Diet for A New America author John Robbins dies at 77 from legacy of polio, ANIMALS 24-7 headlined on June 24, 2025, above an extensive obituary covering the facts of Robbins’ life and briefly reviewing his teachings.
Robbins’ longtime friend Vasu Murti here offers his further and more personal perspective.
The number of animals killed for food in the United States is nearly 75 times larger than the number of animals killed in laboratories, thirty times larger than the number killed by hunters and trappers, and five hundred times larger than the number of animals killed in animal pounds.
To become a vegetarian or a vegan is to carry the campaign against “cruelty to animals” to its logical conclusion. Nearly all animal activism is nonviolent: cruelty-free shopping guides to purchase products not tested on animals, fake fur, fake leather, leafleting on campuses, vegan cooking demos, vegan parties, vegan picnics, vegan potlucks, dining out at vegan restaurants, etc.
“You’ll attract more flies with honey than vinegar”
Friends Of Animals, based in Darien, Connecticut, offers buttons and/or bumper stickers saying “Veganism Is Direct Action.” I think nearly everyone in the animal rights movement would agree on that point.
There is an old adage that, “You’ll attract more flies with honey than with vinegar,” although in the case of vegans and animal rights activists, agave nectar or agave syrup might be a better option over honey!
Far from being “wild-eyed leftists” or “self-righteous vegetarians,” animal activists are dealing tactfully and diplomatically with the larger meat-eating public in bringing about social change.
Vegan author John Robbins represented the moderate, not militant, face of the animal rights movement. When I first read Diet for New America, I felt it could have the impact upon mainstream secular American society in the late 1980s that Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet had in the early 1970s.
Brad Miller testifies
Said Humane Farming Association founder Bradley Miller:
“Once every decade or so a book arrives that changes the course of a generation. Diet For A New America is the book of this decade.
“Robbins has written a book that rings with clarity and unflinching truth, and possesses an awesome power to enable people to take charge of their own destinies.
“In my many years of working for the welfare of all species and the environment, I have never seen a book so capable of effecting change.
“This is the book that we have been waiting for. Diet For A New America is a true masterpiece.”
(Alex Hershaft photo)
Endorsed by Cleveland Amory (but Amory did not go vegan!)
Cleveland Amory, author of The Cat Who Came For Christmas, and other animal rights literature, compared Diet for a New America with Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, credited with launching the modern-day environmental movement:
“Every so often a book comes along which has the capacity to awaken the conscience of a nation. Silent Spring was one such book; John Robbins’s volume is destined to be another. With consummate intelligence, thoroughness and skill, Robbins takes us on a multi-faceted journey which should cause all sensitive people to question their eating habits most searchingly. I couldn’t put it down.”
“In a tender not strident voice”
And Frances Moore Lappe herself said:
“In a tender not strident voice, Robbins shows us why a humane society cannot be built upon an inhumane system of food production. Robbins does not play upon our guilt, but shows us how our well-being is linked to the development of radically new sensibilities to non-human life. I promise you — what you perceive behind the supermarket meat counter will never be the same after reading Diet For A New America.”
In Diet for a New America, John Robbins defined the three principle reasons for the public to transition to vegetarianism, still advocated by animal rights activists to this day: animal cruelty, health and nutrition, and concern for the environment. And unlike health faddists, John Robbins put concern for animals first, at the top of the agenda.
Plato, Tolstoy and Gandhi
While Diet for a New America makes veganism seem as reasonable and mainstream as recycling, John Robbins clearly saw vegetarianism as a moral imperative for all mankind:
“People of the stature of Plato, Tolstoy and Gandhi have refused to eat meat. But today the question of meat eating has taken on a far more urgent significance than ever before. There is something uniquely painful happening in the way contemporary animals are being raised for meat. Animals have been treated cruelly before, and in some cases sadistically — but the process has never before been institutionalized on such an overwhelming scale. And never before has the cold expertise of modern technology and pharmacology been employed to this end. Throughout history, there have been people who sensed that eating the flesh of animals killed unnecessarily was not the best thing we could do towards the goal of bringing peace to ourselves and to the world. The more I’ve learned of modern meat production, the more I’ve felt that their message is even more vital today.”
Human rights & social justice issues
John Robbins clearly saw the human rights and social justice issues involved with the institutionalized killing of billions of animals for food, when he wrote:
“To supply one person with a meat habit food for a year requires three-and-a-quarter acres. To supply one lacto-ovo-vegetarian requires only one-half of an acre. To supply one pure vegetarian (vegan) requires only one-sixth of an acre.
“In other words, a given acreage can feed twenty times as many people eating a pure vegetarian (vegan) diet-style as it could people eating the standard American diet-style.
“In a world in which a child dies of starvation every two seconds, an agricultural system designed to feed our meat habit is a blasphemy. Yet it continues, because we continue to support it. Those who profit from this system do not need us to condone what they are doing. The only support they need from us is our money. As long as enough people continue to purchase their products they will have the resources to fight reforms, pump millions of dollars of ‘educational’ propaganda into our schools, and defend themselves against medical and ethical truths.
“A new direction for America’s diet-style”
“A rapidly growing number of Americans are withdrawing support from this insane system by refusing to consume meat. For them, this new direction in diet-style is a way of joining hands with others and saying we will not support a system which wastes such vast amounts of food while people in this world do not have enough to eat.”
John Robbins concluded, “A new direction for America’s diet-style would be a significant step towards a nonviolent world. It is a way of saying: ‘Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.’ A nonviolent world has roots in a nonviolent diet.”
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) literature from the 1980s similarly concluded: “A nonviolent philosophy begins at breakfast.”
“Even the counterculture became corporate”
With current trends in animal liberation theology worldwide, and a growing number of theologians, clergy and activists in all the world’s great religions jumping on the PETA bandwagon, it must be pointed out that the animal rights movement really began as a secular and nonsectarian civil rights movement, and is now courting all the world’s great religions for inspiration, blessings, and support.
An article in The People’s Almanac (1975), said meditation is endorsed by all the world’s great religions, and animal advocates would like to see it happen with vegetarianism. Vegetarian writer Steven Rosen, in his 1987 book, Food for the Spirit: Vegetarianism and the World Religions, tried to show that all the world’s great religions support the vegetarian way of life: to win people of different faiths to vegetarianism through friendly moral persuasion. “Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6, RSV).
In Ronald Reagan’s 1980s, even the counterculture became corporate as the New Age movement emerged, and belief in karma and reincarnation, yoga and meditation, vegetarianism and nonviolence moved into the mainstream.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“New Agers are often too speculative”
John Robbins quickly emerged as one of the leaders of the New Age movement for social change through a healthier life of higher consciousness. And in doing so, John Robbins avoided many of the pitfalls of traditional religious teachings of sin, salvation, a personal God, etc. (as well as well meaning animal rights activists), coming across as “self-righteous vegetarians,” saying words to the effect of “Animals have the right to life. Killing (and eating) them is not a choice.”
New Agers are often too speculative: while they are open to other religions, for instance Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as Native American spirituality and so forth, they lack a core set of beliefs, values, scriptures, etc.
While John Robbins clearly saw veganism as a moral imperative, he never made veganism compulsory; he never framed the issue as a religious requirement.
“A modern-day Siddartha”
John Robbins and Diet for a New America were endorsed not only by counterculture figures like Wavy Gravy (Hugh Romney), but by Hindu and Buddhist spiritual masters like Baba Ram Dass (Dr. Richard Alpert), Supreme Master Ching Hai (Hue Dang Trinh), and Will Tuttle, author of The World Peace Diet.
Hinduism Today described John Robbins as a modern-day Siddhartha. As a young Hindu-American-vegetarian, I had the opportunity to meet John Robbins in September 1988. It was one of the most inspirational moments of my life! He was heir to the Baskin-Robbins fortune. He renounced it at an early age, traveled to India, and opened a yoga ashram in Canada with his wife Deo. He spoke of Gandhi and nonviolence.
“I want them to leave as friends”
When animal rights activist Jane Cartmill of San Diego Animal Advocates asked John Robbins how animal rights activists can remain calm in the face of harassment from the larger meat-eating public, John gave the example of Gandhi, who said, “I want the British to quit India, but I want them to leave as friends.”
John’s son Ocean Robbins founded Youth for Environmental Sanity (YES!) before graduating high school in 1991, and is now an activist in his own right, also dedicated to promoting veganism.
John Robbins was a secular author, writing with spiritual eloquence. John Robbins wrote at a time when no one (except possibly Exxon) was aware of global warming, or that animal agriculture is the biggest consumer of fossil fuels and thus the biggest contributor to climate change.
“All things are connected”
Environmental devastation, rather than abortion or war, is the most visible direct manifestation of the collective karma for killing animals. “All Things Are Connected,” the concluding chapter to John Robbins’ Pulitzer-Prize-nominated Diet for a New America (1987), began with a quote from (reincarnationist) Christian mystic Edgar Cayce:
“Destiny, or karma, depends upon what the soul has done about what it has become aware of.”
John Robbins wrote:
“At the present time, when most of us sit down to eat, we aren’t very aware of how our food choices affect the world.
What we don’t hear in the sizzle
“We don’t realize that in every Big Mac there is a piece of the tropical rainforests, and with every billion burgers sold another hundred species become extinct. We don’t realize that in the sizzle of our steaks there is the suffering of animals, the mining of our topsoil, the slashing of our forests, the harming of our economy, and the eroding of our health.
“We don’t hear in the sizzle the cry of the hungry millions who might otherwise be fed. We don’t see the toxic poisons (pesticides) accumulating in the food chains, poisoning our children and our earth for generations to come.
“But once we become aware of the impact of our food choices, we can never really forget. Of course, we can push it all to the back of our minds, and we may need to do this, at times, to endure the enormity of what is involved. But the earth itself will remind us, as will our children, and the animals and the forests and the sky and the rivers, that we are part of this earth, and it is part of us.
The choices we make in our daily lives
“All things are deeply connected, and so the choices we make in our daily lives have enormous influence, not only on our own health and vitality, but also on the lives of other beings, and indeed on the destiny of life on earth. Thankfully, we have cause to be grateful–what’s best for us personally is also best for other forms of life, and for the life support systems on which we all depend.”
In the late 1980s, John Robbins pointed out, the Rainforest Action Network did not start out as an animal rights group. But when the Rainforest Action Network discovered the real cause of rainforest destruction in Central America was the American fast food market, decimating rainforests to create grazing land for cattle for cheap hamburgers, they became the ones calling for a boycott of Burger King [which in 2002 became the first major fast food franchise to offer vegetarian burgers at all franchises.]
“Livestock industry is the biggest consumer of fossil fuels”
John Robbins pointed out that the livestock industry is the biggest consumer of fossil fuels, saying the next war would be fought in the Middle East, and that it would be fought over oil. Sure enough, the Persian Gulf War took place a few years later, in early 1991.
When I asked John if he would try to get the American Left to support animal rights, he said he sent a copy of Diet for a New America to Mother Jones, a progressive periodical out of San Francisco.
Vasu Murti’s only quibble with Robbins
As a pro-life Democrat, the only quibble I have with John Robbins is that because his book was clearly aimed at the political left, he subtitled it, How Your Food Choices Affect Your Health, Happiness and the Future of Life on Earth.
Dr. Michael Klaper, author of several books on vegan nutrition, considered this one of the book’s selling points when he reviewed Diet for a New America in Vegetarian Times in the spring of 1988. Dr. Klaper quoted John Robbins saying he has too much respect for his readers to tell them what to eat. Instead, he says he knows that once given the information, they will act accordingly and see how the world situation will change.
Along the lines of taking a stand against domestic violence and/or hate crimes against LGBTs, I must ask: should harming someone or taking someone else’s life (animal or human) be a “choice“ ?! When my pro-choice sister-in-law, sympathetic to vegetarianism, insists eating meat is her “choice,” I respond: “The animals had no choice.”
(See The animal rights movement is divided on abortion, by Vasu Murti.)
No “right to choose” injustice
No abolitionist movement seeking to end an injustice will ever end the injustice if they tell the perpetrators of the injustice they have a “right to choose” to commit that injustice in the first place.
Usually, it is pro-choice liberals, framing the abortion issue solely in terms of “choice” and a woman’s “right to choose,” rather than in terms of the possible rights of the unborn, extending rights to the unborn alongside extending what until now has been described as “human rights” to other animals as well, who fail to see this very obvious point.
More recent literature from PETA insists: “Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for ‘entertainment,'” clearly leaving no choice in the matter. An essay, “Abortion, Distant Peoples, and Future Generations” by James Sterba of the University of Notre Dame (1980), similarly says that if you believe in saving the planet for future generations but support abortion, you hold an inconsistent view.
(See Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards Into Battlegrounds, by Jim Sterba.)
The moderate, not militant face
Again, far from being “wild-eyed leftists” or “self-righteous vegetarians,” animal activists are dealing tactfully and diplomatically with the larger meat-eating public in bringing about social change.
Again, John Robbins represented the moderate, not militant, face of the animal rights movement.
John Robbins sought to win people over through friendly moral persuasion: not through coercion, nor through confrontation, but through choice.
[Vasu Murti, author of A Source of Inspiration: Krishna Consciousness and the Judeo-Christian Tradition and They Shall Not Hurt or Destroy: Animal Rights and Vegetarianism in the Western Religious Traditions, describes himself as “a writer and activist, born and raised in Southern California in a family of South Indian Brahmins,” who holds degrees in physics and applied mathematics from the University of California, and “is a regular contributor to Harmony: Voices for a Just Future, a ‘consistent ethic’ publication on the religious left.”]
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As a vegan, I certainly recognize and appreciate the enormous growth of veganism on so many levels and the many powerful tools of advocacy that have been used to achieve this result.
However, it is helpful to also recognize that there are huge numbers of individuals and industries who remain rigidly resistant to stopping animal abuse, environmental destruction, and negative health consequences. These groups have not been reached by logic, scientific data, appeals to compassion,
or to use this article’s words–“friendly, moral persuasion.”
The reason it is so important to recognize the depth of the resistance–and its components–is that only continuing the same tactics will guarantee things remain as they are now.
It is always useful to try to tease out what the factors are that result in no change.
How much is pushback from resistant individuals and industries and
how much is failed strategies by animal advocates?
Recently, the Wall Street Journal published an article, “A New Meatpacking Plant’s Novel Pitch to Attract American Workers.”
It was an appalling article celebrating animal slaughter and animal consumption.
Here was writing denying every single environmental harm caused by this industry,
saying instead, that their slaughterhouse would contribute to sustainability. How about that…..
If one wants to have a quick view of the nature of resistance and denial, read the comments to the article. Although there are some protestors (including me!) who point out the documented harms of animal agriculture, the vast majority of readers are enthusiastic about slaughtering animals and push back against comments condemning it.
I think it is fair to say that new and creative ways have to be found and added on to the existing tool kit of vegan advocates–unless we want to bury our heads in the sand.
Finally, there is the statement that “Animals have been treated cruelly before, and in some cases sadistically–but the process has never before been institutionalized on such an overwhelming scale…never before
has the cold expertise of modern technology and pharmacology been employed to this end.”
This is, of course, precisely what happened in the Holocaust. Anti-semitism was always there.
But the Holocaust industrialized it into massive slaughter. As we know from the book,
“Eternal Treblinka” by Charles Patterson, the founding fathers of the Holocaust were men who started out as butchers. They brought the same tactics they used in animal agriculture to the Jews and others they successfully slaughtered.
Interesting and complex tribute. While I absolutely disagree with the “right-to-lifers” and do not believe in reincarnation, the interconnectedness of life make vegetarianism and veganism the humane choices from every angle.
Sharing with gratitude.