Vegan Senator Cory Booker Appointed to Senate Agriculture Committee
With the committee focusing on agriculture, nutrition and hunger, Booker - a longtime advocate for phasing out factory farms - could push nutrition reform and help create real change for America’s broken food system.
Credit: Gage Skidmore
Senator Cory Booker has been appointed to the Senate Agriculture Committee, in a move that gives hope to nutrition reform in America.
Booker has long campaigned to create real change for America’s broken food system, including advocating for access to healthy, nutritional foods, phasing out huge factory farms, and support for local, family farmers.
“Our food system is deeply broken. Family farmers are struggling and their farms are disappearing, while big agriculture conglomerates get bigger and enjoy greater profits. Meanwhile, healthy, fresh food is hard to find and even harder to afford in rural and urban communities alike”, Booker said in his new role. “In the richest country on the planet, over 35 million Americans from every walk of life are food insecure.”
His new position makes him only the second Black person in history to serve on the committee.
Booker explains how as Mayor of Newark, he witnessed first-hand how America’s broken food system harmed local residents, with large sections of Newark being “food deserts”, where communities had no access to healthy foods.
This has led Booker to champion local, family farms, particularly those from Black communities.
Booker has also repeatedly condemned factory farms, which he says have “broken” the food system and have “undue influence” over public policy. He introduced The Farm System Reform Act back in 2019, a bill which seeks to shut down America’s huge factory farms. The bill has received support including co-sponsorship from Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Ro Khanna.
And he recently took to Twitter to highlight the role that factory farms have in helping to spread infectious diseases. With the huge warehouses of tightly-packed animals forced to live in stressful and unnatural conditions are a potential breeding grounds for diseases, Booker called for phasing out factory farming to be “high on the agenda”.
The Senators tweet highlights the human health risks posed by factory farms. Not only do outbreaks of infectious diseases like Avian influenza kill millions of animals each year, but the current COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the risk of zoonotic diseases for humans, too: more than 6 out of every 10 known infectious diseases in people can be spread from animals, and 3 out of every 4 new or emerging infectious diseases in people come from animals, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
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