Peanut Butter Curry
The Senator’s favorite dish to cook at home sounded so delicious that we decided to reach out to one of his favorite restaurants and ask them to create a recipe for us. Try “Chef She’s” version below ...
Senator Cory Booker
The junior Senator from New Jersey just might be one of the Food Movement’s most valuable allies. Here’s why.
Cory Booker is on a mission. In his view, America’s food system is broken—and he’s going to fix it.
“We have a crisis that is threatening humanity in every imaginable way,” he told the podcast Talking Feds last November, during a panel discussion titled “Making Ends Meat: Farmers Get Raw Deal.” He was referring to a system that he sees as, literally, killing us with corporate consolidation, misplaced subsidies, and overuse of antibiotics and chemicals, to name just a few of its many ills.
Senator Booker has been talking about these topics for years, including during his tenure as mayor of Newark (2006–13), and he’s become increasingly active on the food front since becoming a member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry in early 2021. His deep understanding of the issues and firm belief that most of the hard answers lie in better supporting America’s small-scale farmers led author Michael Pollan to recently refer to the Senator as “the leader the food movement has been waiting for”.*
And, in true Booker fashion, the Senator looks at the challenges through a hopeful lens.
Knowledge, tenacity, and a core of hope will likely all be important assets for Booker over the next 18 months as Congress works on the drafting and passage of the 2023 Farm Bill. A massive package of legislation that is updated every five years, the Farm Bill tremendously impacts food and farming in the United States, encompassing everything from crop insurance to food subsidies, nutrition assistance programs, agricultural research, and more.
Originally conceived in 1933 as part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation, the Farm Bill had three primary goals: to keep food prices fair for farmers and consumers, to ensure an adequate food supply, and to protect and sustain the country’s vital natural resources. While its primary goals remain the same, the bill now touches nearly every aspect of our American food supply.
With issues such as food security and food justice, the impacts of environmental changes on farming, disrupted access to staples such as baby formula, and the skyrocketing rise in diet-related diseases coming to the forefront over the past five years, the 2023 Farm Bill is destined to be one of the most daunting—and important—versions in the bill’s 80-year history. Booker’s role on the 22-member committee responsible for crafting the legislation could prove pivotal, especially since he represents a state considered by many of his peers to be more urban than their more rural constituencies.
Edible Jersey recently met with Senator Booker in his Washington, D.C., office.
You represent the nation’s most densely populated state. That said, your appointment to the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry in early 2021 probably surprised some people. What led to your interest in serving on that committee?
All the issues I care about, that I came to the Senate to deal with in New Jersey, intersect in the farm world—or with our food system, is probably a better way to say it. Issues of social justice, economic justice, environmental justice, climate change, issues of humane animal treatment. Our food systems touch every aspect, not just of the humanity in our lives, but the world in which we live.
Adam [Zipkin, counsel to Senator Booker] came to me years ago and started making that case to me and my then-chief of staff [to get involved on the agriculture committee]. Our first reaction was to laugh, like, “Why would I be on the ag committee?” But the more he pushed, the more I realized the wisdom in this move.
When I started going out and visiting farms and farming leaders—going to everything from the blueberry festival to the work we did in urban farming when I was in Newark—I got the urgency of these issues and that my position on the ag committee can really help.
People are often surprised to learn that New Jersey is home to over 9,000 farms.
They really are. Including a guy who was a senator. Agriculture is one of our top five industries and supports tens of thousands of jobs in New Jersey.
Since being appointed to the committee, you have sponsored or co-sponsored more than 24 bills directly related to agriculture, health, nutrition, and the environment. What topics have you most energized and why?
I think there are three growing crises that give, as Martin Luther King would say, a “fierce urgency of the now.”
One clearly is the nutrition crisis in America. We have an explosion in our country of diet-related diseases that are killing Americans at rates that our ancestors would probably never believe—now half of Americans are diabetic or pre-diabetic.
The second crisis, obviously, is the environmental crisis. Probably a quarter of the overall [environmental] crisis is created through our food systems.
But what is more significant and exciting to me is the fact that, if we start investing in farmers who want to do more sustainable practices, we can actually sequester more carbon and lead ourselves out of this crisis. Not to mention [we can] end a lot of the environmental injustices being done to our rivers, lakes, streams, soils, and more. And the chemicals, frankly, that are in our body [due to our] overusing.
The third thing that excites me and the driver for us to be in this space is that there is a consciousness in our country, beyond what I even believed, where moms and dads and families and communities want healthy food. Whether it’s the Central Ward of Newark or the rolling hills of Cumberland County, people want healthy food and healthy food systems. There’s more wisdom than people know.
What also excites me is that the White House gets that we have a crisis but also gets that there is a public will to support policy that will deal with this crisis. So for us to be sort of a catalytic agent for the second-ever White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health**—the first one being held, I think, the year I was born—this is a big thing. I’m 52, about to turn 53! This is an exciting moment for me that we can actually better trigger and summon the collective will of our country to do something about this crisis.
Do you think the pandemic played a role in this renewed public will? With empty shelves at local grocery stores, especially early on, and the dire national news out of meat-packing plants, it seemed to pull back the curtain on vulnerabilities in our food system.
The pandemic definitely has triggered a greater understanding of the need for local and regional sustainable food systems. And that we should start to align our government policies to support them because those local and regional food systems are more resilient and less susceptible to the larger shocks that might go on, that might interrupt global supply chains or interrupt larger multinational corporations’ ability to deliver food during these crises and create these perversions where you literally have farmers culling their pigs at the same time that consumers can’t find pork on their shelves. That’s emblematic of broken globalized food systems.
Local, regional food systems are far more resilient—and we need to start doing things to support them.
2023 will mark your 10th year serving in the Senate. It will also be the year to pass a new Farm Bill, an onerous process encompassing everything from environmental impacts to animal disease management, SNAP benefits, farm-to-school initiatives, and more. What are some of the topics that proverbially keep you up at night in regard to the 2023 Farm Bill?
A driver for us is how this corporate concentration—near monopolization— has really hurt American consumers, and American farmers. We had a hearing today*** where we talked about the people who raise cattle, and that we’ve lost close to half of those ranchers.
Four major meat packers now control 80–90 percent of the industry. That corporate concentration has driven farmers and ranchers out of business and raised prices for consumers. It is everything that we—not even a century ago—were seeing: the meat-packing industry so concentrated and the federal government trying to take measures to break it up. We’ve come full circle to a meat industry that’s more concentrated now than it was back then.
So, we have a larger broken food system marked by multinational corporations and their concentrated monopolistic practices that are hurting farmers, that are doing horrific things to farm animals, that are a perversion that consumers don’t want done.
They [the corporations] try to hide the truth. They put these beautiful pictures on their walls which are just nothing like the reality. It’s hurting farmworkers; it’s hurting rural America.
John Tester [U.S. Senator, D-Montana, and third-generation family farmer] just testified about how his own town has shrunk [in population], disappearing banks, groceries stores, hardware stores. Rural America is getting hurt.
“THERE IS A LOT OF DEBATE IN WASHINGTON AS TO HOW ARE WE GOING TO PROVIDE HEALTH CARE, BUT NOT ENOUGH CONVERSATION AND DEBATE ABOUT WHY WE NEED SO MUCH HEALTH CARE.”
In addition to corporate near-monopolization, what other aspects of the Farm Bill concern you?
We do not have an alignment between our subsidies in things like the Farm Bill with what we are actually told to eat by the people who look at health and nutrition in our government. In fact, that’s one of the biggest incongruencies. There’s a hypocrisy in our country.
When I tell people that only 2 percent of our ag subsidies go to the food that our government says we should eat 50 percent or more of, they’re sort of shocked. That only 2 percent of our ag subsidies are going to fresh fruits and vegetables. Most of our ag subsidies are going to produce these hyper-processed, zero-nutrition, chemical-laden foods.
We have perverse realities in communities like mine, where my kids walk into a corner grocery store and, because of our ag subsidies, the Twinkie product is cheaper than an apple. That’s insane. So, that’s another reason why this Farm Bill is becoming, I hope, in the consciousness of our country, more and more urgent as we start to try to correct for some of these problems.
There often seems to be a deep misconception that the only way to feed the world is through large-scale operations. Do you think small, local farms are the answer to fixing America’s food system?
I don’t think that’s only speculative; I think it’s proven now for the health of land, the health of us. And it’s not just the health of us because of hyper-processed foods. There are two other issues that we can’t forget about.
One is the overuse of antibiotics. We’ve created a system that wasn’t necessary in the past when we raised livestock in a healthy way. Now, we’ve got to pump them full of, prophylactically, so much antibiotics that we’ve created a reality in America where tens of thousands of people are dying in our country because of antibiotic- resistant bugs. The World Health Organization says one of the greatest threats to humanity now is the overuse of antibiotics and what might come in terms of the potential threats to [our] health.
The second thing is the overuse of these horrific chemicals [like Monsanto (now Bayer) Round-Up] in order to do these massive farming strategies, pumping chemicals into our water, rivers, lakes, streams, onto our soil, killing our soil. It is creating a health crisis in and of itself because these chemicals are now evidenced in our bodies and having all kinds of harmful effects. Data is starting to show harmful effects. That these are causing everything from cancers to endocrine disruptions to possibly things like autism.
People just don’t understand what these chemicals are doing to our soils and to our health.
“ALL THE ISSUES I CARE ABOUT, THAT I CAME TO THE SENATE TO DEAL WITH IN NEW JERSEY, INTERSECT IN THE FARM WORLD— OR WITH OUR FOOD SYSTEM, IS PROBABLY A BETTER WAY TO SAY IT.”
You are a long-term proponent of small, family farms (and NJ is home to many!) and often speak about the need for local food resiliency. In 2021, Michael Pollan referred to you as “the leader the food movement has been waiting for.” What impact did that statement have on you?
We need more people to understand. I love that I’m getting a chance to be, in many ways, a voice that’s trying to wake people up to the realties that we don’t know. I feel like we as a society are a frog in boiling water right now, where we don’t realize the dangers that are all around us.
The challenge, the reason why we need more people to be active in this space, is because of these powerful multinational corporations that influence Washington decision making in a stunning way. These are some of the most powerful lobbies down here, trying to preserve a system that is producing such unhealthy food and not subsidizing and not supporting localized systems, fruits and vegetables, lack of overuse of chemicals, humane treatment of animals. There are all these forces trying to stop us from doing the things that we actually want for ourselves and our families and our ecology.
And so that’s the challenge for being a Senator. As one person said to me once, “I can’t believe you’re willing to say these things” because there are such powerful forces working against our health and our well-being, aggregating so much political power, influence, and money into preserving the status quo.
We’re going to need more popular uprisings, so to speak—like the Civil Rights movement, for example—of people demanding change.
There have been many efforts to address and improve childhood nutrition, both within and outside the school setting. What concerns you the most on this front?
The diabetes rates for our children. The overall diabetes rates are exploding, but for minority children? The rate for Type 2 diabetes among black children has more than doubled in 10 years. Think about that explosion. If you project out 10 to 20 years, we will not be able to afford the health care.
How did we get to this point, and what needs to be done to solve America’s health crisis?
Right now, one out of every three governing dollars goes to providing health care and [we are looking at] the growth of everything from Type 2 diabetes to Alzheimer’s, which is very much diet-related. Some people call it “Type 3 diabetes.” The mushroom of these health challenges as a result of our diets is going to drive this country into severe bankruptcy because we will not be able to afford the health care.
There is a lot of debate in Washington as to how are we going to provide health care, but not enough conversation and debate about why we need so much health care. Why are Americans, the wealthiest country on the planet, having such an explosion of death, disease, and suffering as a result of preventable diseases that are, unfortunately, linked to this bad diet we have?
I hate how we blame people for the obesity crisis: “This is your moral problem and somehow you are to blame.” What we don’t realize is that, unlike our grandparents and our great-grandparents who were not coming of age in a system designed to make you sick or obese, [today’s] ease and availability of empty nutrition, high-calorie, overprocessed, hyperprocessed foods is stunning, including the way it’s constantly marketed towards us.
We’re subsidizing a lot of this marketing; we’re subsidizing everything in a fast-food hamburger. So people can get easy access to this cheap, highly processed, hyper-calorie, zero-nutrition food and then we’re keeping it harder for them to get access to the foods that they actually want. No subsidies or little subsidy going there.
And there is also the related issue of hunger….
In terms of hunger, nutrition assistance programs seem so ineffective. It’s almost a byzantine labyrinth of ways that people get food assistance when there’s common sense things that we can do.
Universal food programs for schools show incredible data. Just giving people healthy foods actually will lower taxpayer costs. It’s called “food as medicine programs.” It’s amazing what we could be doing in this space. We’ve made a lot of progress in New Jersey. I just visited one of the urban farms in the South Ward of Newark. They were telling me that programs in New Jersey are allowing [nutrition incentives] and you can do double SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) dollars if you bring them there. Those are the kind of things that are really good, but we need to expand upon them.
What opportunities give you hope in relation to your work on the 2023 Farm Bill?
That we can align that Farm Bill with the well-being of farmers and families in America. And not just [create] another Farm Bill that is doubling down on the incongruent subsidies.
We’ve had to fight to just even keep SNAP money from being cut at a time when we have food and nutrition insecurity. We should be elevating our feeding programs, simplifying them—simplifying is key—and also incentivizing local sustainable food systems.
There’s a lot of opportunity here but there’s definitely things that keep me worried because of the powerful lobbies that are trying to protect the status quo.
On the personal front, how did you decide become a vegan?
It started just as a health thing. I was a competitive athlete and that was the first thing that opened the door. But clearly now I’m driven by the inhumane things that nobody—vegan or not—wants to be done to animals. The environmental urgencies that we have as well. So now it’s the totality of the reasons when it comes to health and safety and well-being that help me make this personal choice. America doesn’t need to go to a vegan diet. We just need to create food systems that are supportive of healthy diets regardless of what you eat.
Any favorite restaurants to recommend from your home city of Newark?
Literally in my neighborhood, I have Vonda’s Kitchen. She’s amazing; what a great story. She’s one of my favorite entrepreneurs. He [pointing to Zipkin] was the head of my economic development when we were in Newark. We were looking for people like Vonda who we could help get their business started and she’s one of my great success stories.
I also love Green Chickpea. Burger Walla. Our friend Kai Campbell is a great entrepreneur there. He’s an extraordinary Newark story, a Newark guy who started a great burger joint that has a lot of vegan options which I love. Blueberry Café is another great vegan restaurant.
What meal do you most enjoy when you have a night to just kick back at home?
I got better at cooking during the pandemic. I have a peanut butter curry that I make that I love. I’ve cooked that for a lot of other people as well and it’s one of the favorites for me to cook.
Also, big pots of chili. I got really good at using a crock pot or, in this case, an Instant Pot. Just enjoying lots of good fresh vegetables and lentils.
A favorite childhood food memory to share?
Planting a garden with my granddad. He went to an agriculture HBCU [historically Black colleges and universities] in Arkansas, Pine Bluff, where he learned agriculture. He took me out to the backyard and we dug up a big plot and planted everything imaginable. It was life-changing.
How old were you?
Fifth grade, maybe sixth. Yes, it was really life-altering. To grow food and then prepare and eat it.
There are so many positive impacts when children—anyone!— grows their own food. We’ve seen it in New Jersey school gardens and farm-to-school programs.
Yes, that’s why I love the Hawthorne Avenue Farm [part of the Greater Newark Conservancy]. There are students and kids involved there in the same way there used to be in the [urban farm] behind the Krueger- Scott Mansion when I was mayor. Unfortunately it’s now a development, but it was incredible at the time.
You can get so many wins. We created programs where men and women coming home from prison got a job on the farm. Working with seniors and schools. It was amazing. If we really focused in on doubling down on urban farming …. They become centers of community that are really extraordinary.
*Twitter, 11/29/21
**The White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health, planned for September 2022, will be the first such conference held in over 50 years. The Biden Administration has set a goal of ending hunger and increasing healthy eating and physical activity in the U.S. by 2030 so that fewer Americans experience diet-related diseases, such as diabetes, obesity, and hypertension.
*** Legislative hearings, April 26, 2022: S. 4030 The Cattle Price Discovery and Transparency Act and S. 3870, The Meat and Poultry Special Investigator Act.
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