John Robbins, "an heir to the Baskin-Robbins ice cream empire who rejected the family business to advocate plant-based nutrition, environmentalism and animal rights," died June 11, the New York Times reported. He was 77. Robbins was best known for his bestselling book, Diet for a New America: How Your Food Choices Affect Your Health, Happiness and the Future of Life on Earth (1987), which "drew a link between the heavy consumption of animal-based products and the increased risk of chronic illnesses like heart disease and obesity; examined the environmental damage caused by factory farming; and raised ethical concerns about the treatment of animals in confined conditions."
Robbins wrote that the book's message was "that the healthiest, tastiest, and most nourishing way to eat is also the most economical, the most compassionate and least polluting." In 1988, Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy compared Diet for a New America and its impact on the way we think about food with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962).
Robbins's other books include May All Be Fed: Diet For a New World (1992), The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World (2001), Healthy at 100: The Scientifically Proven Secrets of the World's Healthiest and Longest-Lived Peoples (2006), The New Good Life: Living Better Than Ever in an Age of Less (2010), No Happy Cows: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Food Revolution (2012), and Voices of the Food Revolution: You Can Heal Your Body and Your World with Food! (2013)
He worked in his family's ice cream business during his younger years, but, "as a devotee of Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman, he later mutinied against materialism," telling the Times in 1992 that, in his family, "roughing it meant room service was late." In 1967, Baskin-Robbins was sold to the United Fruit Company. While his father remained with the company until he retired in 1978, Robbins did not.
After graduating in 1969 from the University of California, Berkeley, Robbins and his wife, Deo, moved to British Columbia, where they built a one-room log cabin. He received a master's degree in humanistic psychology in 1976 from Antioch College through its affiliation with Cold Mountain Institute in British Columbia. In 1984, when his son, Ocean Robbins, was 11, the family moved to the Santa Cruz area in California. John Robbins began reading books about the treatment of animals at factory farms, as well as the links between food, health and the environment. His studies inspired him to write Diet for a New America.
John and Ocean Robbins established the Food Revolution Network, an online education and advocacy organization dedicated to healthy, ethical and sustainable food, in 2001.