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Tom Vilsack is a trendy guy—but only if by “trendy,” you mean “normcore.” He has spent the past eight years as secretary of the US Department of Agriculture—the country cousin of presidential cabinet positions. He’s a solid centrist Democrat from Iowa, where he served two terms as governor as well as a stint as mayor of a town called Mt. Pleasant (pop. 8,668). He even calls himself a “workhorse, not a show horse.” But he has been generating massive buzz as the possible vice presidential pick of presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, recently catapulting to the upper echelons of her Veep short list.

If she picks Vilsack and the ticket wins (the polling site 538 gives Clinton a 63 percent chance to prevail in November), the country will have its first vice president to be plucked from the USDA since Franklin Roosevelt tapped Vilsack’s fellow Iowan Henry Wallace in 1940. In other words, we’d have a food-farm policy wonk a heartbeat away from the presidency.

But what kind of food policy wonk is Vilsack?

Lovera of Food and Water Watch sums up Vilsack’s term with a cake metaphor. “He made the icing on the cake a little better,” she said, referring to the Know Your Farmer initiative. “But the cake itself was still Big Ag.”