New Jersey Senator Cory Booker is no stranger to the vegan community– the former Newark mayor announced his plan to go vegan for a year back in 2014, and hasn’t looked back.
“When you find yourself trying to avoid the truth about something because it’s inconvenient, because you know it doesn’t align with your values and your moral compass … I wasn’t living my truth,” he told Philly.com.
Now, three years later, Senator Booker is still an enthusiastic and apparently pretty woke vegan — he’s Tweeting about his recent #vegan Impossible Burger sesh and how it led him to an opportune meeting.
“While getting an impossible burger #vegan, just met a group of Georgetown grad students working with @foodandfriends to help bring food to deserving folks who are struggling with life threatening diseases. Follow them and help,” he Tweeted earlier today.
The Impossible Burger is of course the super trendy, super food-industry-changing meatless patty made out of plant-based ingredients, including heme, which comes from the root of the soy plant and gives the burger its signature “bleeding” redness. Like the Beyond Burger, the Impossible Burger is nearly indistinguishable from meat in flavor, texture, and versatility (it actually comes in a “raw meat” format like ground beef). And both are all the rage as health and environmentally conscious consumers and, apparently, U.S. senators, seek tasty alternatives to the destructive animal-based food industry.
It’s not actually Senator Booker’s first taste of the Impossible Burger, though. In October, he had this to say on his Instagram account: “Someone queue the Anita Baker’s song, ‘You Bring Me Joy!’ On a one day trip to the Bay Area I saw a restaurant called The Counter Custom Burgers and found out blissfully discovered that they had the Impossible Burger: a vegan hamburger that tastes incredible and in taste, texture, smell and look (it even bleeds) it is very much like animal meat yet it is all plant based. My meat loving (slightly beef Jerky obsessed) chief of staff tried it and was blown away. I was so psyched they even had Just Mayo, vegan mayo, another of my favorites.”
So, just who are the Food & Friends that those grad students were working with? The DC-based organization helps provide nutritious, predominantly plant-based meals to people suffering from cancer, HIV/AIDS, and other life-limiting illnesses. The organization delivers the healthy food to patients, as well as groceries, and offers nutritional counseling. And if the group continues to chum around with Senator Booker, perhaps it’ll shift its clients to fully vegan meals, and maybe an Impossible Burger, or two.
