History of vegetarianism

• 1. Introduction

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  The history of vegetarianism stretches back at least to the 9th century BCE, when Lord Parshvanath, the 23rd Jain leader, was said to preach nonviolence toward all living creatures. Across two and a half millennia and every inhabited continent, human beings have returned again and again to the same set of questions: what do we owe to animals, what does our food say about who we are, and who gets to decide? The answers have come from monks in medieval Japan, from Romantic poets in England, from women reformers in Victorian Manchester, and from a secretary in Leicester who, in 1944, coined a new word for a new idea. This documentary traces those threads, from the ancient principle of ahimsa to the first legally vegetarian city in the world.

• 2. Ancient Roots: India and Ahimsa

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  Jain and Buddhist sources place the principle of nonviolence toward animals as an established rule in both religions by the 6th century BCE. The Jain version of that principle may be older still: Lord Parshvanath, whom modern historians regard as a historical figure, preached nonviolence in the 9th century BCE, centuries before the more familiar era of Mahavira. The Tirukkural, dated to the late 5th century CE, devotes full chapters to non-animal diet, non-harming, and non-killing.

  The Buddhist picture is more complicated. One school of thought holds that the Buddha and his followers accepted meat from hosts or alms-givers as long as the animal had not been killed specifically for them. Another school, supported by Mahayana texts, insists the sangha was strictly vegetarian from the start. The Mahaparinibbana Sutta adds an unresolved puzzle: it records that the Buddha died after eating sukara-maddava, a term some translators render as pork and others as mushrooms. The first major schism in Buddhism, according to the Vinaya Pitaka, happened while the Buddha was still alive, when a group led by Devadatta broke away precisely because they wanted stricter rules, including an unconditional ban on meat eating.

  Ashoka, the Buddhist emperor who lived from 304 to 232 BCE, turned these philosophical debates into policy. He promulgated detailed laws protecting many species, abolished animal sacrifice at his court, and had his edicts carved in stone. One edict records that where once hundreds of thousands of animals were killed daily in the royal kitchen, the number had been reduced to two peacocks and a deer, "and the deer not always." He pledged that in time even those three creatures would be spared.

  In the Hindu tradition, the concept of the Guna shaped dietary practice across the Vedic period, roughly 1500 to 500 BCE. Three qualities, Sattva, Rajas, and Tamas, mapped onto vegetarian, spicy, and meaty foods respectively. Brahmins, as priests of the highest caste, typically adhered to the Sattva-guided vegetarian diet. The Vedas, the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata all include passages supporting a meatless diet. Philosopher Michael Allen Fox described Hinduism as having "the most profound connection with a vegetarian way of life."

• 3. Greeks, Pythagoreans, and the Soul

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  In ancient Greece the vegetarian diet carried an explicit philosophical name: abstinence from beings with a soul, or apokhé empsúkhon. The earliest reliable evidence for vegetarian theory and practice in Greece dates from the 6th century BCE, when the Orphic religious movement may have practiced it. Whether Pythagoras himself prohibited all meat is uncertain; later writers amplified what was probably a more selective set of prohibitions. Eudoxus of Cnidus, a student of Archytas and Plato, wrote that Pythagoras "not only abstained from animal foods, but even kept his distance from cooks and hunters." Pythagoras additionally forbade his students from consuming eggs and wearing woolen clothing.

  Behind these rules lay a specific ethical argument: animals possess both intelligence and passion, the critical elements for sentience, and their mistreatment was therefore unethical. The concept of transmigration of the soul, metempsychosis, reinforced this view. Both Orphics and strict Pythagoreans refused the ritual offerings of meat to the gods, which placed them at odds with mainstream religious practice.

  In the 5th century BCE, Empedocles went further, distinguishing himself as a radical advocate of respect for animals in general. The Neo-Platonist Porphyry, writing centuries later, produced the most elaborate ancient pro-vegetarian text known, On Abstinence from Eating Animals. Porphyry argued that animals are aware, have memory, and can evaluate situations. He maintained that killing an animal is no different from taking the life of a human being, making him one of the first thinkers to assert that animal life is equal to human life.

  Not everyone agreed. Almost all the Stoics were emphatically anti-vegetarian, with the notable exception of Seneca. Their position rested on the claim that brutes lack reason and therefore no ethical obligations apply. The Cynics, whose extremely frugal way of life led to a practically meatless diet, did not make vegetarianism a formal principle. The concept of a Golden Age, a primordial time when humans needed no meat because the earth produced all food spontaneously, was recorded by Hesiod, Plato, Ovid, and others. Ovid's Metamorphoses gave this idea and the figure of Pythagoras their widest European audience; before the word "vegetarianism" was coined, English speakers called adherents "Pythagoreans."

• 4. Monks, Hermits, and the Christian Tradition

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  Following the Christianization of the Roman Empire in the 4th through 6th centuries, vegetarianism nearly vanished from Europe as a coherent practice. What replaced it was something narrower: monastic restriction on meat, driven by asceticism rather than ethics. The Rule of St. Benedict, written in the 6th century, permitted Benedictines to eat fish and fowl but forbade the meat of quadrupeds unless the religious was ill. Fish was never prohibited in any Christian monastic rule, because Jesus himself had eaten fish according to Luke 24:42-43.

  St. Jerome, who died in 419, was the most prominent model for medieval monks who chose to renounce meat. William of Malmesbury records that Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester, who died in 1095, adopted a strict vegetarian diet for a strikingly human reason: he found it difficult to resist the smell of roasted goose. Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, observed a vegetarian diet as an act of physical austerity rather than out of concern for animals. A passage from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur portrays the hermit Nacien gathering herbs, having "tasted none other meat of a great while."

  Historian John Passmore concluded that no surviving textual evidence exists for ethically motivated vegetarianism in either ancient and medieval Catholicism or the Eastern Churches. St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas both emphasized that humans owe no duties to animals. St. Francis of Assisi used mystical language about animal beings, but contemporary sources do not claim he practiced or advocated vegetarianism.

  Dissenting movements kept a different flame alive. The Encratites, the Ebionites, and the followers of the 4th-century monk Eustathius of Antioch all considered abstention from meat part of their asceticism. Medieval Bogomils of the Thrace region in Bulgaria and the Cathar dualists of southern France also despised meat eating. Across the Eastern Orthodox world, fasting periods required complete abstention from animal products, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church prescribes vegan fasting on Wednesdays, Fridays, and throughout the Lenten season, so that Ethiopian cuisine to this day contains many fully vegan dishes.

• 5. Renaissance to Revolution

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  Leonardo da Vinci, who lived from 1452 to 1519, was among the first figures of the European Renaissance to support vegetarianism as a philosophical concept grounded in ethics. Pierre Gassendi, 1592 to 1655, followed in the same current. By the 17th century the leading theorist of what was still called the "Pythagorean diet" in England was Thomas Tryon, 1634 to 1703, who published The Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness in 1683. John Evelyn published Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets in 1699. Scottish physician George Cheyne, 1672 to 1743, authored An Essay of Health and Long Life, first published in 1724.

  The Romantic poets carried vegetarianism into the early 19th century as a cause tied to broader social reform. Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792 to 1822, was influenced by John Frank Newton's Return to Nature, or, Defence of the Vegetable Regimen, published in 1811, and followed it with his own A Vindication of Natural Diet in 1813. In the United States the same period produced early figures including Benjamin Franklin, who became a vegetarian at age 16 and later introduced tofu to America in 1770, and Benjamin Lay, 1682 to 1759, a writer and abolitionist.

  The French Catholic priest Sebastien Rale, 1657 to 1724, working in an Abenaki community in Maine, described his strict ascetic vegetarianism in a 1722 letter. The Ephrata Cloister in Pennsylvania, a religious community founded by Conrad Beissel in 1732, was the best-known 18th-century vegetarian community in the United States.

  Philosophers resisted all the way. Rene Descartes, 1596 to 1650, and Immanuel Kant, 1724 to 1804, held that no ethical duties toward animals are possible. Kant nonetheless noted that cruelty to animals hardens a person in their dealings with other humans. By the end of the 18th century in England, the view that animals existed only for human use was losing general assent.

• 6. The Victorian Movement and Its Contradictions

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  In England, 1847, 140 people gathered at a conference in Ramsgate and founded the first Vegetarian Society of the modern Western world. By 1853 it had 889 members; by the end of the century, nearly 4,000. After its first year alone, membership stood at 265, with ages ranging from 14 to 76. The society's philosophical parent was the Bible Christian Church, founded by Reverend William Cowherd in 1809, which had advocated vegetarianism as a form of temperance. About half of the Vegetarian Society's founding membership were "Cowherdites."

  Class shaped the movement in revealing ways. Many working-class Britons already ate mostly meatless diets, not by ethical choice but by economic necessity. The upper-middle-class reformers who organized the society sometimes struggled to bridge that gap. The working class did not have the luxury of dietary idealism, and believed a mixed diet provided essential energy. In March 1880 the Cornishman newspaper reported that a vegetarian restaurant had existed in Manchester for some years, and a new one had just opened in Oxford Street, London.

  Women were central to the movement's practical work even when they were pushed to its margins formally. The Vegetarian Advocate noted that women were more inclined to do actual work in support of vegetarianism and animal welfare, while men tended to speak on the matter. Of the 26 vegetarian cookbooks published during the Victorian era, 14 were written by women. Martha Brotherton had authored what is described as the first vegetarian cookbook, Vegetable Cookery, in 1812. In 1895, Alexandrine Veigele, a French woman living in London, established the Women's Vegetarian Union to promote a "purer and simpler" diet and to reach the working class.

  The movement also drew feminists. Charlotte Perkins Gilman imagined a vegetarian society in her feminist utopia Herland, published in 1915. Margaret Fuller argued in Women of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1845, that the liberation of women would help transform violent male society and make vegetarianism dominant. Frances Power Cobbe, a co-founder of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, identified as a vegetarian and as a feminist; many of her colleagues in the first-wave feminist movement did the same.

• 7. Global Currents and the Birth of Veganism

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  The International Vegetarian Union was founded in Dresden in 1908, drawing together national societies from across the world. The German Vegetarierbund Deutschland, established in Nordhausen in 1867, is the second-oldest vegetarian organization in the world. Historian Albert Wirz observed that the pre-World War I trend toward vegetarianism was partly a reaction to the social upheavals of industrialization and globalization, and it arrived alongside related food movements such as Rohkost, the raw food diet, and Vollwerternahrung, whole food nutrition.

  In Russia, Tolstoy, who lived from 1828 to 1910, became one of the most prominent advocates of vegetarianism. According to Slavist Peter Brang, vegetarian restaurants and associations in Tsarist Russia were seen as symbols of intellectual opposition, heavily shaped by Tolstoy's teachings. In 20th-century England, Cranks opened in Carnaby Street, London, in 1961 as the first successful vegetarian restaurant in the UK; eventually five Cranks restaurants operated in London before the chain closed in 2001.

  Mahatma Gandhi's model of nonviolence toward animals contributed to the popularization of vegetarianism in Western countries. Albert Schweitzer developed his principle of "reverence for life" partly through studying Far Eastern religious concepts of nonviolence, though Schweitzer himself began practicing vegetarianism only shortly before his death. Singer-songwriter Morrissey discussed vegetarianism through the song and album Meat is Murder, and his cult status brought the meat-free lifestyle to a wider audience.

  In August 1944, several members of the British Vegetarian Society asked that a section of its newsletter be devoted to non-dairy vegetarianism. When the request was refused, Donald Watson, secretary of the Leicester branch, set up a new quarterly newsletter in November 1944 and called it The Vegan News. Watson and co-founder Dorothy Morgan chose the word vegan themselves, drawing it from "the first three and last two letters of 'vegetarian'" because, in Watson's words, it marked "the beginning and end of vegetarian." In 2014, the Jain pilgrimage destination of Palitana City in Gujarat became the first city in the world to legally ban the buying and selling of meat, fish, and eggs.