Meet the Bay Area Rappers Who Want You to Eat a Salad

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sk any San Francisco teenager from my generation what they did after school in the ’90s and it would most likely go something like this: bumming a cig off campus, splitting a super suiza from El Farolito with friends, and turning on California Music Channel to watch videos from local rap stars who never got love from MTV.

I felt proud of hometown heroes like RBL Posse, Messy Marv and San Quinn, who sold cassette tapes out of the trunk of their cars, making a name for themselves — and Frisco — without the backing of major record labels. Back then, much of Bay Area rap reflected the violence of the drug trade and the values of exploitative capitalism. If the music was inspirational, it was about how to be a gangster or a successful drug lord. And if someone rapped about food, it was largely as a way to woo women. “You wanna eat Nation’s? Crab at Crustacean’s?” Quinn raps on “Wassup.” “Tiger prawns, butterflied shrimp, it must be nice living like this.”

These days, however, there’s a new wave of Bay Area rappers pushing a different kind of aspirational lifestyle — one that’s focused on açaí bowls, organic vegetables and physical fitness rather than a life of crime. Frisco rapper Larry June was the first to double down on this new brand of wellness hip-hop, with song lyrics that reference his own self-imposed health regimen: daily fasting until 1 p.m. followed by fresh-squeezed orange juice (made from 35 oranges, to be exact) that he might savor at a crib in Sausalito with exquisite views and “expensive couches.” In “Dear Winter,” he raps, “Eat some blueberries in the mornin’, a little raw spinach / If you don’t know nun’ about me, you know I’m gon’ get it…move like a beast do / pulp in my orange juice.”

Indeed, Larry June may be the first rapper to make “Healthy & Organic” his personal brand.

But June isn’t the only Bay Area rapper advocating a healthy lifestyle. About eight years ago, “Don Toriano” Gordon of Fully Loaded decided to go vegan after a health scare related to his previous street lifestyle. Eventually, Gordon launched Vegan Mob, a plant-based soul food and barbecue food truck that quickly emerged as one of the most popular Black-owned vegan businesses in the Bay. Now, he’s writing songs about his new diet, too. “I don’t want that shit if it ain’t plant-based,” he raps in “Vegan Mob.” “See you gnaw that pork and steak / Wonder why you ain’t in shape.”

Maybe the most outspoken member of this new wave is Jordan Gomes, aka Stunnaman02. Though Stunnaman had already had certified hits like “Big Steppin’” (which even has an official 49ers’ remix), his catchy 2024 ode to his love of leafy greens, “Eat a Salad,” is what put him in the pantheon of health-conscious Frisco rappers. In the song, Stunnaman extols the nutritious properties of fresh ingredients like “lemon, lime, honey … agave if you’re vegan.” To promote the single, he posted videos of himself performing custom verses that were essentially recipes for different salads he would prepare on camera — Asian chicken, watermelon and Tajin, and even a quinoa salad soup.

Then, last month, Stunnaman released another healthy slap, “Veggies,” and shot the music video inside L.A. grocery stores, where he goes through the produce aisles naming the benefits of various fruits, vegetables and spices: “If I need the antioxidants, I nibble on cacao / Turmeric with the ginger it could really cleanse your bowels.”

Now, Stunnaman has parlayed his newfound status as a hip-hop health influencer into a burgeoning side hustle. In August, he created his own signature salad at Cali’s Sports Bar in Berkeley, in collaboration with owner Wilson Wong. Made with ingredients that don’t trigger the rapper’s eczema, the salad features a choice of grilled or fried chicken, a bed of romaine lettuce and arugula, sliced onions, a custom lemon-pepper hot honey vinaigrette and a side of vegan ranch, which he loves to drizzle on top with the dressing. Stunnaman also has his own juice brand. And he collaborates with local restaurants like Square Pie Guys, which recently released a Stunnaman-inspired “salad pizza.”

With his black mock neck polo and pulled-back dreads, Stunnaman has the energy of a celebrity trainer, complete with the catchy mantra (“We Still Winnin’!”). He says he’s been paying attention to nutrition since he was a kid — a response to struggles with his eczema and his weight. And as the first and last person in his family to be born and raised in San Francisco, he pushes more than just healthy living. He was raised to prize “knowledge of self,” one of the seven principles of Kwanzaa and a focus of John Muir Elementary’s African cultural enrichment program.

“All the children my age [who went to John Muir], majority melanated children, we’re learning about not just the knowledge of self, but the history of Africa. We had to call all our elders ‘auntie’ or ‘uncle,’” he recalls.

While attending St. Mary’s College, he traced his genealogy four generations back on his mother’s side, finding Narragansett Native American ancestry as well as Angolan by way of Cape Verde. After seeing a picture of his Native maternal great-grandfather, Stunnaman was pleased to find his ancestor was also Black, just like him. He credits his mother and grandmother for instilling that pride in him, breathing affirmations into his everyday life that he now pays forward in his raps.

In fact, Stunnaman believes he’s been “sent here from another dimension to restore the collective equilibrium through holistic methods,” as he puts it in the intro to “Eat a Salad.” Having been raised Christian, he also credits God.

You might think that with its farmers market ethos, the Bay Area would have a long history of vegetable-themed rap. But prior to the recent trend, the last time I remember hearing a rap song about salad was Dead Prez’s 2001 anthem “Be Healthy,” which, somewhat cringily, rhymed “crouton” and “futon.” Before that, “healthy rap” mostly existed in the lines of rappers who claimed the Five Percent Nation and were taught to “eat to live” by Elijah Muhammad’s book series of the same name, which promotes vegetarianism and avoiding pork and processed foods. These teachings deeply influenced rappers like KRS-One, Rakim and Poor Righteous Teachers. In the ’90s, A Tribe Called Quest’s “Ham n Eggs” rails about the high-cholesterol soul food diets their grannies raised them on, and how difficult it was to make better food choices. It was my first time seeing that kind of health-focused pushback in hip-hop lyrics. But this was mostly all on the East Coast.

Meanwhile, Berkeley and San Francisco were at the forefront of the natural food movement, going back to the hippie counterculture and “back to the land” movements of the ’70s. When Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971, it helped kick off a national farm-to-table movement that crowned Northern California the mecca of healthy food. Eating organic, biking and yoga all became part of the region’s political and moral identity. And the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast Program emphasized the importance of children eating a healthy breakfast — especially if they lived in a low-income neighborhood. For whatever reason, though, not much of these food politics were reflected in the early years of Bay Area hip-hop.

In any case, Stunnaman, who’s 31, admits that he didn’t listen to much rap during its “Golden Age.” “No shade to no Frisco rappers, but I ain’t really listen to rap music until I was like eight or nine,” he says. Instead, he’d request the Disney Channel or Michael Jackson whenever he had the chance.

Still, he pays homage: “If it wasn’t for RBL Posse, it wasn’t for Cellski, there would be no ‘Big Steppin’.’ What’s reflected in Stunnaman’s music, then, is a rich tapestry of his experience, and a community-minded focus. He really does want his people to eat healthier and take better care of themselves.

Slowly but surely, his message seems to be making a difference. On the day of our meeting, Stunnaman was getting ready to shoot a collab video with the popular food influencer Michael Torres, aka GrubwithMike.

“When his song ‘Eat a Salad’ came out, I thought [Stunnaman] was talking to me,” Torres says, explaining how he’d struggled with his weight — and how Stunnaman’s music helped inspire him to change his diet. Now, he says, “If I wasn’t doing foodie stuff, I’d damn near be a vegan. Like, I’d be super healthy, bro.”

“The OGs are either locked up or they are unfortunately on drugs. With that being the case, we’ve got to help them,” Stunnaman says, pointing out the consequences of poor lifestyle decisions by some elders in the Black community. “That’s why we got Larry June. Because we’ve seen what it was. We’ve seen the product of when you don’t have any discipline with the intake of your vices.”

Speaking of vices, when I finally sat down to try Stunnaman’s signature salad, I opted for the grilled chicken instead of the fried cutlets or wing combo I typically order, inspired by our conversation about making better choices. I poured the tangy, caper-flecked dressing all over my lettuce, dabbing a little ranch on there like Stunnaman suggested. With all that good health advice, it didn’t hurt to make it taste good too. Sometimes the medicine goes down better with a little song and dance on the side.

Rocky Rivera is a journalist, emcee, author and activist from San Francisco. She has released four albums through her label, Beatrock Music, and a ten-volume mixtape series with DJ Roza — her most recent album, Long Kiss Goodnight, dropped in Sept. 2024. She released her first book, entitled Snakeskin: Essays by Rocky Rivera, in 2021.