The food that first entered hiphop in a major way was very bad. It's found in a rhyme by Wonder Mike in Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight." Wonder Mike asks if you, the listener, have ever had this experience: Gone to a friend's house and eaten food that "ain't no good." This friend of yours serves macaroni that looks soggy, "something that looks like cheese," and chicken that "tastes like wood." Unable to eat the rest of this horrible meal (more of which has been piled "on your plate"), you abruptly leave your friend's house, rush to the nearest store and buy and consume a bottle of Kaopectate.
From that moment, hiphop became preoccupied with the things a rapper puts in his/her stomach.
In 1988, for example, KRS-One declared on "My Philosophy" that he did not eat "goat or ham, or chicken or turkey or hamburger." Why? Because to him eating meat was "suicide, self-murder." When, in 1990, the business of eating became the subject of an entire hiphop track, A Tribe Called Quest's "Ham 'N' Eggs," it again concerned the kinds of food one should avoid. Tribe: "I don't eat no ham 'n' eggs, cuz they're high in cholesterol / Ay yo, Phife do you eat 'em? / (No, Tip, do you eat 'em?) / Uh uh, not at all."
Q-Tip also informed us of the limits of his diet: "Strictly collard greens and the occasional steak." As for Phife Dog, he confessed that things with lots of sugar presented the biggest temptations: "Gum drops and gummy bears tease my eyes." That line was recorded not long before he was diagnosed with a disease, Type 2 diabetes, that killed him this year. In the 2011 documentary Beats, Rhymes and Life, the "funky diabetic" said: "Like straight-up drugs. I'm just addicted to sugar."
Even by 2000, rappers had not forgotten the first bad dinner of hiphop and were deeply concerned about what you put on your plate. Dead Prez, a crew that appeared after the sunset on hiphop's modern era (1993 to 1997), stated it simply: "Eat Healthy." They not only described what you should eat but also why should eat it. M1 of Dead Prez rapped: "Lentil soup is mental fruit / And ginger root is good for the youth.... Life brings life, it's valuable / So I eat what comes from the ground, it's natural."
I think it is significant that the first meal of hiphop resulted in indigestion. The significance being that poor people generally eat food that is cheap, and the cheaper something is in a capitalist economy, the more class conflict is in it. Cheap food is bad because it is produced by lowering the labor costs of its production and distribution. The suppression of costs always increases the capital/labor conflict. The more you pay for food, the less class conflict is in it. Ham and eggs sold in working-class neighborhoods tend to have lots of class conflict in it, and so does that something that looks like cheese.
