Beyoncé and Jay Z are international music royalty, capable of selling out venues anywhere there’s electricity, with tickets selling for hundreds of dollars a pop. What’s a cash-conscious fan to do, beyond start a Bey and Jay future concert fund? As of last week, there’s another option: Consider going vegan, and you could check out every tour either of them plays for free—for the next thirty years.
That’s the pitch they’re making in partnership with Greenprint, an organization started by celebrity trainer and nutritionist Marco Borges. Borges, whose work with the couple helped convince them to go vegan themselves, launched Greenprint (named, naturally, after Jay Z’s legendary Blueprint album cycle) in October 2018. Its website defines the “greenprint” as the impact a person can have on the planet by committing to eating plant-based meals. It’s not specifically about converting people to full-time, lifelong veganism—rather, the site asks visitors to set a specific goal, and then offers a comparison of how that goal affects the planet. Eat one plant-based meal, for example, and you accomplish the same environmental impact that two trees do in absorbing greenhouse gases each month; eat only plant-based meals for six years, and you’ve saved as many carbon emissions as a shelter in Haiti uses in a year.
The frames of reference are inexact, but they get the basic point across—eating more plant-based meals is good for the environment. That’s where Bey and Jay come in. The contest promises one lucky fan one ticket to each tour that either of them go on for the next thirty years. (Social media posts, including on Beyoncé’s Instagram, reference it as lasting “for life.” Technically, that’s not true, but if Jay Z is still rapping at eighty years old, you probably don’t actually want to witness that anyway.) It also doesn’t specifically require people who enter to make a commitment to veganism—one just has to visit the Greenprint website in order to enter.
It’s a smart frame for pitching vegan nutrition to people. Rather than building it around what they can’t eat (meat!), build it around what they can (plant-based meals for breakfast!), and remind them of how much they’ll have in common with Beyoncé if they do it. Full-time veganism is a hard commitment to make—especially in a state with as much good BBQ as Texas—but that’s not really the point of what they’re doing here. There may only be one person who wins the grand prize, but if everyone who enters the contest decides to order the beans and potatoes and hold the bacon and cheese for one meal, then we’ll all win a little bit.
