This is a post from AshEl Seasunz our Senior Educator in the Bay Area, and part of our Less Meat March blog series. 

On Tuesday, Feb. 26th, 2013, my band Earth Amplified partnered with New Message Media and Vanessa Carter to produce a hip-hop music video and curriculum called Food Fight. It had nearly 150,000 views in one week. Dang. How did that happen? Well, click the video below to find out!

As a Senior Educator at ACE, presenting to over 125,000 students in the past four years, I have seen first hand the relationship between the quality of food and the mood, health, and the ability of students to reach their full potential. Though, definitely, the quality of food may be linked to disparity between some public low-income and private middle to upper-class schools across Northern California, I realized that we had a one of the biggest tools to educate and shift consciousness known to this generation: Hip-hop music videos.

Realizing that most people on the planet has some kind of relationship with food, we felt it deserved some serious “Earth Amplified” attention. Because the health of our communities is as much about our food choices as it is about the information that we digest, we spent long hours researching the connection between food, climate, and health. As artists and educators, however, we realized that telling the truth about our failing industrialized food system can be hard to swallow. That’s why we added pop culture movie and product references such as the Matrix and Lucky Charms. Additionally, what better way to confront diabetes, obesity and heart disease that are plaguing low-income communities than through the food we choose to eat everyday.

Food can be a killer or a healer. Information can dumb us down or it can lift us up.  Are you a food fighter?