Compton Vegan's "soul food" in N.W.A Land

Lemel Durrah, CBS This Morning; Life & Thyme.com; N.W.A "Straight Outta Compton"; Compton AV & Steelz "Slid'N"; Crystal Quintero, CC Liu, Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

N.W.A. Lineup Music Art Print Poster: Ice Cube, MC Ren, Eazy E, Yella, Dr Dre (Amazon)

Compton native serves up healthier vegan options in a city filled with fast food

(CBS Mornings) Compton is a community whose portrayal in rap music and blaxploitation movies eclipses the lives of real people who live there (once predominantly white, then Black, now Latinx). It's also a city within Los Angeles where healthy food can be hard to come by and life expectancy is five years below the Los Angeles County average. Jamie Yuccas reports for the "CBS This Morning" series A More Perfect Union.

Farming in the middle of the second biggest city in the country, Compton Vegan Farms

Rapper Compton AV & Steelz represent the City of Compton in the media with "Slid'N" (2021 video)

Compton Vegan journey to creating a plant-based future

Vegan in Compton starts catering business "Compton Vegan" (lifeandthyme.com)

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Every kind of food is available as plant-based

On Juneteenth, Lemel Durrah, owner and operator of Compton Vegan, hosted the Compton Vegan Cares Initiative in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. His plan was to feed the City of Compton directly and for free by donating 200 plant-based meals, along with toilet paper, bottled water, face masks, and other miscellaneous essential goods.

In order to claim items, all that was asked was to show anything that had your name on it along with your Compton address.

But when one man arrived, he instead showed Durrah the top of his right hand, tattooed with “Sweet Home Compton” scripted above the city skyline. He was a part of the Compton community, and Compton was a part of him.

Durrah, a vegan soul food chef and health advocate, started Compton Vegan in order to provide healthier options to his home community, a city facing food apartheid, including the scarcity of food that is nutritionally valuable.

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Durrah was born in Compton, and while he moved around as a child — living in places like Virginia, Germany, and Texas — “Compton is home,” he says.

After graduating from Tuskegee University in Alabama, he says, “I wanted to go back to my community and make a difference,” he continues. “I just wanted to be a better example.” ...

In 2014, in an effort toward personal recovery following a hard divorce, he decided to try the Daniel Fast, a biblical abstaining from consuming animals and animal products, typically done for 21 days at the start of a new year. According to the philosophy of the fast, everything eaten should come from the earth in an effort to cleanse one spiritually and physically.

 

Originally inhabited by the Indigenous Tongva Indians and ultimately colonized by the Spanish, Compton was settled in 1867 after California’s Gold Rush era by a pioneering group led by Reverend Griffith Dickenson Compton.

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In fact, Compton is one of the oldest cities in all of California and was the eighth overall city to incorporate in Los Angeles in 1888.

In order to incorporate, Rev. Compton donated his land and stipulated that certain acreage — an area known as Richland Farms — be zoned for agricultural purposes, which remains in effect today.

Here, you could run a small homestead farm or ranch that included land for growing agriculture and raising livestock. During and after World War II, Black families, for example, began to migrate from the South to the West Coast, with many finding their new homes in this very locale and its neighboring suburbs, which reminded them of home along with new prospects of work.

Slaughterhouse escape. Pico Rivera, Los Angeles

Prior to World War II, Compton’s population was 95 percent white. By 1965, Compton had become 65 percent African American. Its current population, according to a study by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, is... More

Lemel Durrah, The Compton Vegan, in his own words