This is the most important book of the 21st century...because it’s the one that will get us to the 22nd century. WARNING: This book is not for the faint-hearted!

In "The Real Forbidden Fruit," Jeff Popick blows wide open the myths and misconceptions surrounding meat and its effects on our planet, our bodies, our society and our spirituality - and it’s not a pretty picture.

Using thoughtful and thorough analysis, "The Real Forbidden Fruit" demonstrates how the animal industry, and our complicity with it, has created the dysfunctional and self-destructive world we live in today. Disease, famine, environmental disaster and even war are demonstrated to be direct results of our callous treatment of our fellow inhabitants of this planet.

Fortunately, there is a solution that can lead us all back to the Paradise this world once was, but it requires that we finally recognize what was "The Real Forbidden Fruit".

Foreword by Howard Lyman (The Mad Cowboy)

Today, in my opinion, the Earth is poised on the brink of disaster. For many years I’ve been concerned at the rate we are trashing the planet. At the rate we are destroying rain forests, they will cease to exist in our lifetime.

The Earth’s topsoil is being displaced by our farming practices. In three hundred years, the United States has lost the majority of topsoil that was here when the boat people arrived. Lost topsoil and chemical runoff draining down the Mississippi have caused an area in the Gulf of Mexico as large as the State of New Jersey to be devoid of life.

If these problems are not enough, we can add global warming. The millions of tons of carbon being exhausted into the atmosphere have changed the temperature on the planet. The Earth is warning to the point where the temperature of the water off the coast of California has increased four degrees in the last forty years. The ice fields are shrinking at a rate of about fourteen thousand square miles of ice pack each year. Studies indicate the Arctic ice fields have eroded about forty percent since the 1950s. Melting at today’s rate would mean the Arctic ice cap would disappear within eighteen years.

The Antarctic ice cap is also deteriorating. Recently, a piece of the South Pole ice pack, which is one and a half times larger than the State of Rhode Island, broke off and is drifting north into warm water, where it will melt. There is concern that if a larger section breaks off and moves north, it could raise the levels of the world’s oceans by seventeen feet.

You look at all of these things and you ask yourself, What in the world does this have to do with eating a vegan diet? The answer is: everything.

The population has exceeded six billion people and is doubling every fifty years. There is great concern about how we are going to feed a hungry world. Yet we continue to waste valuable food (grain) and energy to raise animals for food. The fact is, it takes at least twelve pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat.

Global warming, loss of valuable top soil, feeding a hungry world and not wasting energy are at the core of the reasons for adopting a plant-based diet. The largest area of change available to planners in the short term to avert mass starvation will be a change in the global diet.

It makes no difference if the reason you are exploring a plant-based diet is your love of animals, your concern for the environment or just your own health; this book has the answers. Jeff Popick has taken a very complex and p