Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) took aim at Sen. Cory Booker’s (D-N.J.) comments on industrial factory farms on Tuesday, tweeting a picture of herself eating a steak at the New Jersey senator.
Cheney told the senator, who recently announced his bid for the presidency in 2020, that she supports “PETA — People Eating Tasty Animals,” a riff off of the animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Her tweet follows an interview with Booker, who has been vegan since 2014, published on the vegan news site VegNews, where he explained that he doesn’t believe the planet’s climate can sustain industrialized animal agriculture in the future.
{mosads}“You see the planet Earth moving towards what is the standard American diet,” he told VegNews. “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. It’s just not possible, as China, as Africa move toward consuming meat the same way America does because we just don’t have enough land.”
The comments were attacked by conservatives, including the right-leaning National Review’s Wesley Smith, who wrote that Booker wanted only rich people to be able to afford meat.
Booker joined an increasingly crowded field of Democratic presidential contenders at the beginning of February, becoming the fourth Democratic member of the Senate to announce a campaign for the White House this cycle. A fifth, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), announced her Oval Office run over the weekend.