Exclusive: US senator says everybody loses – except the massive corporations that have taken over America’s food industry

From a viral pandemic to the movement for racial justice to the worsening climate crisis, Senator Cory Booker says the massive challenges facing the US right now are all tied to a “savagely broken food system”.

And last week, his most recent challenge to that system gained new momentum, when a coalition of 300 farm, food, and environmental advocacy organizations sent a letter to Congress urging legislators to pass a bill that would eventually eliminate the country’s largest concentrated animal feeding operations (Cafos).

Speaking exclusively to the Guardian, Booker, a New Jersey senator who ran for the democratic presidential nomination earlier this year, says: “Nobody seems to be calling out how multinational, vertically integrated industrial agricultural companies are threatening American wellbeing, and I just think that the more people learn about these practices, the more shocked they are.