Vegan Living

Frances Moore Lappé’s 1971 book Diet for a Small Planet described waste and taught readers to combine proteins. Ten years later she wrote that it was much easier than she had thought. What the evidence says now, and the feed argument fifty years on.

It began with a leaflet: Ruth Harrison went to see the farms for herself, wrote Animal Machines in 1964, and within weeks the British government announced an inquiry. The Brambell report, the origin of the five freedoms, the link to Peter Singer, and the criticism the book faced.

We checked six claims from The Game Changers against published research: vegan athletes and performance, plant protein and muscle, the gladiators of Ephesus, what one meal does to blood and arteries, and the erection demo. What is supported, what is overstated, and where the film can be watched today.

Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) rests on Bentham’s question: can they suffer? The argument of the 1973 essay that grew into the book, the examples that have aged (cages, numbers, where the line of sentience falls), the rewritten 2023 edition, the two Turkish translations and the main criticism of the utilitarian view.

World Vegetarian Day was started by the North American Vegetarian Society in 1977 and endorsed by the International Vegetarian Union in 1978. The 1975 Maine congress and its “Funeral for Famine”, the link to World Vegan Day on 1 November, and why “lacto-vegan” is not a real term.

179 years ago today, the Vegetarian Society was founded at a hydropathic clinic in Ramsgate, England. The day as told by the 1847 report, where the word “vegetarian” came from, why most members were working people, and why the eggs-and-dairy debate is as old as the word itself.

In 1892 Tolstoy wrote a preface to the Russian translation of Howard Williams’ The Ethics of Diet. Published in English as The First Step, it argues that self-restraint is the first step of a moral life — and contains the Tula slaughterhouse passage. It is an ethical argument, not a nutritional one.

A commentary on Tom Regan’s Empty Cages: the rights theory behind it, why he asked for empty cages rather than bigger ones, who he wrote it for, and the questions critics raised.

The word vegan has a datable birthday: a four-page newsletter signed in Leicester on 24 November 1944. Reading that document shows the famous etymology is missing from it, the break with the vegetarians was no schism, and the 1944 meaning was not today’s.