Sometimes it's just bad habit and a matter of how much we care about the way it’s produced and how that affects our health, our environment and our starving brothers and sisters around the globe who slave away in the smelly, disease-courting farm factories that are replacing their cropland to instead feed the greedy, rich meat-eaters of the United States primarily. Not only does the meat go elsewhere, but most of the grain grown is given to these water-slugging cattle rather than to our hungry workers!

Each fact stated in this 386-page book, each quote from cattlemen, the meat or dairy industry, scientists and doctors, may be verified from his over forty pages of notes in the back. The author’s research is as current as this year and his style quite conversational. Hard-hitting with the truth, yet not critical of ignorant meat-consumers snowed by the meat industry, John Robbins encourages us to become pure vegetarians.

His bestselling, 1987 book, Diet For A New America, already convinced me to go further than meatless and eliminate dairy, eggs and fish, as well, from my diet. My review of it precedes this one. With his new book, The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life And The World, I have been assured of the advantages of my decision.

Contents

It begins with a five-page introduction by Dr. Dean Ornish, founder and president of Preventive Medical Institute (ornish.com), whose media-covered and renowned, five step program for reversing heart disease is discussed in the second chapter. Besides a recommended near-vegan (pure vegetarian) diet, he also stresses a half-hour daily of exercise, another half-hour of stretching or meditation, a support group and no smoking. His program significantly reduces atherosclerosis (clogged arteries) three out of four patients while the American Heart Association’s program with some low-fat animal products only helps one of six heart-disease patients.

Another doctor in Cleveland substantiated Ornish’s results with only changing his patients’ diets.


Part One: Food and Healing goes from veganism’s incredible benefits in heart disease and cancer to a criticism of current fad diets, what a healthy plant-based diet looks like, the untruths of milk advertising and the dangers of food-borne bacteria and antibiotic overuse in livestock feed.

Part Two: Our Food, Our Fellow Creatures starts out with Robbins visiting a “pork production facility,” or in his words a “pig Auschwitz.” He noted that the stench nauseated him, but for a pig who can find an edible root in the dirt with 200 times our capacity for smell, it must be pure hell. He sees the human side of the despairing pig farmer, then discusses such things as factory farms, the animals’ treatment, their proven intelligence and capacity to love, “free range and natural” labels, U.S. laws allowing farm animal cruelty doubling, a letter of thanks from a former meat-eater.

Part Three: Our Food, Our World opens with the effect of human consumption on our planet. We can reduce the damage greatly and feed every hungry person if everyone would just cut their meat intake by ten percent. Robbins effectively shows how cattle raising and grazing has wasted our natural resources and land use. The few wealthy profit in a McDonaldization of the world. Fish farming is not the answer.

Part Four: Genetic Engineering begins with how genetic engineering began in 1995 with the “FlavrSavr” tomato put hopefully out on grocery shelves. It was a dismal failure, but that didn’t stop Calgene, a subsidiary of the now taken-over Monsanto. Robbins takes us on a fascinating and alarming journey through the psychotic mind of Bob Shapiro, CEO of Monsanto, who tried to control the world’s food population with his “biotechnology.”

Fortunately the tide turned. The rest of the world could take a hint after Mad Cow’s Disease and banning of farm animal cruelty and genetically engineered food became more and more prevalent like dominoes falling. The U.S. export of genetically-modified grain and soybeans was a measly third in 1999 of what it had been a year earlier. Organic farming has been recognized by the government and become more popular. Concerned U.S. citizens have flooded the pro-biotechnology, former Monsanto-employed Bush administration with demands for labeling genetically-modified foods.

Final Commentary

I know I’ve only summarized the highlights of The Food Revolution, but taken along with my review of his first book, I think I’ve adequately covered the myriad of reasons for curtailing or hopefully eliminating your habit of stopping into a fast food joint for bacon and eggs at breakfast, a double cheeseburger at lunch and fried chicken at night.

Robbins ends the book with an invitation to join the nonprofit group he started in response to his first book, EarthSave (earthsave.org) or the one his then sixteen-year-old son, Ocean, began in 1990, Youth For Environmental Sanity (YES! at yesworld.org), for fifteen to thirty year olds. There are, however, several pages of other organizations of similar ilk and specific purpose for you to investigate.

So while this was a highly-disturbing book for the most part, Robbins injected it with a respect for his readers to help us get through to the good stuff: the ending. I was so delighted with the backlash caused in Europe, Asia and Africa after the outbreak of Mad Cow’s Disease.I’m sure the U.S. will follow their lead as more people become aware of what’s going on.

I went to earthsave.org, safe-food.org and purefood.org yesterday, learning some very interesting things. California might have the most health food stores that formally renounce genetically-modified foods at 79 stores, but Texas, and only Texas, comes in at all close to them with 72 stores. So take that, Bushie! Hehe.

What more can I say? Please get involved with your health and the world’s health in the most simplest way, by changing the way you eat every day. Thank you.

I’m going to watch my videos of Babe and Babe: Pig in the City now.


Recommended: Yes