The Dish on Vegetarianism

What is a Vegetarian? · History of Vegetarianism
Thoughts on Vegetarianism · Selected Resources


What is a Vegetarian?

  • The definition of "vegetarianism" differs from person to person. Most people who call themselves vegetarians do not consume the flesh of any animal, but may eat eggs and dairy products. These people are called lacto-ovo vegetarians.
  • Strict vegetarians, or vegans, are people who do not consume animal products of any kind, including dairy, eggs, honey and gelatin.
  • Most people choose to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle based on health concerns or for ethical and/or spiritual reasons.
  • The United States is currently home to millions of vegetarians, each one very different than the next. Vegetarians cannot be classified by class, ethnicity or race, sexual orientation, religion, gender, age, or ability, and vegetarianism can be practiced by anyone.

Vegetarianism throughout History


Pythagoras, teaching music, in The School of Athens by Raphael.
  • Although it may seem like vegetarianism is a relatively new concept, the reality is that plant-based diets have a rich history dating back to evolutionary times. Believed by many scientists to have largely subsisted on plants and fruits, our earliest ancestors may have been primarily gatherers, rather than the carnivorous hunters many people imagine them to be. (1 & 2)
  • Many of the world's earliest thinkers and writers are known to have ruminated on the merits of abstaining from animal flesh, including Plutarch, Ovid, Seneca and Plato. Pythagoras, who lived towards the end of the 6th century B.C., is perhaps one of the most well known vegetarians of ancient times. (3)
  • History also dictates that some early Christians, Hindus, Jains, Buddists, and even a small minority of early Muslims and Jews, abstained from animal flesh as part of their religious practices. (4)
  • More modern, and perhaps some of the most notable, references to vegetarianism showed up in the works of prominent writers, philosophers and other "radicals" living in England throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Influential people who took an interest in humane dietary choices included Jeremy Bentham, Voltaire, Alexander Pope, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. (5)
  • The first Vegetarian Society was formed in England in 1843, and helped establish a more organized vegetarian movement. Soon after, the rest of the world began to follow suit, and, according to the International Vegetarian Union, "by 1914 there was a Vegetarian Society in almost every country of Europe and many more around the world." (6)
  • Formed in 1850, the first American Vegetarian Society (AVS) was led by William Alcott, physician and author of The Vegetable Diet As Sanctioned by Medical Men and By Experience in All Ages. (7) Attracting people from the women's, civil rights, and temperance movements, the group's 1853 New York City vegetarian festival was attended by such influential activists as Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone. (8)
  • AVS President William Alcott was also known for being the cousin of Bronson Alcott, co-founder of Fruitlands, the Massachusetts vegetarian community once home to Little Women author Louisa May Alcott. (9) A friend of famed intellectuals William Ellery Channing and Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott also inspired many with his staunch vegetarianism. (10)
  • In 1944, Donald Watson and Elsie Shrigley, both members of the Vegetarian Society in England, broke from the group and formed "a coalition of nondairy vegetarians," known as the Vegan Society. Watson coined the term "vegan" when he tired of using "total vegetarian" to describe vegetarians who abstained from dairy products. "Vegan" was derived from the word "vegetarian" by adding the first three letters (veg) to the last two (an), because veganism starts with vegetarianism and "carries it through to its logical conclusion." (11)
  • The first American Vegan Society was formed by two Californians, Dr. Catherine Nimmo and Rubin Abramowitz, in 1948. (12)
  • The British movement only continued to grow throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. However, vegetarianism was less common in the United States until the 1970s, particularly after the publication of Frances Moore Lappe's, Diet for a Small Planet.The book, which sold millions of copies, posited vegetarianism as a solution to excessive resource depletion. It seemed to be an impetus for a

    Peter Singer at Farm Sanctuary's New York Shelter with Teresa.
    surge in veg cookbooks, publications (like Vegetarian Times), restaurants, and experimental communities (like The Farm in Tennessee). Peter Singer's ground-breaking work, Animal Liberation, introduced the world to the horrors of factory farming. It was also published in 1975. (13)
  • Increasingly endorsed by medical professionals and praised for its health benefits, vegetarianism further edged its way into the mainstream with the publication of books such as Dr. John McDougall's The McDougall Plan (1983) and John Robbins' Diet for a New America (1987). Moving on into the early 1990s, Dr. Dean Ornish's famous Program for Reversing Heart Disease and the diet's endorsement by the American Dietetic Association allowed for the proliferation of the vegetarian culture we continue to enjoy today. (14)

Works Cited

(1, 3) Dozell, Anne. "A Brief History of Vegetarianism." Lifelines Newsletter. The Toronto Vegetarian Society. May/June 1996. 20 June 2006. <http://www.veg.ca/newsletr/mayjun96/history.html>.

(2, 13, 14) Bluejay, Michael. "A History of Vegetarianism." Vegetarian Guide. 1998. 20 June 2006. <http://michaelbluejay.com/veg/history.html>.

(4) "Vegetarianism." Wikipedia. 21 June 2006. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism>.

(5) Lee, Maxwell. "History of Vegetarianism." The Vegetarian Society. 20 June 2006. <http://www.vegsoc.org/info/developm.html>.

(6) "History of the International Vegetarian Union." International Vegetarian Union. 14 June 2006. 20 June 2006. <http://www.ivu.org/history/>.

(7,9) "The American Vegetarian Society." International Vegetarian Union. 11 May 2005. 21 June 2006. <http://www.ivu.org/history/societies/americanvs.html>.

(8) Icobbo, Karen. "Vegetarians in New York, circa 1853." The Viva Vine: The Vegetarian Issues Magazine. Via Veggie Society. September/ October 1999. 21 June 2006. <http://www.vivavegie.org/vvi/vva/vvi36/#roots>

(10) Iacobbo, Karen. "Bronson Alcott: A glimpse at our vegetarian heritage." The Viva Vine: The Vegetarian Issues Magazine. Via Veggie Society. May/June 1999. 21 June 2006. <http://www.vivavegie.org/vvi/vva/vvi35/index.html#roots>.

(11,12) Stepaniak, Joanne. The Vegan Sourcebook: Second Edition. Illinois: Lowell House, 2000.

Thoughts on Vegetarianism

  • Many of the world's most progressive and renowned thinkers, humanitarians, writers, artists, and leaders—both past and present—have advocated for vegetarian and compassionate living. Coincidence? Maybe not!

    "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"

    Jeremy Bentham

    "Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is-whether its victim is human or animal-we cannot expect things to be much better in this world...We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature."

    Rachel Carson

    "Kindness and compassion towards all living things is a mark of a civilized society…Only when we have become nonviolent towards all life will we have learned to live well ourselves."

    Cesar Chavez

    "Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not die, so do other creatures."

    The Dalai Lama

    "Nothing can be more shocking and horrid than one of our kitchens sprinkled with blood and abounding with the cries of expiring victims or with the limbs of dead animals scattered or hung up here and there."

    Alexander Pope

    "If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals."

    Albert Einstein

    "The more we learn of the true nature of non-human animals…the more ethical concerns are raised regarding their use in the service of man."

    Jane Goodall

    "Spiritual progress does demand at some stage that we should cease to kill our fellow creatures for the satisfaction of our bodily wants."

    Mohandas Gandhi

    "I am astonished to think what appetite first induced man to taste of a dead carcass or what motive could suggest the notion of nourishing himself with the flesh of animals which he saw, just before, bleating, bellowing, walking, and looking about them."

    Plutarch

    "While so much ill-treatment of animals goes on…while so much brutality prevails in our slaughterhouses...we all bear guilt."

    Albert Schweitzer

    "To abstain from the flesh of animals is to foster and to encourage innocence."

    Seneca

    "Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends."

    George Bernard Shaw

    "If the use of animal food be, in consequence, subversive to the peace of human society, how unwarrantable is the injustice and the barbarity which is exercised toward these miserable victims. They are called into existence by human artifice that they may drag out a short and miserable existence of slavery and disease, that their bodies may be mutilated, their social feelings outraged. It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery."

    Percy Bysshe Shelley

    "I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals."

    Henry David Thoreau

    "If he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food, because ...its use is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to the moral feeling."

    Leo Tolstoy

    "The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites, or women for men."

    Alice Walker

Selected Resources

Books

Becoming Vegan: The Complete Guide to Adopting a Healthy Plant-Based Diet
Brenda Davis, R.D., and Vesanto Melina, M.S., R.D.

Being Vegan: Living with Conscience, Conviction, and Compassion
Joanne Stepaniak, M.S.Ed.

Complete Idiot's Guide to Vegan Living
Beverly Lynn Bennett & Ray Sammartano

Diet for a New America: How Your Food Choices Affect Your Health, Happiness and the Future of Life on Earth
John Robbins

Diet for Transcendence: Vegetarianism and the World Religions
Steven Rosen

Ethical Vegetarianism: From Pythagoras to Peter Singer
Kerry Walters & Lisa Portmess

The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-Eating
Howard Williams

Living Among Meat-eaters: The Vegetarian's Survival Handbook
Carol J. Adams

101 Reasons Why I'm Vegetarian
Pamela Rice

Religious Vegetarianism: From Hesiod to the Dalai Lama
Kerry Walters

Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating
Erik Marcus

The Vegan Sourcebook
Joanne Stepaniak, M.S. ED.

Vegetarian America: A History
Karen & Michael Iacobbo

Vegetarian Food for Thought: Quotations & Inspirations
Gail Davis

Vegetarianism: A History
Colin Spencer

Voices from the Garden: Stories of Becoming a Vegetarian
Sharon & Daniel Towns

World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony
Will Tuttle, Ph.D.

**Please note: All resources listed in this section are offered to provide supplemental information only and do not necessarily represents the viewpoints of Farm Sanctuary or its staff.

Magazines

Herbivore Magazine
Herbivore started in 2003 with the idea that there was exciting, vital culture coming out of the vegetarian community. The staff's goal is to map it with humor, sensitivity and passion, and their focus is on the art, music, humor, fashion, politics, activism and personalities coming out of the community of people who choose not to eat animals.

Satya Magazine
Satya is a monthly publication focusing on vegetarianism, environmentalism, animal advocacy, and social justice. In Sanskrit, "satya" means "truth," and formed the basis of Mohandas Gandhi's Satyagraha or "truth action" movement for Indian self-sufficiency. Satya is committed to continuing Gandhi's legacy by increasing dialogue among activists from diverse backgrounds and engaging readers in ways to integrate compassion into their daily lives.

Vegetarian Times
This magazine delivers all the information readers need to live a more healthful lifestyle. It provides a variety of delicious, staff-tested vegetarian and vegan recipes, cooking tips, and entertaining suggestions, as well as comprehensive coverage of the latest research on health, nutrition and fitness.

Veggie Health
Published three times a year, VeggieHealth provides a reassuring and honest voice about the benefits of following a plant-based diet and why it is the very best way to ensure good health. Each issue is packed with the latest science on diet and health from around the world, but there's no jargon, just easy-to-read informative features that everyone can understand.

VegNews
Since beginning publication in 2000, VegNews has become the most talked about vegetarian magazine. The premier magazine to focus on a vegetarian lifestyle, VegNews offers its more than 150,000 readers up-to-date information on living a compassionate and healthy lifestyle with such features as: the latest vegetarian news, intriguing interviews, travel tales, food and health, celebrity buzz, delicious vegan recipes, vegetarian city guides...from Los Angeles to Paris, the hottest new veg products, global event calendars, practical advice, fabulous vegan weddings, and much, much more!

**Please note: All resources listed in this section are offered to provide supplemental information only and do not necessarily represents the viewpoints of Farm Sanctuary or its staff.


Websites

All Veggie Links
A directory of links to all things vegetarian, this site covers topics such as vegetarian recipes, travel, restaurants, cooking, nutrition, cookbooks, groups, products, shopping, books, magazines, directories, dining guides, and more!

Grassroots Veganism with Jo Stepaniak
The spirit of this site is to provide information about all aspects of vegan living and answer some of the questions you may have about a vegan lifestyle.

NetVeggie
A vegetarian directory of online resources designed to help you find information on veg food, nutrition, products, and more.

SuperVegan
Winner of VegNews' 2006 Veg Webby Award, this ambitious website made by vegans for vegans has an excellent vegan web directory of health and diet to food culture links.

Vegan Freak
Vegan Freak is the essential guide for new vegans, longtime vegans or anyone just plain curious about veganism.

The Vegetarian Site
TheVegetarianSite.com came into being with the goal of promoting and providing support for your vegetarian or vegan lifestyle. They offer authoritative information on a wide array of topics, from health and nutrition to animal rights issues to agriculture and the environment.

Vegetarians in Paradise
The mission of this invaluable site is to offer the vegetarian community a nesting place to roost awhile and share information about a lifestyle that may keep us flying around a few years longer than our non-vegetarian friends.

VeggiePlace
VeggiePlace is a virtual library of information about the benefits of a healthy and nutritional vegetarian-enhanced diet.

VegSource
The mission of VegSource is to offer the most up-to-date health and diet information possible, and to encourage the many good reasons for a plant- based diet.

**Please note: All websites listed in this section are offered to provide supplemental information only and do not necessarily represents the viewpoints of Farm Sanctuary or its staff. Sites are not maintained or monitored by Farm Sanctuary.

DVDs

Eating, 2nd Edition: Introducing the Rave Diet
Eating, 2nd Edition: Introducing The RAVE Diet presents graphic evidence of how animal foods are not meant for human consumption, and how the suffering and death of the animals "takes revenge" on the humans who eat them by causing most of our chronic diseases, and how the switch to an all whole-food plant-based diet can begin to reverse many of these diseases in as little as three weeks.

Vegan Gal
A DVD packed with practical advice, including: why a plant-based diet is the best, where and how to grocery shop, how to get started, meal planning and kid tips, making healthier choices at restaurants, step-by-step recipes you can make at home, and motivation to make your life easier and better.

**Please note: All resources listed in this section are offered to provide supplemental information only and do not necessarily represents the viewpoints of Farm Sanctuary or its staff.

Podcasts/Radio

Erik's Diner
Hosted by author Erik Marcus, this daily podcast covers many timely veg- related topics and more.

Go Vegan Radio
Hosted by Bob Linden, this weekly broadcast/podcast show features exceptional guests and covers everything from slashed-food to cookie recipes, animal rights, diet, health, environment, world hunger, morality, justice, peace, and more.

Vegetarian Food for Thought
This site addresses commonly asked questions about animal rights, food, cooking, and nutrition; demystifies what it means to "be vegan."

Vegan Radio
Vegan Radio offers a broadcast and podcast show about vegan culture: animal rights issues, the vegan diet, the vegan lifestyle, and the greater relationships to environmentalism, spirituality, politics, and salsa dancing.

**Please note: All resources listed in this section are offered to provide supplemental information only and do not necessarily represents the viewpoints of Farm Sanctuary or its staff. Podcasts/radio shows are not monitored by Farm Sanctuary.

Blogs

Eat Air- A Vegan Food Log
When you tell someone you're vegan, they ask (often incredulously) "What do you eat?!" This blog seeks to answer that question here, while demonstrating that it's not that hard eating vegan.

Fat Free Vegan Kitchen
This is a delicious blog by a health-conscious vegan who likes good food. Each daily post includes a new recipe, accompanied by gorgeous photos.

PB&J Campaign
Find how many pb&j's it takes to save a chicken and more

The Urban Vegan
This blog is about vegan life in the big city, and offers an honest slice of vegan life, including the good, the bad and the ugly.

The Veg Blog
The Veg Blog started with the intention of providing the point of view of a new vegetarian in an attempt to help other new vegetarians. It also has something to offer long-time vegetarians who may need a little reminder about why they're doing what they're doing.

Vegan Lunchcast
It takes a special kind of person to get excited by pictures of delicious vegan food. If you are one of those people then sit back and enjoy this blog about what one grown-up vegan takes to work for lunch everyday.

**Please note: All blogs listed in this section are offered to provide supplemental information only and do not necessarily represents the viewpoints of Farm Sanctuary or its staff. Blogs are not maintained or monitored by Farm Sanctuary.