Robbins Ocean - Voices of the food revolution: you can heal your body and your world--with food!

First published in 2013 by Conari Press, an imprint of

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

With offices at:

665 Third Street, Suite 400

San Francisco, CA 94107

www.redwheelweiser.com

Copyright 2013 by John Robbins and Ocean Robbins

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Robbins, John.

Voices of the food revolution : you can heal your body and your worldwith food! / John Robbins and Ocean Robbins.

pages cm

Summary: Join John and Ocean Robbins for 21 intimate, game-changing conversations with some of the world's leading food revolutionaries: scientists, doctors, teachers, farmers, economists, activists, and nutritionists working on food issues todayProvided by publisher.

ISBN 978-1-57324-624-8 (pbk.)

1. Diet in disease. 2. Diet therapy. 3. Nutrition. I. Robbins, Ocean, 1973- II. Title.

RM216.R62 2013

615.8'54--dc23

2013006185

Cover design by Stewart Williams

Interior by Maureen Forys, Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Printed in the United States of America

MAL

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992 (R1997).

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Dedicated to the day, hopefully soon, when no child, anywhere on earth, lacks healthy food or abundant love.

This book is not intended as a substitute for medical advice. If you have any specific concerns about your health or nutrition, please consult a qualified health-care professional.

W e want to express our deepest gratitude to our wives, Deo Robbins and Michele Robbins, who have put up with us through thick and thin for forty-six years and nineteen years respectively, and provided us with abundant wisdom, boundless support, and infinite love.

Thank you also to the other members of our family and support team. To Veronica Monet, for the countless ways she has nurtured and encouraged us. To Bodhi and River Robbins, our twins/grandtwins, for teaching us about unconditional love and the power of play. And to Tom Callanan, Elizabeth Hendren, and Megan Saunders for all the ways their love and labor have enriched our lives and literally made this book possible.

Thank you to the brilliant and inspiring visionaries we were blessed to interview as we developed this book: Bill McKibben, Caldwell Esselstyn, M.D., Dean Ornish, M.D., Elizabeth & Dennis Kucinich, Frances Moore Lapp, Gene Baur, Geneen Roth, Jeffrey Smith, Joel Fuhrman, M.D., Joseph Mercola, D.O., Kathy Freston, Marianne Williamson, Michele Simon, Morgan Spurlock, Neal Barnard, M.D., Nicolette Niman, Nikki Henderson, Raj Patel, Ph.D., Ronnie Cummins, Rory Freedman, T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., and Vandana Shiva, Ph.D. We are profoundly grateful to each and every one of you for your beautiful and courageous work, for your eloquence, and for the generosity with which you share your wisdom.

Thank you to Lionel Peter Church, Gregg Boggs, Kaia Van Zandt, Candice Csaky, and Brandon Jennings, who did so much infrastructural work to make this possible.

Thank you to all of the affiliates and partners who have made the launch of the Food Revolution Network such a success. This book might never have happened without you. In particular, thank you to Bonny Meyer, Chris Kaatz, Dawn Moncrief and A Well-Fed World, Eron Zehavi, Jeff Nelson, Linda Riebel, Sylvia Bass, Tamara West, and Tera Warner for your unique and vital contributions.

We also want to thank Caroline Pincus and the whole team at Conari. It is always a privilege and a pleasure to work with you.

We want to thank all of the farmers, farm workers, retailers, community leaders, chefs, educators, advocates, conscious consumers, and community leaders who are working for more nutritious, local, organic, natural, conscious, and sustainable food.

And we want to thank you, dear reader, for every step you take to live the food revolution. You inspire us, and you are helping to change this world for the better.

T hank you for participating in one of the most important conversations about our food that has ever taken place.

Our food chain is in crisis. Big agribusiness has made profits more important than your healthmore important than the environmentmore important than your right to know how your food is produced.

But beneath the surface, a revolution is growing.

From rural farms to urban dinner plates, from grocery store shelves to state ballot boxes, people are rising up and taking action. We're reclaiming our food systems and our menus, and we're taking responsibility for our health.

Today there's a huge and growing demand for food that is organic, sustainable, fair trade, non-GMO, humane, and healthy. In cities around the world, we're seeing more and more farmers' markets, and more young people getting back into farming. Grocery stores (even big national chains) are displaying local, natural, and organic foods with pride. The movements for healthy food are growing fast, and starting to become a political force.

The days of skyrocketing obesity and chronic illness...

The days of families, companies, and governments being driven to bankruptcy by mounting health-care costs...

The days of unlabeled, genetically engineered foods spreading rampantly through our food system while family farmers are driven out of business...

Those days may be numbered.

Medical science today knows a lot about the impact our food choices have on our health, and on the world around us. But so far, that information has been far too slow to spread. Despite all the progress, hundreds of millions of people just keep getting sicker, and our planet keeps getting more polluted.

Even our doctors often are ignorant of how powerfully food impacts health. On average, physicians still receive only 24 hours of nutritional education in all their years of medical school. No wonder doctors are more likely to tell you how you can undergo an invasive and dangerous $50,000 procedure than they are to tell you how you can simply and easily change your diet to prevent illness in the first place.

In the absence of educated physicians and an informed public, commercial interests try to sell us nutritional ideas, breakthrough gimmicks, and pseudoscientific diets that have little basis in reality. Most of us are inundated every day with supposed facts that are dangerously misleading, or just plain wrong.

My dad, bestselling author John Robbins, and I decided that it was time to distill the wisdom of the greatest international experts on food and diet and share their leading-edge insights. We set out to discover what you need to know that no one is telling you, including what you can do to get healthy, and how you can even help the environment through your choices.

One of the things that stands out is thatno big surprise hereour current food system is a mess.

Large-scale industrialized food production is wreaking havoc on our forests, topsoil, air, water, and climate. Farm animals are being treated with tremendous cruelty, and farm workers are often exploited. Genetically engineered Frankenfoods are being released, without adequate testing, into the food supply on a vast scale. Meanwhile, people are eating more and more artificial foodand getting fatter and sicker. In fact, more people are chronically ill today than at any time in the history of the world.