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When Stic.man was a young twenty-something rapper in Brooklyn attempting to break out and score a record contract he was deep into what his wife calls the hip-hop lifestyle buried in booze, burgers, and blunts.

“I had picked up some bad habits, smoking herb all the time, drinking every day in the urban obstacle course,” says Stic.man, a.k.a. Khnum Muata Ibomu but born Clayton Gavin. “I woke up one morning and my ankle was gigantically swollen, and I found out I had gout. That was my wake-up call. It was a blessing that revealed my path.”

Stic.man is half of the well-known hip-hop duo the Dead Prez and is going on two decades vegan as are many other well-known OG’s of the genre like Jay-Z and most of the Wu-Tang Clan. Stic has managed to turn that vegan passion into a money-making side business that lets him speak on the benefits of living with compassion and purpose.

According to a 2016 Pew Research Center survey 3 percent of Americans 18 and older identified as a vegan while only around 1 percent were from the Hispanic American demographic. For African Americans that number skyrockets to an incredible 8 percent amongst their demographic.

A new Gallup poll published on Monday shows consumers’ changing eating habits. Whites said they were eating 10 percent less meat in the past year while people of color said they were consuming 31 percent fewer meat products.

Some of Hip-Hop’s biggest African American performers have woven veganism tightly into both their music and their business decisions. Eight out of 10 of the Wu-Tang Clan identify as vegan or vegetarian and The RZA has spoken out often about veganism even defending it on The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast recently.

Rapper Jaden Smith, son of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith had a food truck that went and fed the homeless on Skid Row in Los Angeles, Cardi B created a vegan clothing line, Beyoncé and Jay-Z offered fans free tickets to their shows if they went vegan, and A$AP Rocky rapped about veganism on his recent single “Babushka Boi.”

Forbes listed Jay-Z as hip-hop’s very first billionaire in 2019 and the majority of his money has been made from vegan food and beverage businesses like D’Ussé a cognac liquor that has made him $100 million or Armand de Brignac Champagne that has made him an estimated $310 million dollars.

He has also invested in companies that complement his plant-based lifestyle like 22 Days Nutrition which he invested in with his partner Beyoncé and her trainer Marco Borges back in 2015. The luxury plant-based vegan meal planning and delivery company is worth an annual profit estimated to be around $2.7 million.

Jay-Z also has a venture capital firm Marcy Venture Partners that invested $1 million into the African American owned Partake Foods, a food start-up that produces allergy-sensitive vegan cookies.

Jay-Z joined forces with fellow celebrities Jaden Smith, Trevor Noah, Katy Perry, Serena Williams, and Zedd in a round of funding for the silicon valley alternative meat start-up Impossible Foods. Their round put another $300 million into the coffers of the company who had incredible success in 2019 with their Impossible Burger launching at Burger King’s across the United States with their Impossible Whopper.

Ghostface Killah, GZA and The RZA of Wu-Tang Clan fame have promoted Impossible Foods’ Impossible Sliders at White Castle fast-food restaurants while Snoop Dogg is a current ambassador for Beyond Meat even having his own sandwich at Dunkin’ called the Beyond D-O-Double G Sandwich that features Beyond Meat’s Beyond Sausage patty exclusive at Dunkin’ restaurants.

The investment these hip-hop legends have made pales in comparison to how much investors have dumped into the industry in the past decade though. More than $16 billion dollars has been put into both lab-based meat research and plan-based meat research this past decade. $13 billion dollars of that was invested in a two year period between 2017 and 2018.

During an impromptu appearance at Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s On the Run II Tour in Foxborough, Mass., music executive DJ Khaled had one question for the crowd: “Do we have any vegans in the house?” The question was answered with a roar from the crowd of 40,000.

Many titans of the hip-hop industry are looking to these plant-based companies as a way to have back up plans for their aging careers and it gives them a continued presence in the press as it allows them to give back to their communities.

Data from the Good Food Institute and the trade group Plant-Based Food Association shows that while the U.S. retail food market grew overall by only 2 percent from April 2018 to April 2019, plant-based products grew an impressive 11 percent.

Burger-oriented fast-food restaurants, overrepresented in low-income “food swamps,” are seen as opportunities to introduce plant-based options. Although market research firm NPD Group found almost 90 percent of the people eating non-meat burgers are not vegetarian or vegan, a 2018 Gallup poll found that Americans who earn less than $30,000 are almost twice as likely to be vegan or vegetarian as those who earn more than $75,000.

And the market is likely to keep growing.

According to research firm PitchBook, more than 47 companies that make meat and dairy products from plants have raised $2.29 billion from venture capitalists in the past decade, a quarter of it in 2019 alone. Acumen Research and Consulting predicts plant-based meat sales will reach $6.5 billion by 2026, this popular food category Googled three times more frequently than gluten-free and vegetarian products. And it predicts that the global vegan food market will grow at an annual rate of 9.1 percent to reach a value of $24.3 billion by that same year.

There were nine elements of hip-hop, as codified in a KRS-One song of that name in 2003, including DJing and beatboxing. The tenth element of hip-hop, added in 2016, is health and wellness. A bit of a departure from components like break-dancing and street fashion, its elements include plant-based eating, organic gardening, fitness, sobriety, food justice, and animal rights activism. But like the other nine elements, health and wellness have proved to be a source of livelihood for practitioners.

Keith Tucker, a Seattle-based health activist, is partly responsible for the tenth element of hip-hop. He had a radio show, worked with stars like Public Enemy and Russell Simmons (a vegan since 1997) and pushed back against the stereotyping of hip-hop artists.

“KRS-One was an inspiration for me,” Tucker says. “His song ‘Beef’ in 1990 influenced a lot of people in hip-hop to think about veganism, to think about the meat in the slave diet, about the chemicals that were starting to be put in the food and the rise of highly processed foods.”

Let us begin now with the cow

The way it gets to your plate and how

The cow doesn’t grow fast enough for man

So through his greed, he makes a faster plan

He has drugs to make the cow grow quicker

Through the stress, the cow gets sicker

In 2009, Tucker held his first Hip Hop Is Green dinner, assembling hip-hop artists and educators with the goal of bringing health and wellness to youths and families around the country through group meals with star-studded casts. In 2015 he produced the first plant-based hip-hop event at the White House.

And hip-hop proved to be a powerful megaphone. According to Rolling Stone, hip-hop dominates music streaming, accounting for 24.7 percent of songs consumed in 2018. Its dominance is predicted to continue, with performers such as Drake, Kendrick Lamar, the Weeknd, Migos and Cardi B at the top. Black listeners are the largest user group of streaming services, and the role of streaming itself is forecast by Goldman Sachs to more than double to about $131 billion by 2030.

“Hip-hop is the biggest influence on planet Earth when it comes to young people,” Tucker said. “It’s the CNN for the black community. If we can move it in a green direction, the world will move in a green direction. It’s going viral right now.

“We did drugs and gangbanging and sex over and over again and saw that these things aren’t conducive to a healthy world.”

SupaNova Slom, a performer known as “hip-hop’s medicine man,” says younger African Americans have turned to plant-based living because they’ve witnessed their parents’ poor health due to lifestyle decisions and disparities in access to healthy food. He says a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle is more feasible in urban centers that have experienced gentrification and where even fast-food restaurants now reliably offer plant-based options.

“That’s the positive about gentrification. We have a Whole Foods in downtown Newark,” Slom said. “Influencers online, you see them juicing, doing yoga, using food as medicine. Some of them have lost their parents to diabetes. It used to be blinging outside, now it’s internal blinging. Is your prostate functioning properly?”

Slom was raised vegan in Brooklyn by his mother, a holistic wellness coach named Queen Afua (whose wellness products are backed by performer Erykah Badu), a childhood he says set him apart from many of his peers.

“Sprouted bread sandwiches, apples, and oranges as my snacks — it was hard coming up, me and my brother and sister being raised vegan. It had a profound impact on me,” he said.

A combat veteran who served in Afghanistan in 2013, Slom has maintained a strict vegan diet in difficult situations. He has promoted the “Chlorophyllion” green lifestyle, which touts the health benefits of freshly pressed green juice, with a book called “The Remedy” and a line of vegan dietary supplements.

“The message is health is wealth,” Slom says. “If you want to continue to do your art at a high level, fuel yourself with high-quality fuel. It’s about reclaiming oneself. Look at the top 20 rappers and 10 of them are talking plant-based.”

Some of the changes may be powered by growing options and an increasing national interest in plant-based foods. A 2017 Nielsen survey found that 39 percent of Americans are actively trying to eat more plant-based foods. Grubhub reported orders of vegan-friendly dishes increased by more than 25 percent in 2019.

NPD Group found that plant-based alternative sales were up 30 percent last year. And plant-based restaurants with strong African American patronage, places like Slutty Vegan in Atlanta or the Land of Kush in Baltimore, have long lines and Instagram accounts crowded with celebrities.

Afya Ibomu, a holistic nutritionist, sees distinct reasons for the rise of African American vegans.

“We have higher rates of obesity, cancer, diabetes, and asthma. It’s partly our DNA; we’re not well-suited to a standard American diet,” she said. “Many of us came from West Africa where they mostly had goat’s milk. And here it’s cow’s milk. The majority of health guidance is based on European bodies.”

She says that some of the health disparities have been the byproduct of oppression, poverty, food deserts and lack of education but that African American culture can also contribute to the problem: “We use food as a cultural thing, showing someone you love them by giving them high-sugar, high-fat food.”

Music industry heavyweights Jermaine Dupri, Badu, Waka Flocka Flame, André 3000, Common, YG and DJ Khaled have dabbled or committed to plant-based lifestyles.

AshEL Eldridge, a wellness and food-justice activist and rapper in Oakland, speaks about how the plant-based food movement for African Americans is about reclaiming food sovereignty. “You have your history, your body, your culture.”

He says his community is grappling with questions: “How do we take care of ourselves? How do we govern ourselves? How do we regain the wisdom of our ancestry? And how do we reclaim our health?” he asked.

He says people want a sense of agency and that diet exemplifies that.

“There’s a huge movement around decolonizing the diet,” Eldridge notes. “There is disease-related to diets heavily reliant on meat and genetically modified crops and monocropping. How do we extricate ourselves from that? It’s revolutionary.”

Stic.man says younger hip-hop artists have long been inspired by the diet and fitness choices of their elders.

“When I was a young teen getting into hip-hop, LL Cool J and they were swole superheroes. Now I see a lot of cool b-boy yogis. That’s a whole movement. There were break-dance battles back in the day; now there’s a movement of calisthenics, bar athletics, and Nike-sponsored events,” he says. “The New G Code takes empowerment in a healthy way: I don’t care how many weights you can lift, how many people have you lifted up?”

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