrack to Eating: Your Favorite Rapper Might Be A Vegan
With growing influence comes social responsibility, so it’s no wonder that some of our favorite faces in rap have decided to adopt plant-based lifestyles as we face never-before-seen environmental challenges going into 2020.
The Soundtrack to Eating is a series in which staff writers write about how food and music are intertwined.
Written by Micaela Garza
Illustrated by Mark Yoder
Two things that Scorpio season has in common every year: National Vegan Month and Drake. Champagne Papi must do some serious celebrating too, because last year it was revealed that he’s a vegan. It’s safe to say that rappers are amongst some of the most influential people in the world right now in music, media, fashion, and even politics. In 2017, a study revealed that rap surpassed rock during this decade as the most popular music genre in the United States. So, in a political climate that now seems far from the path towards liberation and equality we thought we were headed in at the beginning of the decade, and a social climate encouraging celebrities to get political, it’s no question why there has been a reemergence of activism in mainstream music. This lean towards in activism came in all forms — including environmental — and coincided with some of our favorite rappers taking on plant based lifestyles. The normalization of plant based lifestyles and embrace of environmentalism amongst rappers in the latter half of the 2010s says a lot about the culture and values of the United States going into the next decade.
The concept of a plant-based lifestyle gained exponential mainstream traction in the 2010s, so for many it’s hard to believe that organizations such as The Vegan Society were founded as early as 1944. Vegans and vegetarians were previously stereotyped as “peace-loving barefoot hippies” by the Boomer and Gen X generations, however documentaries that shed light on being plant-based, like “Forks Over Knives” and “Cowspiracy,” have been noted as having inspired a new wave of plant-based millenials and Gen Z-ers obsessed with environmental consciousness. According to GlobalData, the number of U.S. consumers identifying as vegan grew from 1% to 6% between 2014 and 2017, a 600% increase, and a 2018 survey from Statista shows a solid half of millennials identifying as vegetarian, with 63% identifying as “flexitarian”, those who are more likely not eat plant based meals than not.
Photo courtesy of Funny or Die
The headlines show that it’s not just about the animals anymore — but rather battling the detrimental environmental impact that factory farming and global warming have on the planet and the people on it. We are living in an environment threatened by global warming. Animals being factory farmed for consumption, such as chickens, turkeys, pigs, and cows, are collectively the largest producers of methane gas in the world — a gas that is 34 times stronger at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. With a call to end factory farming practices that take up almost 30%of the earth’s land for food consumption and produce hundreds of millions of tons of waste a year, it’s quite obvious why so many people have decided to become vegan.
For low-income communities and communities of color in the United States, denouncing factory farming is a means of fighting environmental racism. The Food Empowerment Project says that factory farms are “considered a major contributor of pollution that affects the health of black and brown communities and low-income communities, because more often than not they locate their facilities in the areas where these people live.” “Environmental racism” is the term used for a set of business and agricultural tactics that pollute the environments in low-income communities, with either intended or unintended consequences. “Land use, housing segregation, racialized employment patterns, financial practices, and the way that race permeates zoning, development, and bank lending processes are other modern examples of environmental racism, according to sociologists Bob Bolin, Sara Grineski, and Timothy Collins of Arizona State University. These are practices that perpetuate the mistreatment of communities of color in the United States, but are also themes widely discussed in the lyrics of rappers today.
It’s important to note that the standard vegan in the United States is a caucasian female with access to a middle-class income — an economic class that is not strained by animal consumption practices the way low-income families are. However, there are a number of members of the vegan community who are young, progressive, and diverse, and a wave of politically-inclined vegans who are doing a service to the people of the United States by championing for vegan lifestyles, such as plant-based songstress Erykah Badu and the sexiest vegetarian of 2004, André 3000.
Photo courtesy of BET
Erykah Badu gave a Q&A at the Texas Veggie Fair in 2013, where she was asked about her favorite foods and combining spirituality and veganism, and hosted a “Vegan Soul Food Dinner Celebration” in 2016, where she hired Oakland-based vegan chef Bryant Terry to create a seven course meal to celebrate her gig at the Soul Train Awards. The goddess of hip-hop is open about her spiritual connection to what she eats, saying “Vegan food is soul food in its truest form. Soul food means to feed the soul. And to me, your soul is your intent. If your intent is pure, you are pure.” In an interview with VegNews. André 3000 made the move to veganism after heavy drug use and partying put him in ill health, saying in an interview with GQ, “I was a vegan/vegetarian for like 14, 15 years. After our first album, we were going hard, out on the road, doing drugs, partaking in every woman, and I started to see myself deteriorate. I would look in the mirror and be like, ‘You look like sh--t.’ So I got to a point where I said, I gotta stop. So I went that way and tried it.”
There’s a certain duality to rap music: it can be a boisterous collection of verses about sex, drugs, and being a gangster, but in another way, rap is a collection of commentaries that has documented the historical endurances of life as a marginalized American in a system that ignores the quality of life of everyone who isn’t at least a middle-class Caucasian — animals and humans alike. It seems that millennial-aged rappers are riding their emerging wave of influence to instigate an era of environmental consciousness along with political consciousness. Rappers right now are not only becoming advocates for new causes by rapping about whatever they want, but also providing an example in the press and online for their fans to follow by conforming to vegan-inspired lifestyles.
Badu and Three Stacks, amongst the ranks of rapper Common and Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA and Ghostface Killah — are some of the OG rappers to come out in support of veganism, however some of the most popular rappers of the 2010’s — like A$AP Rocky, YG, and Drake — and other rap vets such as the late Nipsey Hussle and Jay-Z have also been out in the open about their plant based lifestyles. In the past, RZA did campaigns with controversial animal rights groups like PETA championing the slogan “A Better Tomorrow Is A Vegan Tomorrow,” and his Wu-Tang group member Masta Killa was seen in a video with his son discussing the decision to leave meat off their dinner plates. In recent vegan rapper news, Drake nonchalantly confirmed in a Twitch broadcast that he “doesn’t eat meat anymore,” and A$AP Rocky’s recent release “Babushka Boy” featured the line, “I ain’t duck sauce since I became a vegan” after an interview with Complex Magazine in which he was quoted saying, “None of that shit is healthy, and on top of that those f--ing animals were stressed and compressed the whole time. That kind of food going into your body is unhealthy.” about the factory farming industry.
The wave of veganism amongst hip-hop comes with the newfound inclination to be vocal about politics on far-reaching platforms like social media. It’s no longer taboo and now more important than ever for our most influential celebrities to share thoughts on the inequities of living life as low-income, black and brown people in the United States. Portraying life in America with their music has created new knowledge of how environmental change can create a positive impact for the communities many rappers have arisen from. Even though being plant-based didn’t become mainstream until the latter end of this past decade, it sure seems like the rap community is ready to embrace the change and use their platform to encourage environmental consciousness amongst their fans.