31-Day Food Revolution

INTRODUCTION

Let’s call it like it is. We live in a toxic food culture.

It’s led us to epidemic rates of obesity, heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, and Alzheimer’s. Things have gotten so bad that most people think it’s normal to have at least a few extra pounds around the middle, to depend on an ever-growing supply of prescription medications, and to lose a little more memory and mobility with every passing year.

This may be typical, but it sure as heck doesn’t have to be normal.

Eating food is mandatory, but suffering from brain fog, living with ever-declining health, and feeling like crap are not. The fact is that right now, hundreds of millions of people are hurting from diseases that never, ever needed to happen in the first place.

Dangerous changes have been made to our food supply in just the last 25 years that impact how your food is grown and processed—and how safe it is to eat. The status quo is driving small farmers out of business, forcing animals to live in deplorable conditions, and producing food that’s making us sick.

The medical industry and the processed food industry are earning trillions of dollars in a system that’s devastating lives and threatening the very future of life on our planet.

It’s my mission to help put an end to this madness, by sharing the truth about food and helping eaters put it into action. This is why I founded the 500,000+ member Food Revolution Network. And it’s why I wrote the book you now hold in your hands.

In some ways, I might seem like a pretty unlikely food revolutionary. After all, in 1953 my grandfather, Irvine Robbins, joined with his brother-in-law, Burt Baskin, to found the 31 flavors ice cream company—Baskin-Robbins.

In case anyone on the planet missed the memo, we’re now pretty clear that ice cream is not a health food. But back in the 1950s, as my grandpa was pumping out delicious flavors by the dozen, not much was known about the connection between food and health. Up until then, most people seemed content with three flavors: vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. My grandfather was a consummate entrepreneur, and he set his heart on offering consumers many more options—31, to be exact—one for each day of the month.

My dad, John, grew up with an ice-cream-cone-shaped swimming pool. Sometimes he even ate ice cream for breakfast. He was groomed from early childhood to one day run the family company. My dad’s youthful innovations included Jamoca Almond Fudge (one of the company’s most iconic flavors to this day) and the rollout to all the stores of the famous pink spoons that enabled customers to enjoy free samples.

But in 1967, my grandpa’s brother-in-law and business partner, Burt Baskin, became very ill. His doctors informed him that he was dying of heart disease. I never knew my great-uncle Burt because he passed on a short time later, six years before I was born. But I do know that he was one of the greatest entrepreneurs in American history. He had tremendous wealth, a business he enjoyed, and a family he loved. He ate a lot of ice cream. And in the end, he lost his health and his life at the age of 54.

Grandpa Irv was faced with a choice: He could sell the company for a large sum of money, or he could keep the company in the family and take on my dad, then about to turn 20, as his business partner.

Grandpa Irv chose to invite his son aboard. But my dad declined his father’s invitation, walking away from Baskin-Robbins and from any access to or dependence on the family wealth. For him, it was a choice for integrity, and it’s a choice I’ve always respected.

My dad had seen ice cream bring smiles to a lot of people. But he also knew that unhealthy foods could fuel devastating consequences, and he didn’t want to spend his life selling a product that might contribute to more people suffering and dying before their time. So he left a path that was practically paved with gold—and ice cream—to follow his own “rocky road.”

My dad had suffered from polio as a child and grew up frequently fatigued and ill. In the 1960s, he fell in love with my mom in Berkeley and the two of them set out on a healthy living path. They stopped eating processed foods. They gave up ice cream. And they based their diet on vegetables and whole, natural foods.

As my dad’s health and energy returned, he and my mom moved to a remote little island off the coast of British Columbia, Canada, where they built a one-room log cabin, grew most of their own food, practiced yoga and meditation for several hours a day, and named their kid Ocean.

They say that they almost named me Kale. I’m glad they took the more conservative route on this one.

In any case, we did eat a lot of kale—along with cabbage, carrots, onions, broccoli, turnips, Swiss chard, and many other vegetables that my parents grew, plus brown rice, sprouts, buckwheat, and beans. For a treat, once in a blue moon, we’d have a few drops of organic blackstrap molasses. I think we went through about a bottle a year.

Though my childhood diet was spartan and my family lived on very little money, I grew up feeling rich in health. I became an accomplished distance runner, completing my first marathon at the age of 10.

My dad went on to study the impact of food choices and to share what he was learning. His landmark bestsellers, including Diet for a New America, inspired millions of people and helped to galvanize the modern health food movement. The media was tickled by the notion of a would-be ice cream heir becoming a healthy-eating spokesperson and called him the “rebel without a cone,” and “the prophet of non-profit.”

Tens of thousands of people wrote my dad letters, often by hand, sharing how his work had changed—sometimes even saved—their lives. One of the lives his work impacted, as fate would have it, was that of my own Grandpa Irv.

Now my grandpa had been pretty mad when my dad walked away from the ice cream company. He and my dad went years without speaking. But then something remarkable happened.

In 1989 Grandpa Irv, then in his early seventies, was suffering from diabetes, heart disease, and weight problems. He’d always eaten the modern diet, with a double scoop of ice cream on top. His cardiologist told him that he didn’t have long to live—unless he changed his diet. And then the good doctor handed him a copy of my dad’s book, Diet for a New America. If my grandpa’s cardiologist knew that the book was written by his patient’s maverick son, he didn’t let on. He simply gave Grandpa Irv the book and recommended following its advice. And Grandpa Irv didn’t bother to tell his doctor that he knew the author.

Remarkably enough, my grandpa started eating fewer processed foods and less meat. He gave up sugar and, amazingly, he even gave up ice cream. He started eating a lot more veggies, fruits, and whole foods.

And he got results.

Before long, Grandpa Irv lost 30 pounds. He ditched all of his diabetes and blood-pressure medications. He was enjoying more energy than he’d had in decades. He bragged that his golf game had improved by seven strokes. He took morning walks with his dog, and soon he was traversing several miles each day. Despite the grim prognosis, he ended up living 19 more healthy years.

One morning, while we were visiting my grandparents at their home in Rancho Mirage, California, my grandpa went out for his usual walk. My dad and I were training for a marathon, and Grandpa Irv cheered for us as we cruised by. I’ll always remember that morning as a vivid illustration of the power of food choices to fuel a healthy life—in every generation.

At the age of 16, inspired by my family’s experiences and the legacy of leadership modeled by the two generations before me, I founded a nonprofit organization called Youth for Environmental Sanity (YES!). Our goal was to mobilize young people to say yes to choices that support healthy lives and a healthy planet.

Over the next 20 years I raised money, built an international organization, and led workshops and training programs for hundreds of thousands of grassroots activists from more than 65 nations.

As I traveled the globe, I had the privilege of being invited into the hearts and homes of people from many walks of life. I dined on hummus with Bedouins in the Middle Eastern desert; on quinoa with indigenous leaders in Peru; on black rice with villagers in Thailand; on potatoes and sweet corn with white farmers in Indiana; and on collards and black-eyed peas with African Americans in rural Alabama.

Everywhere I went, I was connecting and collaborating with leaders and change-makers. And everywhere, food was a force that brought us together. I met people all over the planet who were up to something good, often in extremely challenging circumstances. Their stories have humbled and shaped me, and they’ve galvanized my deep commitment to healthy food for all.

One of the things that most bothers me about the natural foods phenomenon is how elitist it can be. Most people are struggling just to survive. They don’t have time or money to worry about which brand of MCT oil is best to add to their coffee, or which type of heirloom tomato contains the most lycopene. If they can get enough calories to feed their kids, then that’s a freaking miracle.

Perhaps you can relate.

The thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way. There’s nothing about processing Mother Nature’s bounty in a factory, stripping it of its fiber, vitamins, and minerals, wrapping it in a bunch of plastic, shipping it thousands of miles, and spending millions of dollars advertising it on television that inherently makes it cheaper than real, local, natural food. But we have governments and food policies that effectively subsidize the mass production of junk food, which artificially drives down its price.

In the developed world, there’s a huge correlation not just between poverty and hunger, but also between poverty and obesity. As counterintuitive as it may seem, the less money you have, the more likely you are to struggle with your weight. Step into any big-city 7-Eleven and you’ll see how many people feel dependent on products like Doritos and Coke. The brutal reality is that poverty typically makes it difficult to feed your family at all—and harder still to provide real, healthy food. Statistically, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to die of diet-fueled diseases like cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and type 2 diabetes.

The people who can least afford to get sick are also the most likely to live and die with chronic illness. That’s not the way I want it to be.

I don’t think there’s anything elitist about choosing real food, or about supporting family farmers who treat their land, animals, and workers right. What’s elitist is a perverse system of subsidies (more on this in chapter 30) that makes crops grown with poisons and processed into junk food the cheapest to buy, in effect condemning the poor to diets that are nutritional disasters.

Working with people who are struggling, often against enormous odds, to live and to raise their families in a good way has inspired me, and it’s also lit a fire in me. Food is more than a path to health. It’s also a way to build a healthy world. It’s personal. It’s political. And it links us to people, policies, and practices around the globe.

I’ve learned so much from people for whom hunger and malnutrition aren’t statistics on a UNICEF chart—they’re a daily reality. Some of these people have lived through wars or have lost family to senseless violence, and are to this day grateful if they have anything to put in their bellies. These same people have built local, resilient economies that work to alleviate poverty and support health, from the ground up.

I’ve been blessed to learn from Tashka Yawanawá, chief of the Yawanawá tribe in the Brazilian Amazon rain forest, who shared with me the devastating impact that global meat consumption has on his people’s home, as cattle ranchers burn the forest so Europeans and North Americans can buy cheap burgers at fast-food restaurants. I joined Tashka to raise money so the Yawanawá could buy airplanes to monitor their forest home for signs of illegal mining and cattle ranching—thus helping to save the tropical rain forests.

I’ve had the privilege of joining with community organizers in Detroit, Michigan, where the median home price in 2017 was $30,000 and where there are thousands of vacant lots and far too many financially destitute people. In 2009, the unemployment rate was as high as 28 percent.¹ A Yale University study found that in 2010 more than half of Detroit residents lived in areas with severely limited access to healthy food, and this made them “more likely to suffer or die prematurely from a diet-related disease.”² And yet in the midst of this intense poverty—in spite of, or perhaps in some ways because of, the terrible food and health challenges Detroit faced—community leaders began to plant seeds of hope. By 2015, Detroit had become a world leader in the community garden movement, with more than 1,400 urban farms and gardens that now bring nourishment to food deserts and are helping to repair the city’s ruptured fabric.³

As I neared the age of 40, I came to a crossroads. As much as I loved the work I was doing to support and empower grassroots organizers, I felt called to a bigger vision. The global food system is still churning out products laced with chemicals, pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, and other substances that don’t belong in the human body. All over the world, Alzheimer’s is crippling our elders, while attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), diabetes, and obesity are devastating our kids. It’s our children, our elderly, and our poor who are paying the heaviest price for a brutally toxic food system.

In many countries, including the United States, life expectancy is actually decreasing. Animals are still living in abject misery on factory farms. And industrialized agriculture is fueling desertification, drought, climate destabilization, and deforestation that seriously threaten the ability of coming generations to feed themselves.

In 2012, I decided I could make the greatest impact by joining my dad (and now colleague) in launching an online education and advocacy organization called Food Revolution Network. Since then I’ve had the privilege of working closely with some of the top food experts on the planet. (Some of them have contributed recipes for this book.)

Perhaps most importantly, I’ve had the opportunity to work with, learn from, and support a community of more than a million people from over 180 nations who have participated in our online Food Revolution Summits.

Time and time again, I hear from people who are fed up with toxic food, sick of feeling sick, and disillusioned with the status quo. What frustrates so many people is that they don’t really know if there are solutions—and if there are, how to apply them to create lasting change.

Does this sound familiar? Chances are you know there’s a lot of unhealthy food in the world, and you try to stay away from it. But in a junk-food-fueled society, it can feel as if you’re being constantly pulled in the wrong direction. Family, habit, social pressure, price, confusion, and stress conspire to make healthy eating more difficult than it should be.

I wrote this book because I want to change all that for you. And I want to ask for your partnership in going a step further.

If you want healthy food not just for yourself but also for your loved ones and for your world, then I have a challenge, and an offer.

My challenge is this. Starting today, and for at least the next 31 days, I invite you to consider yourself a participant in the Food Revolution and to join me in taking a stand for healthy, ethical, sustainable food for everyone (including you!).

And my offer is simple. With this book, I’ll show how it can be easier, more joyful, and more delicious than you imagined. I’ll show how you can eat to prevent (and maybe even reverse) cancer, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, dementia, obesity, and other chronic ailments. I’ll show how you can bring friends and loved ones together to create the support you need to thrive, and so the people you care about will benefit from what you’re discovering. And I’ll show how you can participate, in a meaningful way, in contributing to a world that we can be proud to pass on to our grandkids.

I’m interested in solutions that actually work, in the real world. I lost interest long ago in ivory tower theories that work only for the privileged few. Too many lives are at stake.

I’m a husband who knows what it’s like to try to put good food on the table while my spouse and I are both working 60 hours a week. And despite the wealth of my grandparents, I didn’t grow up rich.

I’m also a father of special-needs twins who, for reasons modern medicine can’t explain, were born exceedingly prematurely. Today they’re doing surprisingly well, but I don’t know if they will ever live independently, and they require significant ongoing support. Even more than most teenagers, they hate being told what to do (and what to eat!). If these solutions can work for me and for our family, then they might work for you and yours, too.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

Here’s how this is going to work. For the next 31 days, I invite you to join me in the Food Revolution.

In Part One, I’ll help you Detoxify your life and set yourself up with the systems and the environment you need to succeed. We all know that health is priceless. Just ask anyone who doesn’t have it. That’s why the first order of business is your own wellness. I’ll walk you through creating the conditions to leverage food as the true foundation for a healthy life.

In Part Two, Nourish, we’ll dispel confusion and get you affordably and deliciously enjoying the foods that your brain, heart, cells, and muscles need to thrive. You’ll find out how to enjoy warm breakfast porridges, creamy smoothies, hearty sandwiches, comforting casseroles, spicy stir-fries and curries, and other fabulous foods as good for your taste buds as they are for your health.

In Part Three, Gather, I’ll help you navigate social and family dynamics, building a community and network of support that will sustain you in the journey. You may have some loved ones who are eager to share this adventure with you, and others could be fiercely resistant. If your family is anything like mine, you might even have a few members who are prone to acting like jerks on occasion. You can’t control what anyone else does. But I’ll help you to enroll loved ones, find allies, and navigate social relationships.

And in Part Four, Transform, you’ll discover how you can make real, lasting change on the planet. (Spoiler alert: It can be surprisingly easy, because you’re a lot more powerful than you know!)

The Food Revolution program works well when you spend a week honing each of these parts. But you can go at any pace and use this book in any way that helps you to apply what you’re learning. If you like, you can read the entire book and then incorporate all four phases at once over the course of the following month.

I hope you can implement this revolution for at least 31 consecutive days. If you do, you’ll see tremendous results—and I hope you’ll never go back. But if you need to push “pause” while relatives visit or you’re on vacation, or if you get distracted, it’s okay to come back and pick up where you left off. Whether you take 31 days, or three days, or three years isn’t the point.

What matters is that you’re here, and that you’re moving forward.

Every single chapter includes action steps with three options. Choose the ones that make the most sense for you. If some of the actions don’t appeal to you, that’s okay. I’ll still celebrate every step you take. Doing five of the actions can make a very real difference. Ten will be game changing. Do them all, and your world will never be the same again.

The key is that you take action. That’s how you get results. The truth is, cancer, like any other lifestyle-linked disease, doesn’t care how much you know. But it does care, a lot, about what you eat and how you live. Cancer and heart disease and diabetes and obesity all want you to eat foods that undermine your joy and your vitality. I want something far better for you.

So what do you say? For the next 31 days, will you join me in this healing Food Revolution?

Shall we get started?