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Iwas born in the heart of the Great American Food Machine. From childhood on it was expected that I would someday take over and run what has become the world’s largest ice cream company—Baskin-Robbins. Year after year I was groomed and prepared for the task, given an opportunity to live the Great American Dream on a scale very few people can ever hope to attain. The ice cream cone–shaped swimming pool in the backyard of the house in which I lived was a symbol of the success awaiting me.

But when the time came to decide, I said, “Thank you very much, I appreciate the kind offer, but no!” I had to say no, because something else was calling me, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not ignore it.

There is a sweeter and deeper American dream than the one I turned down. It is the dream of a success in which all beings share, because it is founded on a reverence for life. A dream of a society at peace with its conscience because it respects and lives in harmony with all life-forms. A dream of a people living in accord with the laws of Creation, cherishing and caring for the natural environment, conserving nature instead of destroying it. A dream of a society that is truly healthy, practicing a wise and compassionate stewardship of a balanced ecosystem.

This is not my dream alone. It is really the dream of all human beings who feel the plight of the earth as their own and sense our obligation to respect and protect the world in which we live. To some degree, all of us share in this dream. Yet few of us are satisfied that we are doing all that is needed to make it happen.

Almost none of us is aware of just how powerfully our eating habits affect the possibility of this dream becoming a reality. We do not realize that one way or another, how we eat has a tremendous impact. Diet for a New America is the first book to show in full detail the nature of this impact, not only on our own health but in addition on the vigor of our society, the health of our world, and the well-being of its creatures. As it turns out, we have cause to be grateful, for what’s best for us personally is also best for the other life-forms and for the life-support systems on which we all depend.

The more I have uncovered about the dark side of the Great American Food Machine, the more appropriate it has felt to have declined the opportunity to be part of it. And the more urgent it has seemed that people be made aware of the profound and far-reaching consequences of their eating habits.

Diet for a New America exposes the explosive truths behind the food on America’s plates. These are truths the purveyors of the Great American Food Machine don’t want you to know, for in many cases they are not pretty truths. But if exposing them makes America healthier, and the world a kinder and more life-sustaining place, then so be it.

In the past few decades, the animals raised for meat, dairy products, and eggs in the United States have been subjected to ever more deplorable conditions. Merely to keep the poor creatures alive under these circumstances, even more chemicals have had to be used, and, increasingly, hormones, pesticides, antibiotics, and countless other chemicals and drugs end up in foods derived from animals. The more unnaturally today’s livestock are raised, the more chemical residues end up in our food.

But that’s just the half of it. The suffering these animals undergo has become so extreme that to partake of food from these creatures is to partake unknowingly of the abject misery that has been their lives. Millions upon millions of Americans are merrily eating away, unaware of the pain and disease they are taking into their bodies with every bite. We are ingesting nightmares for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Diet for a New America reveals the effects on your health, on your consciousness, and on the quality of life on earth that come from eating the products of an obscenely inhumane system of food production. You don’t have to forgo animal products to derive great benefit from this book. You don’t have to be a vegetarian to be concerned about your health, and to want your life to be a statement of compassion. It’s not the killing of the animals that is the chief issue here, but rather the unspeakable quality of the lives they are forced to live.

The purveyors of the Great American Food Machine don’t want you to know how the animals have lived whose flesh, milk, and eggs end up in your body. They also don’t want you to know the health consequences of consuming the products of such a system, nor do they want you to know its environmental impact. Because they know only too well that if word got out, the resultant public outcry would shake the foundations of their industry.

But I want you to know. I’m letting the cat out of the bag. I don’t care about their profits. I care about your health, your well-being, and the welfare of our planet and all its creatures.

Eating should be a pleasure. It should be a celebration and a communion with life. The information in this book will provide you access to a whole new sense of pleasure in eating—a pleasure all the deeper for being at no one’s expense, a pleasure all the more wonderful for being productive of radiant health.

Exciting things have been learned in the past few decades regarding health and food choices. There have at last been enormous breakthroughs in the science of human nutrition, and for the first time we are now receiving irrefutable scientific evidence of how different eating patterns affect health. We’ve always known that it was best to eat a “balanced diet,” but now we are finding out just what a balanced diet really is, and it’s not at all what we had thought. Thousands of impeccably conducted modern research studies now reveal that the traditional assumptions regarding our need for meats, dairy products, and eggs have been in error. In fact, it is an excess of these very foods, which were once thought to be the foundations of good eating habits, that is responsible for the epidemics of heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, and many other diseases of our time.

Diet for a New America is the first book to reveal the latest findings of nutritional research in a language anyone can understand and at the same time document these findings so you can rest assured of their legitimacy. It takes into account the marvelous and undeniable fact that you are a unique person, with your own special tastes, needs, and biochemical individuality. It does not sell you short by presenting rigid rules you have to follow obsessively. On the contrary, the goal is for you to be truly healthy and happy in every dimension of your being, and to be free from any kind of compulsion. Diet for a New America contains no dogmatic list of shoulds and shouldn’ts but instead gives you information that will help you select and enjoy foods that day by day will make you healthier and happier. It shows you how to protect yourself against heart attacks, cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes, strokes, and the other scourges of our time. It shows you how to keep your body free from cholesterol, saturated fat, artificial hormones, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, pesticides, and the countless other disease-producing agents found all too often in many of today’s foods. It shows you how you can enjoy eating food that leaves your mind and heart clear and unpolluted.

As Americans we are indeed privileged to have the option of selecting the optimum diet. But for most of the world, the struggle is a far different one; it is for survival itself. Diet for a New America shows you how your food choices can be of tremendous benefit, not only to your own life, but to the less fortunate of the world as well. It calls for no self-deprivation but simply the understanding that the healthiest, tastiest, and most nourishing way to eat is also the most economical, most compassionate, and least polluting. Heeding this message is without doubt one of the most practical, economical, and potent things you can do today to heal not only your own life but also the ecosystem on which all life depends. You benefit, the rest of humankind benefits, the animals benefit, and so do the forests and the rivers and the soil and the air and the oceans.

There is enormous suffering today that stems from people’s feeling isolated and alienated from nature. Diet for a New America is a statement of our interexistence with all forms of life and provides a means to experience the profound healing powers of our interconnectedness. You’ll learn how to care for your health and to improve the quality of your life. You’ll see that the very eating habits that can do so much to give you strength and health are exactly the same ones that can significantly reduce the needless suffering in the world and do much to preserve our ecosystem. And you’ll discover the profound liberation that comes from bringing your eating habits into harmony with life’s deepest ecological basis. You will become increasingly sensitive and increasingly able to live and act as an agent of world spiritual awakening.

Few of us are aware that the act of eating can be a powerful statement of commitment to our own well-being and at the very same time to the creation of a healthier habitat. In Diet for a New America you will learn how your spoon and fork can be tools with which to enjoy life to the fullest, while making it possible that life itself might continue. In fact, you will discover that your health, your happiness, and the future of life on earth are rarely so much in your own hands as when you sit down to eat.

When I declined to be a top cog in the Great American Food Machine and turned down the opportunity to live the American Dream, it was because I knew there was a deeper dream. I did it because I knew that with all the reasons that each of us has to despair and become cynical, there still beats in our common heart our deepest prayer for a better life and a more loving world. The book you hold in your hands is a key that will enable you to be an instrument of this prayer.

—John Robbins

Summer 1987

The lives of the animals raised for food in the United States today stand in glaring contradiction to our hopes for a better way of life. In order to understand the full significance of what is being done to these animals, it will be helpful to understand what kind of creatures animals really are. This, then, is where our story begins—with a look at the nature of the creatures we call animals, and at our attitudes toward them. The astounding truth may surprise you as much as it has surprised me…