6. Different Strokes for Different Folks
7. The Rise and Fall of the Protein Empire
9. Losing a War We Could Prevent
Epilogue to the 25th Anniversary Edition
Endnotes
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My gratitude and thanks to:
Deo Robbins, who nursed the book and me through thick and thin, her utterly unique wit providing me a continual source of renewal. Her example is a living demonstration that health comes through love.
Don Rosenthal, whose keen eye and high editorial standards helped sharpen the focus of my thoughts.
Ocean Robbins, whose love for all of life is a continuous inspiration to all who know him.
Salima Cobb and Martha Rosenthal, who believed in my ability to write this book, even when my faith flickered.
Kali Rae, for her support in the original inspiration for the book.
All the animals I’ve been fortunate enough to know. Simply by being themselves, they have encouraged me to be a voice for the voiceless.
My thanks also to the numerous physicians, nutritionists, environmentalists, researchers, and other concerned people who read and criticized the book as it took shape.
And to all those yet to be inspired by the vision of Diet for a New America.
May All Be Fed,May All Be Healed,May All Be Loved.
PUBLISHER’S PROLOGUE TO THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
Diet for a New America was first published in 1987. In the following seven years, beef consumption in the United States decreased by 20 percent, from 75 pounds per person annually in 1987 to 60 pounds per person in 1994. That year, during a National Public Radio debate, a representative of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association accused the book’s author, John Robbins, of being single-handedly responsible for this decline. Of course, many other reasons were responsible as well, but Diet for a New America has played a leading role in changing the way Americans view the food they eat and the industrial food system that produces it.
Since the book’s publication, Robbins has received over 60,000 letters from people who have read the book or heard him speak, describing how the book’s message has changed their lives. Most of them reported either giving up meat or significantly reducing how much they consume. The book’s message has prevented heart attacks and cancer, protected tropical rain forests from destruction, saved species from extinction, and spared millions of animals the cruelty of feedlot and factory farm existences.
A few years after the book was published, the Los Angeles PBS affiliate KCET produced a documentary based on the book, titled Diet for a New America, which became one of PBS’s all-time most successful fund-raising programs. Stations around the country aired it during their pledge drives, receiving an extraordinary response from viewers.
In 2000, largely due to the ongoing impact of Diet for a New America, readers of TheVegetarianSite.com voted John Robbins the most influential individual of all time to the vegan movement. Indeed, when the book was first published, most mainstream Americans viewed the vegetarian lifestyle as the province of “crunchy” granola-eaters. But in the ensuing years, eating a plant-strong diet has moved from the outermost margins of our culture to widespread acceptance.
Today, President Bill Clinton, actors Alicia Silverstone and Woody Harrelson, and comedian Ellen DeGeneres and her wife, actor Portia de Rossi, are vegans, along with countless other celebrities. The list of prominent athletes who have become vegetarian or vegan is long and growing, including nine-time Olympic gold medal winner Carl Lewis, former world heavyweight champion boxer Mike Tyson, baseball slugger Prince Fielder, and Atlanta Falcon tight end Tony Gonzalez, who holds numerous NFL records.
Veganism is also becoming more popular among business leaders: Twitter cofounder Biz Stone, Ford Motor Company executive chairman Bill Ford, billionaire publisher Mort Zuckerman, and music label mogul Russell Simmons have embraced a vegan lifestyle. Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas casino magnate, not only is a vegan but has put vegan options in all his resort restaurants.
Thanks to the ongoing work of medical doctors like Dean Ornish and Caldwell Esselstyn, researchers like T. Colin Campbell, filmmakers like Robert Kenner and Morgan Spurlock, and authors like Jonathan Safran Foer, Kathy Freston, Eric Schlosser, and Michael Pollan, the message of Diet for a New America continues to grow stronger. Americans are growing increasingly aware that what we do to the earth, we do to ourselves; that how we treat animals says something important about who we are as people; and that confining animals in factory farms is wrong and produces food that is damaging to the health of our bodies, our world, and our spirits.
While corporations continue to have great influence, the movement toward food that is organic, sustainable, locally grown, and produced with respect for human and animal rights will continue to grow ever more powerful. We hope this 25th anniversary edition, with a new epilogue from the author bringing the book up-to-date, will introduce a new group of readers to these essential issues.
—Linda Kramer
August 2012
FOREWORD
After reading this book for the second time, I took a walk on the beach below the oil refineries on San Francisco Bay. Seagulls careened in the afternoon sun. A tanker hooked up a half mile out on the jetty. As I watched idly, my thoughts still occupied with the book, a strange fantasy arose in my mind.
It was a scenario of what would happen if Americans no longer found animal products attractive. Say they simply woke up one day and found meat and poultry and dairy products unappealing. Given U.S. eating habits, that speculation borders on the absurd, I know. But suppose some magical transformation took place that would diminish our attraction to animal-based foods and at the same time increase our appetite and enjoyment for other foods that really nourish and are far better for us.
What would happen? What would it mean for our lives and our world? Would that tanker, for example, still be making its deliveries of imported oil? Would those refineries stretch back for as many miles as they do now? Would there be as much DDT in the gulls overhead or in my own body? Would they and I be likely to live longer and healthier lives?
The research that John Robbins has done for us in this book, gathering and distilling an extraordinary amount of little-known but vital information, allows us to deduce what would happen in such a scenario. From the evidence accrued in hundreds of recent medical, agricultural, economic, and environmental studies, which he presents in terms easy