When Did Veganism Start?
Did Socrates eat meat?
I’m not a vegan, but I’m fascinated by the concept. I am a lover of animals and eat as sustainably and ethically as I can, but I’m not a vegan. I eat a lot of vegetarian meals but that’s mostly by accident. A lot of foods I eat just happen to have no animal products.
In case you’ve been living under a metaphorical rock and don’t know, veganism is the elimination of animal products in one’s life, particularly in diet. Meaning, no eggs, no milk, no meat, no leather, no pearls, no nothing. But when did humans decide this was a good idea?
It’s not that simple. The short answer could be 1944, when the term “vegan” was coined. But people obviously ate this diet or lived this lifestyle prior to a word being put to it, right?
Vegetarianism, a simpler diet that forgoes meat but uses some other animal products like milk and eggs, can be dated all the way back to 3300 BC in India. Many ancient Greek philosophers and playwrights also abstained from meat consumption; both Ovid and Plutarch are cited as being vegetarians. According to some scholars, “Pythagoras was distinguished by such purity and so avoided killing and killers that he not only abstained from animal foods, but even kept his distance from cooks and hunters.” Basically, animals deserve justice just as humans do.
It was — unsurprisingly — Western culture that kicked the vegetarian movement into high gear. In 19th century Britain and America, vegetarianism became a huge fad, and celebrities like Percy Bysshe Shelley advocated for the avoidance of animals and animal products. A British doctor named William Lambe even published a study that stated that a “water and vegetable diet” could cure anything from “tuberculosis to acne.”
The first vegetarian society was formed in 1847 in England, and just three years later the American Vegetarian Society formed, co-founded by the inventor of the Graham cracker (cool, right?). It wasn’t until 1944 that a man called Donald Watson determined that there was a difference between non-meat eaters who consumed dairy and those who didn’t. Thus was born the term “veganism.”
You may be asking yourself the same question I did: What the heck is a vegetarian society? Basically, the Vegetarian Society was a group of people who didn’t eat meat that came together and discussed meat alternatives, recipes, and wrote newsletters about the subject. Mahatma Gandhi was an executive member of the first society in England. Gandhi was institutional in the promotion of morality based vegetarianism rather than health based. He argued that vegetarianism was a matter of ethics.
Modern day vegetarianism and veganism still takes on several different forms. Some vegans eat honey, some don’t (but that’s a whole separate conversation). Some vegetarians eat and use eggs, some don’t. Some will use eggs in recipes but won’t eat them on their own. There’s a lot of discrepancy in the definition of what makes a vegan a vegan.
There are more “food movements” in the 21st century than ever before. Pescatarians (those who abstain from eating meat but do eat fish), Raw Vegans (vegans who don’t eat cooked food), Fruitarians (those only eating fruit); the variations are literally endless. In modern world culture, veganism is common among millennials and elders alike. There’s a lot of speculation on whether a vegan diet could be good for digestion or nutrient intake.
Whatever way you slice it, the history of vegetarianism and veganism goes way back. Something I thought was simply a fad diet of the modern world has a much richer history.
