John Robbins (died June 11th 2025, aged 77) was an American campaigner for healthy living and veganism who walked away from the Baskin-Robbins ice-cream fortune.
Robbins grew up in North Hollywood as the only son of Irv Robbins, co-founder of Baskin-Robbins. Ice cream was served at breakfast, lunch and dinner in the family home. As a boy he invented the Jamoca Almond Fudge flavour. Polio crippled his lower body as a child.
At 21 Robbins abandoned the company that was his to inherit. He rejected his father's world of tuxedos at whites-only country clubs and the yacht called The 32nd Flavour. After graduating he fled with his wife Deo to Salt Spring Island off British Columbia, where he built a one-room cabin, grew his own food, taught yoga and lived for a decade on $500 a year.
Returning to California, Robbins became a psychotherapist and author. His first book, Diet for a New America (1987), documented the levels of fat in the American diet, the cholesterol clogging arteries and the resulting death rates. It caused a national stir. He campaigned against inhumane dairy farming — exposing the industry's "happy cattle" marketing as a fiction of dirt lots, permanently pregnant cows treated as four-legged milk pumps, and calves removed at birth for veal. He also argued that grazing was reducing America's forests.
He founded two non-profits: EarthSave and the Food Revolution Network. His son Ocean carried on his missions.
His uncle Burt Baskin, who was seriously overweight, died of a heart attack at 54. Irv Robbins furiously denied that ice cream was partly to blame. The two did not speak for years. By his 70s Irv was seriously ill with type-2 diabetes and heart disease. His cardiologist handed him a copy of Diet for a New America; Irv read it, began to improve, and called his son to say "It turns out you were right."
Stenderup's Law: The sooner you fall behind, the more time you will have to catch up.