It’s not every presidential candidate that kicks off their campaign with an interview with VegNews, but we suppose Cory Booker (D-NJ) is desperate to find something that will set him apart from the other Democrats in the field. As such, he is playing up what makes him unique – namely, that he considers himself a vegan. In an interview with the magazine this month, the New Jersey senator said that he adopted the vegan lifestyle when he realized that eating eggs “didn’t align with my spirit.”
Oh boy.
From the Washington Free Beacon:
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.”
Booker is thought to be a relative longshot when it comes to winning the nomination, but his candidacy does bring to mind an interesting question: Can Americans really tolerate a vegan president? As a nation, we are divided, to be sure. But we still share some things in common across the board. By and large, we are still very much a carnivorous people. Furthermore, we don’t like to be lectured by holier-than-thou individuals, especially when they are politicians. As hard as it is to stomach a tofu burger, it will be much tougher to stomach four years of a president who wants us to trade our porterhouses for smoked cauliflower.
Vegans are not only sanctimonious much of the time, they are also downright strange. They belong to a group that includes PETA and protesters who “moo” outside steakhouses. Do we really want a president who associates with people like that? Is that the kind of influence we need on an international stage? We submit that it is not.
Hey, what a man does at his private dinner table is his own business. We just aren’t sure this nation is ready to vote for a guy who can’t enjoy a cheeseburger now and again. We won’t say veganism is un-American, but…well…
Yeah.
