Are ice creams bad?
John Robbins, heir to Baskin-Robbins, spurned an empire of sugar to take on America’s diet—and his father
Image via RestaurantNews.com
What could be more innocent than a scoop of ice cream on a hot day? That cold, creamy indulgence that melts into pure bliss. It is a simple pleasure for most of us. For John Robbins it was the stuff of both dreams and nightmares.
Born into the Baskin-Robbins empire—his father Irv was the co-founder of America’s most iconic ice cream brand—Robbins had every reason to live a life of luxury. He grew up with a cone in hand and clowns in the living room. Ice cream was for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was the family business, their legacy, their joy. Robbins even invented one of the brand’s biggest hits: Jamoca Almond Fudge. But rather than taking over the family throne he walked away.
At 21, Robbins stunned his family by saying no to the ice cream empire and yes to a very different path. He left behind wealth as well as yachts and a swimming pool shaped like a cone to live in a one-room cabin on Salt Spring Island, off British Columbia. There he and his wife Deo survived on $500 a year, grew their own vegetables and practiced yoga. It was a sincere attempt to live in harmony with the Earth and to undo what he believed his family’s fortune had helped perpetuate: unhealthy living and environmental destruction.
His wake-up call had come early. His beloved Uncle Burt, who co-founded Baskin-Robbins with Irv, died of a heart attack at just 54. He was overweight and extremely immersed in the ice cream lifestyle. Robbins saw the connection no one else in the family wanted to admit. Ice cream was a slow killer.
In 1987 Robbins published Diet for a New America, a bombshell of a book that took aim at sugary desserts and the entire American diet. Americans, he wrote, were eating themselves to death. He backed it all up with charts, data, hard truths about cholesterol, fat and the inhumane treatment of animals in industrial farming. And ice cream made the hit list.
It caused a stir, everywhere except in his father’s mansion in North Hollywood, where the autographed copy of the book lay unopened for years.
For Robbins rejecting ice cream was about more than diet. It was about ethics. He saw the dairy industry as a machine of suffering: cows kept perpetually pregnant, their calves taken from them, their bodies reduced to milk-producing tools. He viewed grazing as a threat to forests and meat consumption as a public-health crisis.
He founded EarthSave and the Food Revolution Network to spread his message. Unlike many lifestyle gurus, Robbins practiced what he preached. Even after moving back to California he lived simply in a modest house, ate a plant-based diet and stayed physically fit: despite having been partially paralysed by polio as a child.
He became the face of a movement that challenged the Great American Food Machine. Baskin-Robbins ballooned into the largest ice cream company in the world (eventually sold to United Fruit in 1967). Yet Robbins stuck to his vegan values. The company he could have led churned out hundreds of flavours including vegan options. And though he occasionally indulged in a plant-based scoop—his favourite was a Jamoca Almond Fudge lookalike made from almond butter and coconut milk—his mission never wavered.
The father-son rift lasted decades. Robbins and Irv stopped speaking. By the time Irv was old and ill with type-2 diabetes and heart disease, the consequences of the sugar-coated life were painfully clear. And yet Robbins never gloated. When Irv’s cardiologist handed him a copy of Diet for a New America, something changed. He read it. He changed. And two years later he picked up the phone and said: “It turns out you were right.” So are ice creams bad?
John Robbins didn’t say you could never enjoy one. He wasn’t out to rob people of joy. But he believed—and proved—that we must question the cost of our indulgences: in health, in ethics and in environmental impact. He lived a life that asked us to look past the cone and ask: is this treat worth the price? The answer was no for him. ■