On first reading, the subtitle for John Robbins' new book, THE FOOD REVOLUTION: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and the World sounds a little overblown, but after reading just a few pages the logical consequences of voting with your grocery basket seem irrefutable. When making food choices, Robbins says, unless you know who produced it, how it was produced, where it's been and how it's been treated before arriving at the market -don't buy it.
Reading a little farther into the book, it quickly becomes clear that he's counting on the fact that once you know the answers to those four questions -particularly regarding commercial livestock and their related processed foods, and genetically engineered food -there's no way you'll buy it.
"I have written The Food Revolution to provide solid, reliable information for the struggle to achieve a world where the health of people and the carth community is more important than the profit margins of any industry, where basic human needs take precedence over corporate greed," Robbins says in the book's introduction.
The next 400-some pages give the reader solid, reliable (extensively footnoted) information in spades, plus a resource guide (including CAFF) to help readers become more involved in food activism.
He's split the book into four parts - Food and Healing; Our Food, Our Fellow Creatures; Our Food, Our World; and Genetic Engineering. Each part is layered into narrative chapters spiced with screen-tinted "Is That So?" sections that deflate food industry myths and propaganda with recognized scientific and environmental sources, and "What We Know" sections of footnoted facts that make The Food Revolution an invaluable resource whenever the discussion turns to the dangers of an industrialized food system.
Samples of "What We Know" include:
• It takes 5,214 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef, but just 49, 33 and 25 gallons respectively to produce a pound of apples, carrots and wheat.
• 2.5 acres of land producing cabbage can feed 23 people, producing potatoes can feed 22 people, producing rice can feed 19 people, producing milk can feed 2 people, producing eggs or beef can feed one person.
• 56 percent of the children in Bangladesh are so underfed and underweight their health is diminished, while 55 percent of adults in the U.S. suffer similarly diminished health because they are so overfed and overweight.
A favorite "Is That So" box featured this exchange:
"Those of us in the industry can take comfort . . . After all, we're the technical experts. We know we're right. The 'antis' obviously don't understand the science and are just as obviously pushing a hidden agenda -probably to destroy capitalism." -Bob Shapiro, Monsanto CEO
"Genetic engineering faces our society with problems unprecedented, not only in the history of science, but of life on the earth. It places in human hands the capacity to redesign living organisms, the products of some three billion years of evolution . . . Up to now, living organisms have evolved very slowly, and new forms have had plenty of time to settle in. Now whole proteins will be transposed overnight into wholly new associations, with consequences no one can foretell. Going ahead in this direction may not be only unwise, but dangerous. Potentially, it could breed new animal and plant diseases, new sources of cancer and novel epidemics." - George Wald, M.D., Nobel Laureate in Medicine, Professor of Biology, Harvard University.
Robbins also reminds us that when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the book credited for beginning the environmental movement in 1962, it was this same Monsanto Corporation that took out full-page newspaper ads attacking her integrity, ridiculing her conclusions and predicting a plague of insects on the world if we stopped pouring millions of gallons of pesticides annually on our food. Sound familiar?
There is no hidden agenda with The Food Revolution; it's right out front for everyone to see. Robbins, who walked away from the Baskins-Robbins ice cream fortune because to him it represented a triumph of profit over human and environmental health, condemns America's industrialized food system for the same reasons.
His unabashed message is that our food system is controlled by fewer and fewer corporations basing their decisions on profit and control, and who would rather increase the risks they already inflict on their customers and environment with dangerous technologies like irradiation and genetic engineering than develop a safe, responsible system of food production and distribution.
Robbins makes an excellent case that your dinner plate and what you choose to put on it is the best weapon against these food barons. Of course that means we all have to begin working harder to become informed so we can make the revolutionary choices he's recommending. Reading this book is an excellent place to start.