Straight outta the garden: 'Eco hip-hop' pioneer Dj Cavem drops beets for kids
DJ Cavem with his wife, Alkemia Earth, with whom he has two daughters. Together, they founded the Vita Earth Foundation which seeks to reconnect people to nature by supporting seed distribution and urban farm development.
DJ Cavem is all about seeds. He plants seeds in the soil to grow healthy food, sure, but he also plants the seeds of lifestyle change in kids. For him, these efforts are one and the same: they both hold the power to “sprout that life”—that life being a culture of wellness, for people and for the earth. He’s an urban grower, plant-based chef, educator, musician, and activist dedicated to healthier communities.
While he’s never been more certain that true success is health, that belief took lots of TLC. He grew up in the Five Points district of Denver, a historically Black neighborhood where processed food was wealth. You were cool if you came to school with a Big Mac, but kale? Not so much.
DJ was raised to see this differently. With an artist-activist mother, he spent time as a kid around family and community elders who grew food. He considers himself lucky, because most of his peers didn’t get a chance to experience this kind of urban gardening at a young age—he recalls planting his first apricot tree at age three. He saw lines of folks waiting for government-assisted processed food at churches, but he also remembers eating pears, peaches, and watermelons from out of a neighbor’s pick-up truck.
Looking back, he sees that the food desert story of his neighborhood came to dominate: an abundance of processed foods and a lack of fresh food was the norm, while his experience of Black folks growing their own food became rare. Such community activists were left out of the conversation on health: “No one was teaching environmental sustainability to communities of color,” he says. “The communities that were doing a lot of canvassing for sustainability, they didn’t come to the hood.”
And as much as hip hop artists rap about the glory and struggles of life in the hood, their music tends to avoid revealing issues that affect public health there. In fact, the hip-hop and processed food industries have benefited from a lucrative partnership for decades. Coca-Cola has branded itself with hip-hop since the ‘90s, and studies from the American Journal of Public Health clearly tie overconsumption of soda to poor health outcomes.
DJ Cavem’s 2015 track featuring Cody ChesnuTT & Bianca Mikahn. Walking by a youth penitentiary on the way to the urban garden, a young boy gets his hands in the dirt. DJ Cavem teaches him that it’s cool to live a good life, and grow food.
Armed with a keen awareness of the health inequities affecting communities of color, DJ Cavem is pushing for change in hip-hop culture. By the time he was out of college, while teaching an African studies college prep course at Metro State University in Denver, he had already dedicated himself to this work: “I decided that instead of just being a political rapper I wanted to talk about environmental hip hop,” he says. “There were things going on in our community and not addressed on hip hop records, outside of police brutality.”
That’s right, we’re talking about eco-hip hop, a term coined in 2007 by DJ Cavem.
Unlike many of his peers, his lyrics directly address issues of food justice and environmentalism. And he’s sure that his music can inspire folks to become agents of change, from the schools to the streets.
His albums, 2010’s The Teachers Lounge and 2012’s The Produce Section, won him the 2013 music education award at the Grammys, and they’ve been featured as curriculum in schools across the nation. He has given lectures from UC Irvine to Georgetown to NYU. He has been featured in short documentaries, shared the stage with artists like Public Enemy and Dead Prez. And he’s worked with youth from the summer camp to the classroom.
Cavem dropped Wheat Grass while living in Oakland, where nutritional health inequities stood out to him. He was working at Green for All at the time.
After years of working with kids to rebrand hip hop and its assumptions of success, he’s learned much about getting that message across. Most importantly, you have to know your audience.
Little kids with their parents are the easiest to sway towards a healthy lifestyle. “They want to get dirty, they want to play in the dirt, they want to play in the water, they love the music, they love the dancing,” he says. “I can go into elementary schools, do an assembly, get all of the kids doing yoga, get all of them to meet me in the lunchroom and have fresh pressed juice.”
But it’s not always as simple as playing in the dirt; he often runs into parents who are resistant to change.
“I had a type 2 diabetic 8th grader who really wanted to change the way she ate. I was telling her about Kool-Aid and all this stuff. She left one day, and never came back to the program,” he says. “I guess the parent was upset that I was challenging their cultural ways of eating.” He has found that middle schoolers “want to be a part of the change but often don’t feel empowered to do so.”
That’s part of why he’s dedicated himself to reaching kids. Their habits aren’t set in stone and they can grow to positively influence those around them. In a word, they give him hope: if he can get them excited enough about growing and eating real food, the “intergenerational tyranny” of unhealthy living that leads kids to a dangerous life can be stopped in its tracks.
A 2013 track with a video featuring Dj Cavem’s summer camp students.
Luckily, he’s got a few tricks up his sleeve when it comes to high-schoolers. Attracted to the “lifestyle of success,” he tries to show them that growing food is cool. “I gotta go in there with the chain on, you know flossin’ and lookin’ fresh with some nice shoes, and I gotta talk about tower gardens and hydroponics. I gotta tell them you can grow food without messing up your jordans.”
In other words, he says, meet young kids where they’re at. “High schoolers like the idea of being creative, to build that sense of pride and patience. So giving them something to grow gives them that opportunity. It’s about creating a lifestyle, that’s Sprout that Life.”
Beyond the school and the stage, he’s been involved in a number of urban farming projects over the years. One such project is the Growhaus in Denver, where he taught summer camp for a number of years. He helped develop Seed2Seed, a youth leadership program that teaches teens to grow food, cook and eat for good health, and become agents of community change.
During the pandemic, he was roused into action when Michigan banned stores from selling seeds. They were deemed nonessential, but for DJ Cavem, there is nothing more essential than being empowered to grow our own food.
He’s now channeling that energy into spreading the kind of urban farming he grew up with. His latest album, Biomimicz, was released with vegetable seed packs that are ready for planting. And he and his wife, wellness coach Alkemia Earth, founded the Vita Earth Foundation which is currently raising funds to send 22,000 seeds to urban farms across the country. “That’s where my mind is right now: raising funds for these communities, nationally, sending the seeds, and helping them start their own green job business.” As he sees it, one way to fight the corporate food system is to give the seeds of change into people’s hands, literally.
And for all these efforts, he has reason for hope.
“Now we’re literally creating a lifestyle which is what you see, you see vegan rappers, and that’s pretty dope,” he says. “Not all of them are talking about growing food, not all of them are talking about health, but they are interested in this lifestyle of community building, which is a process, you know, but I see it happening every day.”
It’s true—plant-based eating now has a firm foothold in the hip hop industry thanks to efforts by artists like DJ Cavem.
His urban growing, rhymes on justice, and widespread education efforts are helping to seed a healthier future for the hood. In a world where many are swayed by the media of what’s cool, maybe he can push us to do what’s right.
Remixed from his latest album, Biomimicz, Cavem asks: “How you supposed to grow in dirty water? I’m in the garden growing for my daughters.”
Alec Tilly is a News Fellow based in San Francisco, CA.