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.
Through the years, food writers for The New York Times have described “Diet for a New America” as “groundbreaking” and “the bible of the anti-meat campaign.” Paul McCartney, a vegetarian since the mid-1970s, read the book and, in a 2018 testimonial to the writings of John and Ocean Robbins, wrote, “The more people who hear this message and move toward diets marked by compassion and respect for life and the earth, the better off our world will be.”
But Mr. Robbins’s methods of raising awareness of the healthful effects of a vegetarian diet drew some criticism from Marian Burros in a 1992 Eating Well column in The Times.
“Much of what Mr. Robbins has to say about diet in this country,” Ms. Burros wrote, “is unremarkable: We eat too much meat and dairy products. Much of what Mr. Robbins has to say about the inhumane treatment of animals on factory farms is correct. But Mr. Robbins undermines his case by exaggerating; facts mix with factoids and anecdotes.”
Ms. Burros cited experts who challenged Mr. Robbins’s contentions that raising cattle was responsible for the deforestation of the United States, and that meat and dairy products contained more pesticides than plant foods.
Sometimes, Ms. Burros wrote, Mr. Robbins’s message seemed blurred. Mr. Robbins, quoted in the column, acknowledged that his message was “a little complicated for the bumper-sticker mind and the sound bite.”
John Ernest Robbins was born on Oct. 26, 1947, in Glendale, Calif. His father, Irvine, known as Irv, was a founder of the Baskin-Robbins ice cream company with his brother-in-law Burton Baskin. His mother, Irma (Gevurtz) Robbins, ran the household. The family pool was shaped like an ice cream cone.
At age 5, John contracted polio. He was in a wheelchair for about six months, his left leg was impaired, and he walked with a limp as a boy, Ocean Robbins said in an interview.
But through yoga, exercise and a healthier diet, Mr. Robbins as an adult built his body to the point where he could run the equivalent distance of a marathon and complete the swimming, biking and running stages of an unofficial triathlon.
Mr. Robbins worked in the family ice cream business in his younger years, helping to concoct a popular flavor, jamoca almond fudge, and to popularize Baskin-Robbins’s distinctive pink spoons. But, as a devotee of Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman, he later mutinied against materialism, telling The Times in 1992 that, in his family, “roughing it meant room service was late.”
He also said that he wished his father had spent more time with him and less time on his company; sometimes, he said, he thought that “my primary importance to him was that I would carry on the business.”
Months after Mr. Baskin died of a heart attack in 1967, Baskin-Robbins was sold to the United Fruit Company. Irv Robbins remained with the company until he retired in 1978. According to Ocean Robbins, his grandfather had offered not to sell the company if his son would join him in business.
But John Robbins declined.
He was concerned, he said in a 2019 interview with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, that the consumption of large amounts of ice cream, loaded with saturated fats and sugar, had contributed to Mr. Baskin’s cardiovascular problems, and also concerned about the treatment of cows at commercial dairies, where they produced ice cream’s primary ingredient: milk.
“It broke my heart to see them treated so poorly,” he told PETA. “I found the idea of profiting from such cruelty to be appalling.”
Irv Robbins was angered by John’s rebuff, Ocean Robbins said. “He thought he had fallen prey to the hippie counterculture world where you just reject everything.”
Upon graduating in 1969 from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied political philosophy, Mr. Robbins sought a simpler life. He and his wife, Deo, moved to Fulford Harbour, British Columbia, where they built a one-room log cabin that was later expanded to three rooms.
Ocean Robbins said that his parents did not own a car and lived on $500 to $1,000 a year, teaching yoga and meditation classes, growing what crops they could and taking one delivery per year of food they couldn’t grow themselves.
By the mid-1970s, John Robbins had re-entered academia. He received a master’s degree in humanistic psychology in 1976 from Antioch College (now University) in Ohio through its affiliation with Cold Mountain Institute in British Columbia and began a career as a psychotherapist.
The family moved to the Santa Cruz area of California in 1984, when Ocean Robbins was 11. Around that time, Mr. Robbins began reading books about the treatment of animals at factory farms, which led to further reading about the links between food, health and the environment. From that sprung the idea for “Diet for a New America.”
In 2001, Mr. Robbins wrote a follow-up, “The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World.” In 2012, he and his son founded the Food Revolution Network, an online education and advocacy organization dedicated to healthy, ethical and sustainable food that claims more than a million members.
In 2019, Ocean Robbins said, Mr. Robbins began experiencing symptoms of post-polio syndrome, losing strength and suffering chronic pain in his legs and later enduring sleep and cognition issues.
In addition to his son, Mr. Robbins is survived by his wife, whom he married in 1969, and two sisters, Marsha Veit and Erin Robbins.
In the late 1980s, his son said, John Robbins reconciled with his father: Irv Robbins, suffering from weight issues, heart disease and diabetes, was given a copy of “Diet for a New America” by his cardiologist. The doctor had no idea that the book had been written by his patient’s son.
Irv Robbins read the book, gave up sugar, reduced his meat consumption, lost weight, improved his golf game and lived another 20 years, Ocean Robbins said. He died in 2008.
It was confirmation, John Robbins liked to say, “that blood was thicker than ice cream.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
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