“Wait —” is a weekly newsletter in which Caity Weaver investigates an unanswered question in the news and pop culture. Sign up here to receive it in your inbox.
How long is life? According to Official Rules set on behalf of Beyoncé and Jay-Z, life is a period of up to 30 years, beginning at 11:59:59 p.m. Eastern Time on April 22, 2019, for U.S. residents 18 or older.
This definition comes from a sweepstakes sponsored by 22 Days Nutrition — a food company that Beyoncé and Jay-Z co-own with their personal trainer Marco Borges — in which participants can enter to win Beyoncé and Jay-Z concert tickets “for life” in exchange for tolerating a mild digital exhortation to adopt a plant-centric diet.
The couple have publicly loved plants since December 2013, when Jay-Z outlined on his website a 22-day challenge “to go completely vegan, or as I prefer to call it, plant-based!!” (“Any professional vegans out there that have any great food spots please help out! Please ha,” he wrote.) Beyoncé Instagrammed it.
Just over a year later, 22 Days Nutrition announced a Beyoncé-backed vegan meal delivery service. This was followed by a prerecorded video of Beyoncé expressing her love for such meals on “Good Morning America” (which had promoted the video as an “amazing” announcement). Last March, Beyoncé declared it “Vegan Time!!” She and Jay-Z also co-authored the introduction to Mr. Borges’s new “plant-based lifestyle plan” book, “The Greenprint.”
In 2015, Beyoncé wrote in an email to The New York Times: “First it’s important that you know I am not a vegan.”
But the 22 Days Nutrition Meal Planner invites customers to “Join Beyoncé” for “Vegan Time,” adding that “Beyoncé’s vegan diet is now available to YOU in her new delicious meal planner!”
However, the Vegan 101 section of the F.A.Q. page says that the company “prefers” the term “plant-based” to “vegan.”
But the same section implies that vegan and plant-based diets are merely similar (“in that both diets avoid all animal products”), not identical.
However, the specific differences are ambiguous.
And, in a promotional video on the 22 Days website (with clips recycled from “Good Morning America”), Beyoncé declares “I still eat meat.”
So: The diet is “plant-based,” which is vegan, but the meal delivery kits are “vegan,” but Beyoncé eats meat?
Mr. Borges clarified in an email to me: The “plant-based” concept combines vegan avoidance of animal food products with supplementary avoidance of “highly processed foods.” (Twizzlers, for example, are vegan but not “plant-based.”) “The term vegan,” he added, “typically refers to people who avoid all animal products (meat, dairy, leather, fur, etc….) not just in their diet but also in their lives,” which is why 22 Days Nutrition avoids it. The meal planning page, he said, uses the term “vegan time” because it’s what Beyoncé said on Instagram.
Are Beyoncé and Jay-Z vegan?
No.
Mr. Borges wrote that Beyoncé eats “a plant-based” — i.e. vegan — “breakfast daily” and consumes no meat on Mondays. Jay-Z eats “2 plant-based meals a day.”
Turn-of-the-century archival footage shows that a teenage Beyoncé never envisioned a meatless world. In this 2000 interview, Beyoncé, outlining Destiny’s Child’s commitment to humility, states: “ … we’ve all promised ourselves that we will stay the same people, still like Popeyes chicken …”
In this 2000 clip, the pop star describes how she plans to remain humble.
(One could argue that like does not necessarily imply eat. Which raises the question: Can a person like something he or she no longer encounters or observes, or only miss it and/or remember it fondly? Is liking eternal, or merely ongoing?)
We can also view the quotation through the lens of two of Buddhism’s noble truths: first, that life is suffering; second, that suffering is caused by desire. In one reading, Beyoncé’s suffering is caused by her desire for Popeyes chicken, and her inability to consume it due to her “plant-based diet.” In another, the suffering is caused by Beyoncé’s yearning for a “plant-based diet,” at odds with her unbreakable public vow to “still like Popeyes chicken” forever. Either way, the challenge is for Beyoncé to embrace suffering.)
Scenarios by which a claim to a lifetime of Beyoncé and/or Jay-Z concert tickets can be forfeited include the death of Beyoncé and/or Jay-Z, and/or a winner’s engaging in activity that may bring “public disrepute, contempt, scandal, or ridicule” on the couple.
In 2003, the caretaker of Ulysses S. Grant’s tomb implied that Beyoncé had brought that and more upon herself with her “Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks Spectacular” performance of her single “Baby Boy” at the memorial site, which he said “clearly crossed the line.” Fortunately, President Grant’s great-grandson disagreed. “The way the world is now, who cares?” Chapman Grant said in 2003. “It’s kind of nice that he gets even a little exposure.”
“Who knows?” he added. “If the old guy were alive, he might have enjoyed it.”
Speaking of the way the world is now — imagine how different it will be in 2049. Thirty years ago, the World Wide Web was invented. Thirty years before that, the first commercial photocopier was unveiled by Xerox — a company that would later hire Mathew Knowles to work in its Houston office, kick-starting a series of life events culminating in the creation of a 30-year ticket giveaway by Mr. Knowles’s elder daughter. Thirty years before that, Jay-Z was born.
Just kidding: He was born in 1969, which means that at the prize’s conclusion he will be nearly 80. Beyoncé will be 67.
