Her children initially motivated her to pursue the work she does
today. When her youngest child had a life-threatening allergic
reaction, Robyn started learning about food allergies, but also
found alarming stats on the health of America’s children—called
Generation Rx due to the amounts of prescription drugs they
take. She discovered that cancer is the leading cause of death
by disease in American children under the age of 15, and that
there are startling projections of insulin dependency as children
reach adulthood. she did, overhauling their food one thing at a time. Since then,
she’s taught her kids how to cook, discussing with them the
importance of clean food and ingredients.
ROBYN REFLECTS: Robyn is keenly aware that we have a “very, very broken food
system”—one that’s “structured financially in a way that doesn’t
allow farmers to make the choices they may want to make and
makes food companies somewhat beholden to shareholders
and the cheapest ingredients. It has a lowest common
denominator problem.”
I don’t know if it was just my brain or if that data speaks to
everyone the way it spoke to me, but I couldn’t unlearn that data.
I couldn’t turn my back on it. All I could think was: this is the
future of our country. And children may be less than 30 percent
of the population right now, but they’re 100 percent of our country’s
future. If we don’t address this now, who will? What does it look
like 10 or 15 years from now as they become our adult population?
What does our economy look like? What does our innovation,
entrepreneurship and productivity look like? I realized I had
to try to do everything I could to create change—and I couldn’t
do it by myself. It was going take huge collaborations across
industries and expertise. The gift that’s in this work is in that
collaboration. It’s in the people that you meet, the synergies
created and the opportunities in front of all of us today.
So, 10 years ago, her mission started at home. Admittedly,
she wasn’t sure even how to begin, though, because up to that
point, she assumed that everything on the grocery shelves was
safe. Now she knew otherwise—and decided that she needed
to feed her children real food, not fake food. So, that’s what
The philosophy she used at home also transferred to
consumers, corporations and politicians. Again, the way she
communicates her message is so compelling. She observes,
“It’s not about fear mongering. It’s not about scaring people.
It’s about saying that we’re smarter than this, and we can build
a better food system.”
When asked about her mission at large, Robyn responds,
“I fundamentally believe that clean and safe food should
be affordable and accessible to anybody who wants it.
And right now it’s not, and I think that this food movement we’re
now seeing in our country is truly one of the greatest civil rights
movements of our time—the right to information about how
our food is made, how it’s produced, how it’s grown and what’s
applied to it. I think it’s a fundamental right we deserve as
human beings when it comes to protecting the people we love.”
She also realizes that this will be a lifetime work for her,
with each chapter of her life building on the other until
people have been informed about and change has happened
in our food supply.
And she’s already thought through what kind of legacy she
wants to leave for her kids and, eventually, grandkids. She
wants to be able to tell them the story of how we all worked
together to change our food system for the better.
So, while her book unveils the unhealthy truth about our food
industry, she is writing another story with her life and efforts—
one that results in a day when she can share the healthy truth
about our food industry.