Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) is a vegan. In an interview with VegNews, Booker explained how his vegan “journey” began in 1992 and culminated with his “last non-vegan meal” on Election Day 2014. It started, in fact, with Gandhi:
I was just coming off from playing varsity football for Stanford, about to start to play varsity basketball for Oxford, and I really believed what Gandhi titled his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth. So, I tried to experiment with his vegetarian diet and see how I felt. And my body just took off; it was like somebody lifted off a twenty-pound weighted vest. My sleep patterns got better, I felt more energy, better recovery after workouts.
But as The Washington Free Beacon highlights, the real gem from Booker’s interview with VegNews is his attestment that Earth “simply can’t sustain” people eating and enjoying meat:
While claiming he does not want to lecture Americans on their diets, Booker 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.”
The allegation that planet Earth “simply can’t sustain” people eating and enjoying would surely come as news to planet Earth itself, considering that carnivorous animals have roamed the Earth for hundreds of millions of years. Furthermore, as Erick Erickson notes, despite Booker’s anti-meat stance, he concedes in the same VegNews interview that, “[t]his doesn’t mean, in any way, getting rid of animal farming.” Go figure.
Booker’s vegan campaign dovetails with the revanchist environmentalism currently on display from the activist base of the Democratic Party — and, specifically, the environmentalism in the form of the recently unveiled so-called “Green New Deal” introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and other far-Left Democratic lawmakers. As Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro noted, in excoriating the “Green New Deal” as “one of the stupidest documents ever written,” the manifesto courageusly took direct aim at the great national scourge of … flatulent bovines:
The proposal calls for the United States to be free of carbon emissions within 10 years without the use of nuclear power. It calls for every building in the United States to be replaced or retrofitted in green fashion. It calls for universal healthcare, free college education, the replacement of airplanes with high-speed trains, charging stations “everywhere” (this is the sort of exactness the proposal contains), replacement of “every combustion-engine vehicle,” government-provided jobs, family and medical leave, vacations, retirement security, and the abolition of “farting cows.” It also calls for total “economic security” for anyone “unable or unwilling to work.”
As The Daily Wire has previously reported, Booker is a confirmed 2020 presidential candidate for the Democrats.