John Robbins (author)

John Ernest Robbins was the son of Irma Robbins and Irv Robbins, co-founder and co-owner of Baskin-Robbins.^[3] He was Jewish of Polish-Jewish and Russian-Jewish descent.^[4] He had two sisters, Marsha and Erin. John graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1969, and received a master's degree from Antioch College, in 1976. Rather than following the ice-cream parlor legacy of his father, he left the company to seek a simpler life. He and his wife Deo were married on March 10, 1967.^[5] Ocean Robbins, their son, is the founder of Food Revolution Network.^[6][7]

In 1987, Diet for a New America was published. In the book Robbins links the impacts of factory farming on human health, the environment, and animal welfare, to make a case for a plant-based diet. A year later he founded EarthSave. In 2001, Robbins updated and reiterated his advocacy of whole foods, plant-based diet for ethical, environmental and health reasons in the book The Food Revolution. The book includes information on organic food, genetically modified food, and factory farming.^[7]

He worked with PETA in 2002 to sue the California Milk Advisory Board over its 'happy cows' television advertisement.^[8] The Milk Advisory Board won on a technicality.^[9]

His 2006 book Healthy at 100, published by Random House, was printed on 100% post-consumer non-chlorine bleached paper, a first for a book from a major U.S. publisher.

Robbins was on the advisory board of Naked Food Magazine, for which he was a regular contributor of articles espousing a plant-based diet.

Robbins died from complications of post-polio syndrome at his home, on June 11, at the age of 77.^{[7] [10][3][11][12]}

In 1988, Robbins founded EarthSave, an international, non-profit organization. The organization was born to channel the reader response to his Diet for a New America.^[13] EarthSave did outreach to the non-vegetarian public, with information tables and vegetarian social activities such as vegetarian Thanksgiving potlucks, and activism on vegetarian, animal, and food system issues.^[14]

EarthSave sponsored a youth-outreach group, YES (Youth for Environmental Sanity), which toured the country visiting high schools and raising awareness of the EarthSave message.^[15]

EarthSave continues to promote healthy, environmentally sound food choices. As of January 2022, its head office is in Chatsworth, California.^[16]

Earthsave Canada was established as a registered non-profit charity in British Columbia in March 1990.^[17]

• Diet for a New America: How Your Food Choices Affect Your Health, Happiness and the Future of Life on Earth, (1987). ISBN 978-0-915811-81-6
• May All Be Fed: Diet For a New World, 1992.
• Reclaiming Our Health: Exploding the Medical Myth and Embracing the Source of True Healing, 1996.
• The Awakened Heart: Meditations on Finding Harmony in a Changing World, 1997.
• The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World, 2001, ISBN 978-1-57324-487-9
• Healthy at 100: The Scientifically Proven Secrets of the World’s Healthiest and Longest-Lived Peoples, 2006, ISBN 978-0-345-49011-7
• The New Good Life: Living Better Than Ever in an Age of Less, (2010), Ballantine Books, 304 pages ISBN 978-0-345-51984-9
• No Happy Cows: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Food Revolution, 2012.
• Voices of the Food Revolution: You Can Heal Your Body and Your World with Food!, (May 6, 2013)

• Diet for a New America (1991) featuring Michael Klaper, T. Colin Campbell, and John A. McDougall
• Super Size Me (2004) by Morgan Spurlock has a short interview with Robbins.^[18]
• Love Over Money, a 2023 documentary about Robbins' life story^[19]