Who Is Tom Vilsack?
Who Is?
iHeartRadio + NowThis
4.1 • 803 Ratings
🗓️ 23 March 2021
⏱️ 46 minutes
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Summary
Do you eat food? If you answered yes, you are impacted by the United States Department of Agriculture, and the person who is currently in charge of it: former Governor of Iowa Tom Vilsack. And it’s not just food: from environmental justice, to economic justice, to racial justice, to climate justice, agriculture sits at the nexus of many of the critical issues of our time. Basically, power isn’t always where you think it is, and the Secretary of Agriculture is probably the most powerful cabinet official that you’ve maybe never heard of. On this episode of “Who Is?,” Sean Morrow heads to Iowa, for a look at an agency with changemaking potential that is particularly susceptible to business as usual, and for a glimpse at who’s in charge in the Biden Administration.
- Chris Clayton, Ag Policy Editor at The Progressive Farmer. Clayton is the author of “The Elephant in the Cornfield: The Politics of Agriculture and Climate Change”
- Navina Khanna, Executive Director of the Health, Environment, Agriculture and Labor (HEAL) Food Alliance, which is based in Oakland, California
- Adam Mason, State Policy Director at Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement
- Kathie Obradovich, Editor of the Iowa Capital Dispatch
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Do you enjoy food and eating it? |
| 0:04.0 | Well, today we're going to talk about the most important cabinet position you've maybe never heard of. |
| 0:10.0 | Secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture. |
| 0:14.0 | Who is Tom Bilsack? |
| 0:16.0 | Okay, that's a tough one. |
| 0:19.0 | Okay, to be fair, it's a hard question that I literally have no idea how I would answer. |
| 0:26.5 | But that's Tom Vilsack in Iowa back in 1998. |
| 0:30.7 | In 2021, Vilsack was confirmed to lead the United States Department of Agriculture for the second time. |
| 0:36.9 | He used Biden's pick to get America's |
| 0:39.2 | food system to net zero, meaning agriculture that doesn't contribute to climate change, at least in |
| 0:45.5 | terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Whether or not that's even possible remains to be seen. But |
| 0:51.4 | unlike a lot of President Biden's still very new administration, |
| 0:55.6 | Tom Vilsack is a politician who's been around for a long time. |
| 1:00.0 | And from climate justice to racial justice to economic justice, |
| 1:04.8 | there's a lot to talk about. |
| 1:07.0 | So, who is Tom Vilsack? |
| 1:09.7 | Thank you. So, who is Tom Gilzac? |
| 1:25.6 | I'm Sean Morrow, and this is Who Is, the podcast from Now This, where we examine power through the stories of people who have it. |
| 1:29.3 | Today, two-time Department of Agriculture head, |
| 1:35.8 | Tom Vilsack, master of all things grown and farmed, and ninth in line for the presidency. |
| 1:40.4 | But if we get down to the ninth guy, I feel like we'll have bigger things to worry about. |
| 1:45.4 | Like I said at the top of the episode, you don't typically think of the Secretary of Agriculture as being very powerful, but power isn't always where you might think it is. So let's look at Tom Vilsack. |
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