Trends or traditions

VegNews: When and why did you go vegan?
Cory Booker: I think my journey started in 1992. I was just coming off from playing varsity football for Stanford, about to start to play varsity basketball for Oxford, and I really believed what Gandhi titled his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth. So, I tried to experiment with his vegetarian diet and see how I felt. And my body just took off; it was like somebody lifted off a twenty-pound weighted vest. My sleep patterns got better, I felt more energy, better recovery after workouts. I was like, “Oh My Gosh, I will never go back to eating meat. I started becoming a vegetarian, but then, it made me insanely curious, like why is my body reacting this way? I just started reading about health and fitness. I found the data that began to reaffirm my vegetarianism. In fact, it led me to more about our environment and cruelty to animals. I began saying I was a vegetarian because, for me, it was the best way to live in accordance to the ideals and values that I have. My veganism started then.