Voices of the Food Revolution. John Robbins

      Introduction

      Thank you for participating in one of the most important conversations about our food that has ever taken place.

      Our food chain is in crisis. Big agribusiness has made profits more important than your health—more important than the environment—more important than your right to know how your food is produced.

      But beneath the surface, a revolution is growing.

      From rural farms to urban dinner plates, from grocery store shelves to state ballot boxes, people are rising up and taking action. We're reclaiming our food systems and our menus, and we're taking responsibility for our health.

      Today there's a huge and growing demand for food that is organic, sustainable, fair trade, non-GMO, humane, and healthy. In cities around the world, we're seeing more and more farmers' markets, and more young people getting back into farming. Grocery stores (even big national chains) are displaying local, natural, and organic foods with pride. The movements for healthy food are growing fast, and starting to become a political force.

      The days of skyrocketing obesity and chronic illness . . .

      The days of families, companies, and governments being driven to bankruptcy by mounting health-care costs . . .

      The days of unlabeled, genetically engineered foods spreading rampantly through our food system while family farmers are driven out of business . . .

      Those days may be numbered.

      Medical science today knows a lot about the impact our food choices have on our health, and on the world around us. But so far, that information has been far too slow to spread. Despite all the progress, hundreds of millions of people just keep getting sicker, and our planet keeps getting more polluted.

      Even our doctors often are ignorant of how powerfully food impacts health. On average, physicians still receive only 24 hours of nutritional education in all their years of medical school. No wonder doctors are more likely to tell you how you can undergo an invasive and dangerous $50,000 procedure than they are to tell you how you can simply and easily change your diet to prevent illness in the first place.

      In the absence of educated physicians and an informed public, commercial interests try to sell us nutritional ideas, breakthrough gimmicks, and pseudoscientific diets that have little basis in reality. Most of us are inundated every day with supposed “facts” that are dangerously misleading, or just plain wrong.

      My dad, bestselling author John Robbins, and I decided that it was time to distill the wisdom of the greatest international experts on food and diet and share their leading-edge insights. We set out to discover what you need to know that no one is telling you, including what you can do to get healthy, and how you can even help the environment through your choices.

      One of the things that stands out is that—no big surprise here—our current food system is a mess.

      Large-scale industrialized food production is wreaking havoc on our forests, topsoil, air, water, and climate. Farm animals are being treated with tremendous cruelty, and farm workers are often exploited. Genetically engineered “Frankenfoods” are being released, without adequate testing, into the food supply on a vast scale. Meanwhile, people are eating more and more artificial food—and getting fatter and sicker. In fact, more people are chronically ill today than at any time in the history of the world.

      You probably already know that large-scale industrial agribusiness is controlling an expanding share of the world's food supply. They have huge advertising budgets to market highly processed, genetically engineered, chemical-laden, pesticide-contaminated pseudofoods. With all their lobbyists and political donations, they pretty well run the show in most of our government regulatory and agricultural agencies.

      These corporations want to fill your plate with chemicals, and they're spending billions marketing processed foods that get people addicted for life. They'd like you to keep your mind closed and your voice silent. They'd like you, and all the rest of us, to