Diet for a New America

This well-documented expose of America's ""factory farms'' should prompt even die-hard meat-and-potatoes lovers to reevaluate their diets. Asserting that ``we are ingesting nightmares for breakfast, lunch and dinner,'' Robbins, who is medical director of the California Institute for Health and Healing, details how livestock is raised under increasingly industrialized conditions by ``agribusiness oligopolies.'' Grazing and foraging have given way to debeaking, tail-docking, dehorning and castration, and treatment with pesticides, hormones, growth and appetite stimulants, tranquilizers and antibioticswhich, in turn, are assimilated by humans. The author correlates our ``protein obsessed'' society with a higher incidence of arteriosclerosis, osteoporosis, cancer and other degenerative diseases, as well as freakish occurrences like premature puberty from estrogen contamination. As Robbins debunks nutritional myths perpetuated by the powerful meat and dairy industries (indicting as well his family's Baskin-Robbins ice-cream empire), this is sure to prove controversial. Photos not seen by PW. (September 10)