Rapping for Organics

“And there wasn’t a com­mu­nity gar­den any­where,” he laments.

That’s changed now, in part due to Vita’s relent­lessly pos­i­tive food jus­tice hus­tling and his deter­mi­na­tion to claim the idiom of hip hop for green, sus­tain­able, social enlight­en­ment. Vita’s MC han­dle — DJ Cavem — is an acronym for “Communicating Awareness Victoriously Educating the Masses.” Vita has even rede­fined hip hop itself — in his gospel, the words stand for “higher inner peace, help­ing other people.”

So say good­bye to the old school OG — “orig­i­nal gang­ster” — and hello to the new “organic gar­dener.” In Five Points, Vita says, it’s time to tune out the hip hop glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of sex and alco­hol and vio­lence, and tune in to, no kid­ding, the right­eous­ness of wheat­grass juice.

A vegan since he was a high school sopho­more, Vita attrib­utes his musi­cal quest to improve his community’s access to organic col­lard greens to a fam­ily back­ground rich in music, poetry, and social jus­tice con­cerns. His grand­fa­ther was a Black Panther; his mother took him to poetry read­ings as a child. The rev­o­lu­tion he seeks is mea­sured in green jobs and “veg­etable gar­dens instead of lawns.”

It’s a fam­ily affair: His mother, the well-known Denver activist Ashara Ekundayo, helped found Denver’s GrowHaus — a non­profit ded­i­cated to improv­ing access to healthy food.

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