Election 2020: Cory Booker goes on vegan attack of meat, cheese: ‘Planet can’t sustain’
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker said the planet “can’t sustain” people eating meat, as the 2020 hopeful aims to become the first vegan president.
photo/ donkeyhotey
Booker told the vegan magazine VegNews earlier this month that he became vegan after coming to the realization that eating eggs “didn’t align with my spirit.”
He says Americans need to be nudged into fake cheese because the planet cannot sustain the “environmental impact” of the food industry.
“You see the planet earth moving towards what is the Standard American Diet,” Booker said. “We’ve seen this massive increase in consumption of meat produced by the industrial animal agriculture industry.”
“The tragic reality is this planet simply can’t sustain billions of people consuming industrially produced animal agriculture because of environmental impact,” he said. “It’s just not possible.”
Booker says the “devastating impact” of greenhouse gases produced by the meat industry is “just not practical.”
“The numbers just don’t add up,” he said. “We will destroy our planet unless we start figuring out a better way forward when it comes to our climate change and our environment.”
Booker, who said his vegan “journey” began in 1992 when he became a vegetarian after reading Gandhi’s biography, wants to make the “existing model” of the food industry “obsolete.”
“You never change things by fighting what exists in reality; to change something, you gotta build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete,” he said. “That’s the deal here. American consumers should not be told what to eat, but if you provide viable alternatives, in some cases, that taste even better—and if people have more information, if we consumers are informed about whatever it is—the dangers of the overuse of plastics all the way to the conditions in which animals that we are consuming are being treated.”
Booker argues all his nonvegan friends “love” vegan food like his favorites, “vegan pancakes” and “vegan stuffed French toast.”
“I’ve seen incredible vegan cheese shops popping up across the country, and my friends who are lovers of cheese just can’t tell the difference,” said the senator. “You have pizza: I was at the New Jersey VegFest, and Screamer’s Pizza is just phenomenal.”
“My nonvegan friends love it,” Booker said.
