Booker Unveils “Food is Medicine: HEAL America Agenda” Confronting Nation’s Affordability, Health and Food Crisis at CAP Ideas Conference

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Speaking at the Center for American Progress (CAP) Ideas Conference, U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), a member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, unveiled the Food is Medicine: HEAL America Agenda, a sweeping proposal confronting the connection between Americans' affordability, health and food crisis, which is making us sicker and poorer.

Booker warned that the United States is experiencing the worst chronic disease epidemic in its history, driven in large part by a food system controlled by a handful of powerful corporations. He cited staggering statistics: 2,700 Americans die every day from diet-related disease - nearly a million people every year, more than Alzheimer's, accidents, and strokes combined. Half of U.S. adults are diabetic or pre-diabetic, as are one in four teenagers. Cancer and dementia rates among young people are rising. And experts increasingly link these trends to the ultra-processed foods that dominate the American diet.

"Big food companies. Big pharmaceutical companies. Profiting off our pain. Getting richer while American families get sicker and the bills pile higher," said Senator Booker.

Booker's Food is Medicine: HEAL America Agenda lays out a three-part push to treat nutrition as part of health care - scaling a pilot that lets families double a portion of their SNAP benefits when they buy fresh produce; requiring every federally funded meal to be a healthy meal sourced from American family farmers; and allowing families to use pre-tax dollars to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables so the tax code finally reflects the truth that food is medicine.

Senator Booker's Remarks As Prepared for Delivery

Thank you to CAP for convening us. There is a quiet emergency unfolding in this country, and it is making us sicker and poorer at the same time. Sicker, because the food we are feeding our families is driving the worst chronic disease epidemic in the history of our nation. And poorer, because a handful of big corporations have created systems that drive up the cost of groceries, drive up the cost of insurance, and drive up the cost of the prescription drugs Americans now depend on to manage diseases they should never have gotten in the first place.

Big food companies. Big pharmaceutical companies. Profiting off our pain. Getting richer while American families get sicker and the bills pile higher. Every single day in America, 2,700 people die from diet-related disease. That is nearly a million Americans dead every year from what we eat. More than die from Alzheimer's, accidents, and strokes combined. And we have normalized it.

Half of our adults are diabetic or pre-diabetic. One in four of our teenagers. Half the children alive in this country today are projected to be obese by the time they are 35. Cancer rates in young people are climbing. Dementia rates are climbing.

And a chorus of doctors, researchers, and experts are now tying much of this health crisis to the ultra-processed food Americans are eating every single day. Diet-related chronic disease is now the number-one killer of Americans. More than guns. More than cars. More than opioids. More than anything.

We don't have a health care system in this country. We have a sick care system. We wait for people to get sick, and then we charge them a fortune to manage the symptoms of an illness that big food companies engineered on their dinner plate.

And here is the part that should make every taxpayer in America furious.

We are paying for this twice. We pay once at the front end, when our tax dollars incentivize farmers to grow massive amounts of corn and soybeans, which are primarily used to feed animals on factory farms or as ingredients in the cheap, ultra processed foods that are making us sick. Then we pay a second time, at the back end, when those same Americans show up at the hospital with Type 2 diabetes.

Nearly one out of every three dollars in the federal budget now goes to health care. Type 2 diabetes alone, one disease, costs us over $300 billion a year in direct medical costs. And that is just diabetes. Cancer rates are up. Dementia rates are up. Hypertension is up. Heart disease, kidney failure, fatty liver disease in children, all of it climbing.

Put it all together and we are spending trillions of dollars a year treating diseases that would not exist at this scale if big corporations had not built a food system designed to make us sick. And every step of that journey, somebody is getting rich off it.

The food companies that make us sick. The insurance companies that ration our care. And the prescription drug companies charging Americans the highest prices in the world for the medications this broken food system makes you need. Profiting off our pain. We are subsidizing the sickness. Then we are subsidizing the medicine. And families lose twice.

In my neighborhood in Newark, a kid walks into the corner bodega and a Twinkie like product is cheaper than an apple. Let that sink in. Multinational corporations have built a food system where the food that will kill us is cheaper than the food that will save us, and they use our tax dollars to make it that way

This is not an accident. This is a policy choice. Corporate lobbyists wrote it. Both parties signed it. And the American people are paying for it with their wallets, with their waistlines, and with their lives. So here is my Big Idea. And it fits on a bumper sticker.

Food is Medicine. It is time to HEAL America.

Healthy Eating for American Lives.

Not a slogan on a hat. A policy agenda. And here is what it looks like. Three moves, right now.

Number One. Double the Bucks. Right now a tiny pilot program lets some SNAP recipients double a portion of their benefits when they buy fresh fruits and vegetables. It works. I met a woman on an urban farm in Newark whose diabetes reversed because of it. I met another woman on that farm whose gut disease vanished once she was able to purchase all those fresh fruits and vegetables.

We need to scale this program up. Make it universal. SNAP dollars spent on a real fruit, a real vegetable, real food from a real farm, counts double. We turn a $113 billion grocery program into the largest preventive medicine program in American history. And we make healthy food more affordable for the families who need it most.

Number Two. Feed the Kids and the Troops Right. The federal government is the largest food buyer on planet Earth. USDA. Pentagon. School lunches. Military bases. VA hospitals. We spend billions every year, and too often we use it to buy ultra-processed slop and serve it to our children and our soldiers. That ends. Every meal the federal government pays for will be a healthy meal, sourced from American family farmers. And we restore, and we expand, the local-farm-to-school and farm-to-food-bank money the Trump administration cancelled.

And while we are talking about kids: let me say plainly that child hunger in the wealthiest nation in human history is a moral obscenity. No child in America should go to bed hungry, and no child in America should be fed poison because poison is all their family can afford. Ending child hunger is one of the great unfinished tasks of this country. That is a fight about the Child Tax Credit. That is a fight about wages. That is a fight about housing. Those are big ideas for another speech. But know this. Feeding our kids healthy food is where it starts.

Number Three. Pre-Tax Produce. If you can spend pre-tax dollars on Band-Aids and aspirin in your HSA, you should be able to spend pre-tax dollars on broccoli and blueberries. Food is medicine. Let the tax code finally treat it that way.

That's it. That's the big idea. Double the Bucks. Feed our kids and our troops right. Pre-tax produce.

And scaling up programs like SNAP double bucks and reimagining federal food procurement would not only provide tens of millions of Americans with access to affordable healthy foods - it would also provide transformative economic opportunities for family farmers across our country.

These investments would enable farmers to grow healthy food for their neighbors and to build resilient local and regional food systems.

And let me say something to my fellow Democrats. Some of you may be surprised I came here to talk about food. Don't be. Because while we were debating other things, millions of American moms and dads turned their attention to what is on the dinner plate, and a movement called MAHA caught fire in the vacuum we left behind.

We should not be fighting that movement. We should be telling those moms and dads that they are right. Right about the chemicals. Right about the ultra-processed foods. Right about the chronic disease. Right that something is profoundly broken.

And we need to talk about how those moms and dads are being betrayed by the current administration, who says it supports them while its lawyers walk into the Supreme Court to protect the pesticide companies.

This is not left versus right. This is not red versus blue. This is Americans versus the big corporations who are making us sick.

And it is time for Democrats to lead, because earning back trust means showing up where people are living, and people are living at the dinner table and at the pharmacy counter.

So let me close with this.

We can keep paying twice. Subsidizing the sickness, then subsidizing the medicine. Watching another generation of American kids grow sicker than their parents, and watching American families grow poorer paying for it.

Or we can decide that the wealthiest nation in human history will not also be the sickest. And that we will no longer accept a system where corporations get rich profiting off our pain.

Food is medicine. It is time to HEAL America. For real.

Thank you.