- [Narrator] Welcome to Food
Revolution Conversations,
where we explore healthy,
ethical and sustainable food for all.
This is Ocean Robbins and I am here now
with my dad and colleague, John Robbins
to welcome and introduce
Senator Cory Booker.
Senator Booker represents
the State of New Jersey
in the United States Senate.
He's the former mayor
of Newark, New Jersey.
He's a Rhodes Scholar and
he is a dedicated advocate
for healthier lunches
and better nutritional
education in schools,
for community gardens and farmers markets,
and for increasing access to healthy food
in low-income communities.
Senator Booker is the
co-author of legislation
that would lead to the
elimination of factory farms
in the United States.
And we are here today to talk
about this moment in history,
about the state of our world
and about what might be a path forward.
And now for this interview,
I'm gonna hand it over
to my dad and colleague, John Robbins.
- Well, thank you Senator
Booker for being with us.
- I am thrilled to be with you.
You are really one of the more
influential people in my life
when I was just in my
early 20s I read your book
and it forever changed me.
I just can't tell you
how much of an influence
you've been on my thinking
and really waking me
up to a lot of things,
I just did not know.
Never question, never really thought
about about food systems.
So you planted seeds that have
reaped a tremendous harvest
in my life of activism,
and my work in the Senate.
It's such an honor,
your son has become a dear friend as well.
And I just love you both.
And just I'm grateful for you.
So when he told me, he
asked me to be on with you,
I'm like, heck yeah. (chuckling)
So it's good to be here with you today.
- Well, thank you.
It's a privilege to be with
you, and I love your work,
I love what you stand for.
I love how you express,
the ways that you bring people together,
the way you form connections with people.
Right now we're at a time
when things are so polarized,
the conversations seem
to be splitting us apart
in so many ways in your voice...
So, again and again, that
brings us together and unites us
and finds common ground
that we can build on
to face the issues and the
problems we are really facing.
And I wanna start by asking you
about the Farm System Reform
Act, that you have written
and now there's quite a few co-sponsors.
What's the status of that?
Why did you write it?
What do you hope to accomplish with it?
- In 2016, 17, I went out to the Midwest
and met with farmers,
including Republican farmers.
And just started learning from them
and their own experiences
about how broken our food systems are.
And entangles all of us
from the end consumers
and communities like
mine to our producers,
and just saw the tragic
realities of farmers
who saw their share
of the consumer dollar
dropped precipitously
just about 50% in the last
handful of years alone,
where this massive corporate concentration
is going on in our food systems,
that are driving so many
farmers out of business
that are engaging in practices
that are bad for ecology,
bad for animals, are bad for
our health and well-being
and our driving workers
and farmers out of business
on so many levels.
Right there in our food system,
this perpetuation of a lot of injustices.
And so I wanted to write
a bill in partnership
with a lot of these farmers
and some of the organizations,
like the Farmers Union that
would really get to the bottom
and addressing a lot of that.
So, the Farm System Restoration Act,
it does a lot of things, it present,
puts a moratorium on these concentrated
animal feeding operations or these CAFOs
which are so destructive
to our environment.
So Just grievous in what
they're doing to rivers
and streams and groundwater.
I had a Republican farmer
in the Midwest said to me,
that he used to be able
to fish from his creek
and drink from his well,
that land that his family's
been on since the 1800s.
And since the CAFOs moved
in, they can't do either.
It also allows therefore, people to hold
those big corporate integrators
that have these vertically
integrated monopolies virtually,
and to hold them accountable for the harm
that their CAFOs are causing
to communities and neighborhoods
and I'll take you down to
Duplin County, North Carolina.
well, first time I watched
one of these massive pig CAFOs
and the huge lagoon of pig waste
and watching it sprayed on spray fields,
and then watch the spray mist
off into surrounding areas,
met with the residents and
heard their horrific stories
of respiratory problems, not
being open their windows,
run their air conditioning,
put their clothing out on the line,
property values going down.
And these were low-income
minority communities.
And then to help those
folks because I realized
that the contract farmers
that are working really like
sharecroppers for the big,
massive multinational
monopolistic corporations,
they have horrible, horrible realities
in their lives as well.
And so we help them in this bill
by putting about 100 billion dollars
into voluntary buyout programs
for these contract farmers
who wanna transition
away from this perversion
of agriculture, away from these CAFOs
and get into some more
sustainable practices
that speak more to our heritage.
And then I wanna go right
at this massive corporate consolidation
that frankly is hurting our country
in so many different sectors.
But dear God, it's making such
a painful impact on farming
and really prohibits the USDA
from doing all these tricks
that really make them a
wholly owned subsidiary
of these multinational corporations.
And so this bill was helped to be written
with a lot of farmers,
hailed by a lot of farmer organizations.
But what's beautiful about this,
I know you will appreciate it is that,
it is this incredible intersection
of those of us who are really
about our animal welfare.
So there you see those activists involved.
You see, farmers involved,
you see ecologist involved,
it's created this sweet spot
where there's so many overlapping
intersectional yearnings
for justice in our country
and I really am excited,
and the prospects it's gonna be...
This is gomnna be a long process
of awakening consciousness in our country.
And that's what why again,
I love who you are and what you do
is because we know from
the Civil Rights Movement,
to the Workers Rights Movement,
Suffrage Movement would
always preceded legislation
as this country becoming
more aware of the in justices
that are out there.
And as their consciousness grew
it helped us to change things.
Remember, the jumble of
Upton Sinclair exposing
a lot of the horrors that were going on
in the Meatpacking industry,
help us to make reforms,
even though we're slipping
back to those days.
And so I just know that our success
is gonna be based upon
how well we can expand
the consciousness of our country
about the injustices going
on in our food systems.
- One of the things
that's always bothered me
about factory farms, CAFOs
is that they depend on
concentrating animals
and stocking densities
that are really egregious.
They're appalling from an
animal welfare point of view.
But they also...
If you were designing a system,
if you wanted diabolically
for some reason to design a system
that would breed resistant bacteria,
bacteria that are resistant
to our antibiotics,
I don't think you can
find a more effective way
of doing it.
80% of the antibiotics that
are used in the United States
for all purposes, aren't used as medicines
to treat bacterial
infections in human beings,
which is the rightful use,
but they're used as feed additives
in factory farms and CAFOs
Just to keep the animals
alive and gaining weight
under the filthy and appalling conditions
that have become
normalized in these places.
And so I think that your bill could help
to save our antibiotics as
medicines to help cure people
from bacterial infections.
And if we don't do something
about this problem,
we will lose our antibiotics,
we will enter a post microbial era,
and then the next pandemic
and the one after that are inevitable.
- Well, look, I saw an
opportunity amidst COVID crisis
to address Global wet markets
and the awful things that go on there.
And I got Republicans to join me
when they're talking
about other countries.
But I couldn't make the
point to people that,
if you look right here at home,
we are doing the same kinda practices
that could cause global health disasters.
And so you pointed out, it's not just us,
but a lot of other countries
are taking on these practices
where they're prophylactically
or preemptively
using the majority of our antibiotics.
And these superbugs will
happen from these environments.
It's not a matter of if,
these superbugs will happen.
And we will see Americans dying
from very common colds or ailment
that are just because of
the antibiotic resistance.
So it is a massive public
health crisis waiting to happen
if people don't heed the
warnings of health experts
and sort of prescient
people like yourself.
- Well, if if our listeners
agree with you and with me
that it's time now to end big
eggs, harmful factory farm,
once and for all.
Is there a way that our
listeners could add their names
to become maybe citizen
co-sponsors have your bill
to maybe encourage the Senate
to take it up for a vote
or do you encourage their senators
to become co-sponsors of it?
- What I will do eventually
will be to petition.
I do wanna just let folks know
that there's an old saying in Washington,
that change doesn't come from Washington,
it comes to Washington,
and really is the activism
and engagement of people
that bring about the change.
And often it happens from tragedy
whether it's women throwing
themselves out windows
at the Shirtwaist Factory fire,
or four girls dying in
a bombing in Birmingham
or even the momentum we now
have around a policing reform
because of the horrible
murder of George Floyd.
But the thing that you and I both know
is there's silent horrors going on,
that literally these companies
try to hide from public view,
or pass things like ag-gag
laws to prevent our knowledge,
and we have to be activists
to expose what most Americans
in our common conscience
would find unacceptable.
So like the challenge I give
in response to your question is,
don't be silent, silence is complicity,
find ways to demand the change.
Find out where your legislator,
House member or senators
stand on this issue
because we really need your
activism now more than ever,
in your social media platforms,
please educate people.
There are books written about this.
This is information frankly,
you've been talking about for decades.
It's out there in articles.
There are mainstream newspapers now
that are starting to
really speak to this crisis
in our country.
And so I just asked people
to be activists and remember,
there is economic justice aspect to this,
there's a justice in terms
of animal treatment in this,
there's health and
well-being of humans in this,
there is a support for farmers
as our original entrepreneurs in this,
there are racial justice
components in this,
there're economic and climate change
and climate justice issues in this.
This is one of those
points that if you said,
"Hey, I don't have that many areas,
"'cause I'm busy working
in my job, raise my kids."
Well, this is one of those,
Archimedes suddenly said,
"Give me the right lever,
I could change the world."
This is one of those real leverage points
to look at our food systems in America
and to take steps to
correct this injustice.
And I feel really blessed
to be one of the voices in Congress.
And amongst finally it was
lonely calling this out.
In fact, I'll tell you a funny story.
I was with a well known senator talking
and I'm on the Environmental
Public Works Committee,
and I just got to the Senate
and I was telling them that,
"When it comes to climate change,
"the animal agricultural sector produces
"about as much as damage
"as just the overall
transportation sector."
And I still remember they
were like (shushing),
it's like an inconvenient,
that's talking about
an inconvenient truth.
They didn't want that.
And I found that sort of a
shocking kind of response.
And so I'm happy to see from
that moment first in the Senate
now more people willing
to stand up and say this,
but I tell you, there is a powerful lobby.
From big oil to pharma,
these are former lobbies,
but big Ag, I am telling you right now,
as such a whole, think
about this for a second,
that almost 90% about
90% of our ag subsidies,
the things that you and I as taxpayers,
are paid to grow four mono crops.
A significant amount of that
is to go feeding livestock,
the billions of animals that
we slaughter every year.
And then the rest of
it often goes to things
that make us sicker, corn syrup,
and it's why that my kids here in Newark
at the local bodega can
buy a Twinkie products
cheaper than an apple.
Because we have created food subsidies
that further subsidize animal agriculture,
as well as unfortunately,
the things that often give us
diabetes and heart disease and more.
We have such a savagely
broken food system.
But these powerful interests protected
and it's not for the small,
independent family farmer,
this is for these big
multinational corporations
who get billions of dollars
because of our subsidies
and fiercely protect these broken systems
that make us sicker, that
are often hurting animals,
that are driving climate change
with tearing down rainfall and more.
So I am laughing 'cause this
is my girlfriend, Rosario,
who just did a great film on...
She just did a great
film about soil erosion
called "The need to grow"
which further talked about
these farming practices
that are being done by
these massive integrated
multinational corporations
that are just destroying our
our climate and our ecology.
And the one thing that
even her, Rosario's film
was talking about is that
this idea of pitting farmers
against activists like us.
The reality is there's this common space.
I believe we should be paying farmers,
as my bill gives billions of dollars
to get farmers out of these traps,
but also paying farmers to
do things like cover crops,
crop diversity, and all the things
that would make us healthier,
but also help us to meet the
climate future that we have.
So I'm hopeful that we
are on the beginnings
of a larger movement and consciousness,
and especially that's
gonna help to localize
food systems even more,
make them more resilient
to moments like this
where we have crises or pandemics.
But I'm just asking all your listeners
to double down on their
activism in this space.
And really use your social
media platforms, use your voice,
use your engagement to
start waking people up,
because when you tell people the truth,
I always say you get folk woke,
they realize that this is wrong.
And you get more people
involved in this movement
and we will hit a tipping point.
- It seems to me that
you're bringing together
animal rights activists
who tend to believe
some of them anyway that
it's wrong or unethical
to use animals for food,
with farmers who make their living,
using animals food, breeding animals,
raising animals for food,
and you found a coalition
because both sides
have an investment in a food system
that actually works for
people and the environment
and for the animals.
There's something about the way
Big Ag has taken over meat production
that has pushed small farmers
into situations that are
a living hell for them.
There's no way out for them.
I see your bill as potentially anyway,
being a path forward for them,
so that they can actually
do what they wanted to do,
which is grow food for people to eat
in ways that are healthy
for the environment,
and for the people who eat that food.
And don't depend on
egregious animal suffering,
don't depend on polluting
the environment atrociously,
don't depend on going
into debt all the time.
And I really wanna applaud you,
that's a remarkable achievement.
- Well, I don't know if
you heard about this,
but I ran for President last year.
(both laughing)
And I had these cynical
folks saying to me,
"You're gonna get killed in the Midwest
"when you're going through Iowa."
What is some vegan guy.
First of all, I would stand
in front of Iowa farmers
and get a huge round of applause
because I was connecting to them
on issues that they are passionate about.
They know, forgive my language,
they're getting screwed
by these massive
multinational corporations,
their heritage, many of
them have been on the land
since the original land grants
that were given generations ago,
immigrants that came from
Europe that got a plot of land
that's been in their families for so long.
But now they're being muscled off of it,
because of these massive
corporate consolidation.
And so I'm glad you see that,
and we have got to create
these unexpected Coalitions
in our country,
that if we're gonna get
the kind of strength
to get these things done,
King said that, "We're all
caught in an inescapable network
"of mutuality, tied in the
common garment of destiny,
"injustice anywhere is a
threat to justice everywhere."
Injustice faced by our farmers,
to people living in our
cities, it's all interrelated.
And we need each other.
And the last thing I'll say,
because you have this spirit,
You can't lead the people if
you don't love the people.
And what my heroes from
Ella Baker, Gandhi, King,
these were people that
even those that hated them,
they still never left,
stop seeing their humanity.
John Lewis who's one of
my great living heroes
told me the story as we were
driving to see Jimmy Carter
in Plains, Georgia in Slalom car ride,
but he was telling me
about one of the people
that beat him on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
How he was non violent,
never stopped extending love
to that someone who hated him.
And years later, he came to his office,
I think with his child or grandchild
and asked for John Lewis's forgiveness,
and that we need to give
pathways for redemption
to each other, extend grace to each other.
Often we end them,
and often, I still remember
a story one of my friends
at a vegan restaurant,
told me once that he had some dish
that had a little bit of cream in it
and he had people break in and spray paint
like all this stuff.
He goes, "There was a
butcher shop down the road."
And he got the wrath of people
from within our own movement.
And I just hope we can all understand
that we're all evolving.
There's an urgency in
addressing these issues.
But even people that we might perceive
as on the, quote, unquote,
wrong side of this,
we need, as you said, to
find that common ground
to begin to find solid
ground to start to build upon
and make progress upon.
And I think that that's why the
love we have for each other,
the compassion to understand
that this contract farmer
who has this massive CAFOs on their land,
that they're trapped
to in a broken system,
and we need to have
imagine a way for everybody
to have a pathway out to
economic well being security
for their families, and dignity.
- Right now, we're in a racial moment,
where the ugliness of systemic racism
is becoming more visible to everybody.
- There is wretchedness and
pain and hurt in this country.
There are scars and wounds
that have not been healed.
There's unfinished business
that we see from a wretched
criminal justice system
that makes us call ourselves...
We call us Atlanta The Free,
but we're only 4% of
the globe's population
but one out of every
four incarcerated people.
We see horrible disparities
in educational opportunities,
environmental injustice,
the number one indicator
of whether you live near a Superfund site
or drink dirty water with dirty air
is gonna be the color of your skin.
But despite all of
that, I still have hope.
Because I know what the reservoirs of love
and the possibilities that
exist within the human heart
and in the human soul,
if we can become aware,
if we're willing to take
time to open ourselves
to other struggles,
and expand that circle of
empathy I talked about before,
that ultimately should lead into action.
And so I as mayor of a
majority black city here,
I was so distraught by
the broken food system.
So I created New Jersey's
ever first food policy
position in my City Hall.
And I started really learning more
about how do we have...
Why isn't McDonald's Happy Meal a dollar?
Or something like that.
Because again of what our society
has done to subsidize illness
and horrific treatment
of animals and all that
goes into the billions
of animals are killed.
It is directly connected to
the disproportionate rates
of disease in my communities
as a great guy named Ron Finley,
please watch his TED Talk.
He's called...
You know him, the guerilla
gardener in South Central.
He says, "In South
Central we have drive-bys
"and drive-throughs,
"but the drive-throughs
are killing more people
"than the drive-bys."
Because we have these systems
that disproportionately
are impacting communities like
mine that had food deserts,
but get fast food restaurants
when you could get a
happy meal for a dollar.
That would ultimately affects
a child's performance in school,
creates the stratospheric
obesity rates in our communities
that erode the potential of
my children or our children.
So this compounding injustice
of us having cities like mine
that by design we're
or pockets of poverty,
where housing discrimination,
where environmental toxins
were loaded into our city,
our city has every thing
from the county incinerator
put into Newark,
all the highways cutting
through the inner city.
And so your child here will grow up
with environmental toxins, food deserts,
a criminal justice system.
Look, I went to Stanford and Yale
and saw more Marijuana being smoked there
than any other city communities.
But you know what,
if you're Black in
American, White in American,
no difference between
using pot or selling it,
but you're four times
more likely to be arrested
for those things in
inner city communities.
And for people who think that,
"Hey, we're a nation is legalized,"
stop, in 2017 there were more
marijuana arrests in America
than all the violent
crime arrests combined.
And so you just start
compounding these injustices
concentrated in areas where
black and brown people live,
environmental injustice,
criminal injustice,
economic injustice, all these things.
And then you add on to that the fact
that as we saw with policing,
we have communities afraid
and so I just want everybody
to be disturbed by that.
I want us all to not be
comfortable with a society
where the color of your
skin still determines
the challenges, the pain,
the hurt, the threats.
I don't want another generation
of adults in this country
teaching children like my
parents taught me that,
"You need to protect yourself,
"you need to be on guard, because
people are gonna fear you,
"people are going to
surveil you and search you,
"where you can get killed
for misunderstanding."
And so this is why I just again,
I have a lot of love for you, my friend,
because that you help us to understand
the intersectionality
of all of these issues,
and that we're not that different.
And that the plight of a farmer,
white farmer in the Midwest
is directly tied to the plight
of a child in an inner city community.
And then by attacking
these unjust systems,
we could heal this country
and help to heal the
divisions and heal the rifts
and we all will elevate as a result.
- Oh, that's beautiful,
Cory, and thank you for that.
You mentioned Ron Finley and I know him,
and have interviewed him
several times for our summits
as you've been also part of it.
He's a beautiful man.
He's very artistic, he's very creative.
And he growing gardens
in the inner cities.
And I keep thinking about
how during World War II.
Americans planted home gardens,
they were called Victory Gardens then.
And these gardens produced
40% of all the fresh produce
that was eaten in the country,
was produced in these
home vegetable gardens,
community gardens.
And I keep thinking we could
do something like that now.
And if we had sufficient
government support, (indistinct).
- Yeah, I just wanna say that
you're you're 1,000% correct.
When I was mayor of the
city, we decided to do that.
We turned city blocks into farms,
creating all this agriculture
in this in our country
and to localize food systems, to invest,
to use our big ag subsidies
to support local communities
doing this stuff.
This is not a matter of us
not having the resources,
we have it.
And I'm proud.
I don't know if I told you this,
there's a friend of mine,
I'm so excited that Rosario
is moving from Los Angeles
in with me in Newark.
And the first thing she said to me is,
"Let's build a greenhouse.
"Let's create our own garden."
You gotta start living as
thoroughly consistent, Cory.
And when you said that,
it's so touched me,
'cause that Buxton grandma of mine,
that grandmother of mine
bragged until the day she died.
She was born the year before women
got the right to vote in America in 1919.
And she told me these proud stories
about her victory gardens,
about her rationing during World War II,
and about how this country
used to have this ethic.
We're not seeing it right now.
Now, it's all like my
freedom to be individual,
to make my own...
No, we viewed our freedoms differently
in my grandmother's generation.
We felt like we had a
responsibility to each other.
And that was how we created
a freedom from fear,
freedom from want, of
freedom from the Nazis.
Is when we found ways to work together.
And my grandmother, a black woman
bragged about how she
helped to beat the Nazis.
And she was a part of a movement.
And so this idea of thinking local,
it's not just a slogan,
it is really a way of being
and if we can start to
reimagine our food systems
and localizing them,
we're gonna empower
farmers and restaurants
and the flourishing of our health.
So you thrilled me when you
talk about Rand's philosophy
about how it's urgently needed,
and I hope the next time we
have a conversation like this,
Rosario will be sitting next to me
and she'll be telling
you about my experience
growing food here in my house.
My Victory Garden.
- I look forward to that very much.
- [Rosario] My Victory Garden.
- Yeah, that's her.
That's her trying to say right now
that she wants to talk about
our Victory Garden, yes.
(laughing)
- [Rosario] My Victory Garden.
- Yes.
- Thank you Rosario.
Cory, I wanna bring up one other topic.
It's a painful one.
But I know you don't shy away from pain.
It's often a place where
we can meet together,
if we have empathy for one another.
We can understand each other's pain,
we can identify to some degree with it
and do something about it, finally.
Right now, there are 50 million Americans
who are dependent on food banks.
And for people who are in this situation,
just getting enough calories to survive,
can be difficult, it can be
arduous, it can be perilous,
there's all kinds of
challenges involved in that.
And I'm of the belief
and I know you're too,
that any nation as wealthy as ours is
this is a crime against humanity.
This should not be.
Cory, what do you think
we could do as a society
to decrease food insecurity?
So that the poorest people,
the poorest among us
would not have to fear
starvation and malnutrition
so that we could have healthy
ethical and sustainable food
available and affordable to all?
- So it is an American shame
that we have so much food insecurity
in the wealthiest nation in the world.
And before I start talking
about food systems here,
I just wanna talk about the
scene of people in my community
who work longer hours than my parents did,
but still need to rely on
food subsidies, food stamps,
food kitchens, just to
feed their families.
And we have got to start
talking about living wages
in this country, about labor.
The irony of my friend, Natasha Laurel,
God rest her soul, she's now passed away,
but working in an iHub
where they barely pay her enough money
where she still needs housing subsidies,
she still needed a snap of benefits.
She works in a restaurant
where they outsource
the costs on society from everything,
from the subsidizing of the beef
that they're serving in their hamburgers,
all the way to us, all of us
subsidizing their labor costs
'cause they're not paying
their full time workers
like Natasha, who caught extra shifts,
and still find it impossible to keep up.
This awful reality in this
country where work does not pay.
We've used our tax code
to shift wealth upwards.
On so many levels, we carry interest,
I can go through the things that shift
by giving wealthier
people more tax breaks,
we shift wealth up as opposed
to doing the common sense things
like expanding the
earned income tax credit,
expanding the child tax credit,
just would eviscerate poverty in America
and lift up the amount of
people into food security
that live in insecurity
and I haven't even started
about the elderly in our country.
Seven million seniors
that live effectively
below the poverty line,
because their social security
checks don't go far enough,
because social security
taxes are regressive taxes,
in the sense that somebody
making $40,000 a year,
$50,000 a year, $70,000 a year,
pays a lot more percentage of their income
in social security taxes than someone
making four million dollars a year,
five million dolars a year and
six million dollars a year.
They just moderately raise
the Social Security tax
contributions on the wealthiest Americans.
You could take those self
seven million seniors
out of food insecurity,
where I remember like it was yesterday
talking to a Iowa senior
who was telling me
that they ration their insulin,
because they couldn't afford it,
and are living in this
kind of economic insecurity
because of prescription drug costs
that are out of control
or their safety net
does not go far enough.
So it's hard not to have
a quick conversation
about economic justice.
When we're talking about
corporate consolidation
in the ag industry,
this corporate consolidation is hurting us
in so many industries.
The last example I'll give you that is,
in my dad's generation,
by the way, remember the minimum wage
when it was put into place
was above the poverty line.
It is not a lot of the power,
is never kept up with inflation.
In my dad's generation,
wages paid more than today.
And New York Times Magazine
did an article comparing a
janitor that worked for Kodak,
that old company, but
then it was a tech company
versus a janitor that works for Apple.
And they compared their life experiences.
Well, the janitor that worked for Kodak
actually worked for the company,
and she got a tuition-assistance program.
So she went to school at night.
She worked hard, American dream,
worked hard, got the
reward, got her degree,
moved up in the company from a janitor
to mid-level management,
a great American story.
While the janitor that working for Apple
doesn't work for Apple.
They work for an outsourced company,
then wins that bid with
Apple by suppressing wages
and driving down the income.
So now suddenly that person,
they're doing the same
work that this person did.
But now instead of
going to school at night
to try to get out,
they're actually working a
double shift and a triple shift.
And then we blame them
when they're not home
to check homework for their kids,
or can't do a lot of those things
that often we think that
Americans should do,
but don't realize that so many Americans
are working themselves to
death in substandard housing,
'cause they can't afford
their housing costs,
relying on food banks, 'cause
they can't afford food,
needing public benefits.
And the story goes on and on and on.
I do not understand why we
would do this to ourselves
when we know children
perform better in school
when SNAP benefits are increased.
We know that families who
are teetering on poverty
can be brought out of poverty
just by having food security
at their lives.
So there are a lot of systemic things
we need to do on the food side,
to provide a better access
to bountiful food in our country,
through what we do with our subsidies,
what we do also with SNAP,
But this economic injustice in our country
where I watched people
who work longer hours
than my parents did,
but they still can't find
themselves falling behind
this is something we
have to address as well.
- We should do.
And I'm afraid it's gonna get
worse before it gets better
because of the COVID-19 issue,
what it's doing to the economy
and I see Domino is about
to fall on a lot of people
in a heartbreaking way,
already there's 14
million American children
whose parents are having
a hard time feeding them
and the percentage in the
black and brown communities
is even higher than it is
in the white communities
as often is the case in this country.
A lot of us can feel, I can
feel certainly overwhelmed.
I can feel almost resigned.
It's like so much the difficulties,
the problems are so...
They can seem insurmountable.
The forces behind them
can seem so massive.
There's so much momentum behind them.
There's so much vested interests
that it can seem intractable.
And yet when I listened to
you, when I talked with you,
I feel much that resignation lifting.
I can feel something hopeful
starting to arise in me.
And I'd love you for that,
because it gives me a sense of aliveness
and connection to the
problems that is fruitful,
that I can be effective,
there's things we can do,
we don't have to accept it the way
we've normalized it to be.
- Yeah, look, I learned
from people in the city
and the community around you,
who helped raise me into an
adult and the person I am today,
who have, as I said earlier,
their hope is scarred and callous.
Their hope has been bloodied and battered,
but yet they still hope anyway.
For them hope is this indomitable,
invincible determination
to never let despair have the last word.
And that to me is what
real hope is all about.
And we are not powerless, we
can't surrender our power.
The story I told a lot during the campaign
was just the fact that
there was one white guy
on a couch in 1965, watching TV.
I know the movie he was watching,
was called "Judgment on Nurnberg."
It was March, 7th 1965.
He's on a couch in New
Jersey and watches John Lewis
in marches on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
And his first instinct
is to go to Alabama,
and as a lawyer, as a young
lawyer and try to help out
but he realized he couldn't
afford a plane ticket,
couldn't shut this business down,
was barely making ends meet,
had a family to support
and the problem with racism
in America was so big,
but he didn't allow his
inability to do everything,
to undermine his
determination to do something.
And so he did a little
calculation in his head
and realize he could afford
one hour pro bono work.
And he goes to working now.
I called him up to interview him,
'cause he said he helped
meet with this incredible
group of activists and
former state operation
to help black families
were getting turned away
from housing in white
neighborhoods in New Jersey.
And he said he got this case file,
this family that needed some help.
He said, they went and
fought to help the family.
There was literally a physical altercation
when the real estate agent
refused to get the contract,
set the dog on the father,
and punch the lawyer
and all this violence.
But they ended up moving into that town
and he says to me,
"Cory, you know the name
on that case file, right?"
And the name of the case
file of the family he helped
was Cory and Carolyn Booker, my parents.
And so here's one man on a couch,
years before I was born making a decision
to give one hour a week of pro bono work,
that as you said, clicked
over all these dominoes
and here I am sitting before you
as a United States senator.
So we are all more
powerful than we realize.
And Reinhold Niebuhr
wrote a lot about this.
You may sometimes I
even live to understand
or see the ramifications
of your decisions,
but do not surrender your power,
do not yield or be seduced to despair.
Do something right now,
do something tomorrow
in the cause for our country.
You may not know it
that one day a 22-year
old sitting in Oxford
is gonna pick up the book you wrote,
and it's gonna change his life
and turn him away from eating meat
and send them on a lifelong Odyssey
to join you in your course
that you've been talking
about for decades.
You just never know
what helping one family,
plant a garden it might do,
or there's so many things we can do.
So you're not impotent.
And I pray that we can work together
and I tell you this,
all of us our ancestors' wildest dreams,
are living lies beyond
their even imagination.
I still remember my grandparents reaction
when I graduated from Yale Law School,
how dangerous it is.
I still remember that
grandmother from Buxton,
taking her to Barack Obama's inauguration
and the reporter asked her,
"Did you ever think you'd be to see this?"
And she said, "Nope." (laughing)
So I just want you to know,
I believe if we are loyal to the work
of racial reconciliation,
of economic justice, of food system,
justice in our food systems.
If we're loyal to the work,
the hard yeoman's work,
then one day our grandchild
will one day say,
will be able to say before them
that "We never imagined we'd live to see
"what they're seeing."
- Yeah, I recognize everyone's
gotta have authorship
over their own food choices
and should have that sovereignty.
And people will make choices
that makes sense to them.
They want to enjoy their food and should.
But we can feed it people healthy food
and environmentally
sustainably grown food.
We don't have to pollute.
We don't have to destroy the topsoil.
We don't have to use
pesticides and herbicides
and insecticides and
fungicides everywhere.
We really could grow food organically,
grow in a way that respects the earth
and respects the people
who are involved in it,
respects the animals that
are involved, if they are,
and I wonder about your food choices,
I know you are a vegan, you've said that.
I know you also do respect
people's right to choose
and need to make their own food choices.
Why do you make the food choices you make?
What is it in it for you?
What is the statement
you're making to yourself
in your own heart to the to the world
when you eat and choose
the food that you do?
- So I mean, what is the most
intimate thing we can do,
is what we put in our body right?
And I realized that so much of the impact
I have on the world is not
by what I say, but what I do
and that thing I do multiple times a day,
sometimes too many times a day,
of choosing what I do, it's
like I'm voting every moment,
I'm supporting systems every moment,
whatever injustices that are
there I'm complicit in those.
So, I really mean this,
that your book sent me on this Odyssey,
I was stunned when I read
through those things.
And I realized, once you
can't go back to not knowing.
And I realized that if
I was gonna be my own
choices of integrity,
if I was gonna live a life in alignment
with my own integrity,
then I had to stay true to myself
because to thine own self be true,
it's the most important thing.
And I have to say, I became a vegetarian,
knew I should become a vegan
after I read your book,
but it took me years and years and years,
and I remember learning a
lot about the egg industry
and knowing about the, for me again,
the baby chicks being born,
the male chicks being put
into like a garbage disposal.
And one day I was at a hotel
have those big trays of eggs.
And I was just going through the line
and sitting down in front
my eggs and then I knew it.
They call it neuro
associative conditioning.
My brain had shifted,
I couldn't eat that anymore
without associating with
things that were so,
for me, so not in accord with my values.
And so I had, you're
right, I have no judgment,
nothing but love.
If people had judged me when I was 1518,
or judge me when I was 35,
and still eating Ben and
Jerry's and ordering pizzas,
I just think we should
just take care of our own,
and also have the humility to know,
I don't know where this suit was made.
Fast fashion is something that's awful.
And, this was my year
to begin to examine that
and begin to learn more
about those systems,
because we all are living in society
where just because we
live in a larger society,
we participate in systems,
whether we know it or not.
And so I just wanna live my life
where I'm growing in understanding
and allowing that to inform my actions.
And one of the most
sort of affirming things
I've done in my life journey
has been by changing my food choices.
You've got to lead with love
and it starts with loving yourself.
But it's been a journey for me, man.
And I'm not even nearly done
in terms of just trying to get to a point
where I'm living my life
with the kind of integrity
within my personal decisions,
and that's gonna make a
bigger influence in me.
You and I both know of people that preach,
it's like the newly converted sometimes,
I just don't think that that's
the way we make a difference.
The way we make a difference
is by living our light
and letting it shine,
and like a lighthouse,
you're gonna affect and guide
and help others.
But God I'm a work in progress
and I pray for the strength
that I could be the change
that I wanna see in the world.
That simple idea from Gandhi.
- Is a very simple idea,
and a very beautiful and
powerful one I think,
and you're living it.
A lot of us are as best we can.
My own sense of it is
that if you were to say,
what's the odds that in 20 years
half the people in the
United States would be vegan?
I would say probably close to zero.
That's just not gonna happen.
But if you asked, what are the odds
that by that time, half the meals eaten
in the country would be plant-based?
I think that's doable.
So I don't see that the
goal is to convert people
to be vegans, I see that
the goal is to help people
live healthier lives, make
healthier food choices
that are healthier for their bodies,
for their immune systems,
for their respiratory systems,
for their ability to withstand viruses
and other types of illness,
and also to reduce their
risk of chronic diseases,
heart disease, diabetes, and obesity,
all these other things
that plague us today.
And at the same time, make food choices
that are more compassionate
to the animals,
more sustainable to the environment,
can help to fight climate change.
All of these things can be done
with our forks, with our spoons.
We don't have to become militant,
we do not have to become abrasive.
We can just care for
ourselves and each other
in ways that you model.
And you are so eloquent in
speaking for that possibility
that all of us have,
that opportunity that all of us have,
every time we make any choice.
When we start to own our thoughts
and empower of them, own our
choices, our food choices,
and the other ways that
we interact with life
and engage with life,
and try to bring all of those choices
into a deeper sense of
congruence with our hearts
and our spirits and our real
purpose for being alive,
then we join each other,
then we're together in this,
facing racism, facing a pandemic,
facing all the ugliness and problems
that haven't been addressed,
and need to be addressed in our society,
facing the wealth inequality problems,
facing what's happening with
our hearts open to one another,
so that we can work together
to solve these things.
And I just love you, Cory,
for being such a beautiful spokesperson
and embodiment of this opportunity
that I think we all have.
- Well, you just called the
eloquent, while you just...
Literally, I'm going to play this back
because the way you put
things there are so kind
and gentle and beautiful and
also practical and pragmatic.
I love what you just said
about we're not gonna...
The half of the world is
not gonna become vegan
or half our nation but to reduce
that's a much bigger thing.
I mean, I tell people this all the time
as 10% more people being vegan in America
is not as powerful as 50% people
making significant reductions
in the meat that they consume.
But the gentility you have towards others
and the love and compassion
you have towards others
wherever we are in our journey,
that's what we always need to affirm
and that unconditional love of my friends
who can't imagine a fourth
of July without a stake,
I bless you, I love you.
And let's both keep telling our truth
and be open to each other's journey.
And I'm not gonna be mean or
militant or any of that stuff.
I just again, you are a
person of great eloquence.
And as I said, one of
my great life heroes,
for how you've lived and how
you've taught me from afar,
when I finally got a chance to meet you,
it's like, there's what's
that a little warning, though?
Don't be your heroes.
Well, I met one of my heroes,
and he exceeded by adoration
that I already had for him.
So just thank you.
I pray that God gives me the chance
to do a lot more work
with you on this journey,
because I just would love to find ways
to help elevate the message
that you've been consistent on
for decades now.
I just think that you are a
great healer in this country
and a great light worker, and
I'm just grateful for you.
- Well, thank you, Cory.
Thank you for being with us.
Thank you for all the
work that you're doing,
that you've done for a long time,
and that you'll continue to do.
Your star is ascending,
your prominence will grow.
And that's a wonderful thing.
It's a blessing to all of us.
So I wanna thank you
for being with us today,
thank you for your work.
Thank you for being who you are
in my heart, in our world.
- Thank you, thank you.
I appreciate you for that.
