Cory Booker

What I think government is doing right now is picking winners and losers.

The farmers, if you talk to them, the contract farmers are living in deep debt and in real crisis.

I agree with both of you that the farmers are my hope in America.

Senators Booker and Braun, the two of you, together with Representatives McGovern and Walorski in the House, have called for the second White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, Hunger, and Health.

Indigenous voices are not always at the table, and I really appreciate this opportunity to address each of you.

We are honored that you are here.

All right, everyone. Fasten your seatbelts. I have read all the testimonies. These are extraordinary declarations of the State of our American nutrition, and I am excited about them.

We can only do this if we actually have a plan, a real national strategy.

This is absolutely not sustainable.

I am just grateful to my Ranking Member one more time for the common ground that we have found and both of our commitments to do something about the problem.

We have to figure out how to shift without hurting those farmers, shift their profits and their productivity toward healthier crops.

My experience in this is the fact that I was a mayor of a city. I cut my city government by 25 percent.

We need to figure out what is causing the fires and put them out rather than only focusing on the downstream treatment.

It is time to bring everyone together again to reimagine our national food system for the next 50 years.

This is not--this is a fiscally conservative approach.

We designed the food system to be what it is today.

The hope or the vision for Senator Braun and I--and I would love to talk to you more about it--is the idea if we get all stakeholders around the table in a bipartisan fashion, private sector, farmers, policymakers to begin to talk on those…

I was stunned in the hearing we had in the Ag Committee on the cattle industry that I was being praised by a guy on conservative radio in Alabama as being this northeast Democrat that was talking to the concerns that the farmers have.

Programs like--we have done this in my city, in Newark, giving people access to make their SNAP dollars go further.

We are on a path to disaster.

I want to start off by stating the fact that all of our witnesses agree on this reality, this urgency, that today in America we are facing a massive broad-based nutrition crisis.

We have a system set up for 20th century goals, and we need to really sit down together as a nation.

We are not letting the free market rule? We are investing heavily as a government, dramatically, on the things that are making us sick.

Do we have perverse incentives in government as opposed to the clarity that the Senator had, that we could do some changes to our policy that align incentives?

It is time to fix this.