He walked away from his family’s hugely successful ice cream business to crusade for a plant-based diet and against cruelty to animals.
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 on June 11 at his home in Soquel, Calif., near Santa Cruz. He was 77.
His son and collaborator, Ocean Robbins, said that the cause was complications of post-polio syndrome, which resulted in muscle weakness and other symptoms nearly seven decades after he contracted polio as a boy.
Mr. Robbins was best known for his book “Diet for a New America,” published in 1987. The book, which is said to have sold more than a million copies, 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.
The book’s message, Mr. Robbins wrote, was “that the healthiest, tastiest and most nourishing way to eat is also the most economical, the most compassionate and least polluting.”
The Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy in 1988 compared “Diet for a New America” and its impact on the way we think about food to Rachel Carson’s classic “Silent Spring” (1962), which warned how the unlimited use of agricultural pesticides like DDT had contaminated the soil and water and threatened the health of wildlife and humans, and which helped spur the modern environmental movement.
