The Food Revolution, John Robbins “Is it ok to eat animals?”
John Robbins thinks it’s wrong to eat animals, on a number of levels.
Deep within the mind, people are compassionate. So, are they really sad about the way food animals are reared and killed. or are they trained from childhood onwards to suppress that sadness and keep on eating meat. Further, are they brainwashed as to the nutrition and value of meat, which is a myth. This makes people insensitive to cruelty. The inherent human compassion and love for living beings, including fellow humans, thus, disappear. The whole thing is a matter of individual psychology.
Diet For A New America – How Your Food Choices Affect Your Health, Happiness, and the Future of Life on Earth, is widely considered to be one of the most influential books on health, compassion, and the environment ever written in the English language. It has sold more than 1,000,000 copies, and at the turn of the century, it was heralded as among the ten most important books of the 20th century by numerous organizations working for a joyous, fair, and sustainable world.
Robbins, the author of bestselling book Diet for a New America, decided to completely change the way he lived and set out to explore a way to live with nature in harmony and also grow his own food without eating meat. His classic book awakened the conscience of a nation and since its first publication in 1987 beef consumption in the United States has fallen a remarkable 19%. Diet for a New America is a startling examination of the food Americans currently buy and eat in the United States, and the shocking moral, economic, and emotional price we pay for it. John Robbins takes an extraordinary look at our dependence on animals for food and the inhumane conditions under which these animals are raised.
Although it is commonly known today that meat and dairy products are one of the primary causes for heart and other deadly diseases, people are living (and dying) with them every day. Diet For A New America is a well-documented expose of America’s “factory farms” and should prompt even die-hard meat-and-potatoes lovers to reevaluate their diets. Asserting that “we are ingesting nightmares for breakfast, lunch and dinner,”
Robbins details how livestock is raised under increasingly industrialized conditions by “agribusiness oligopolies.” Grazing and foraging have given way to debeaking, tail-docking, dehorning and castration, and treatment with pesticides, hormones, growth and appetite stimulants, tranquilizers and antibiotics which, in turn, are assimilated by humans who then suddenly become sick.
Robbins correlates our “protein obsessed” society with a higher incidence of arteriosclerosis, osteoporosis, cancer and other degenerative diseases, as well as freakish occurrences like premature puberty from estrogen contamination. As Robbins debunks nutritional myths perpetuated by the powerful meat and dairy industries (indicting as well his family’s Baskin-Robbins ice-cream empire), this is sure to prove controversial.
It becomes clear that the price we pay for our eating habits is measured in the suffering of animals, a suffering so extreme and needless that it disrupts our very place in the web of life. Robbins then challenges the belief that consuming meat is a requirement for health by pointing our the vastly increased rate of disease caused by pesticides, hormones, additives, and other chemicals now a routine part of our food production.
Robbins shows us that the high health risk is unnecessary, and that the production, preparation, and consumption of food can once again be a healthy process. He also looks at the global implications of a meat-based diet and concludes that the consumption of the resources necessary to produce meat is a major factor in our ecological crisis. Or read the book.