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 I think it is important that people be made aware that the vegetarian movement has a venerable history behind it. It didn't spring full-blown from the head of a flower child in the 1960's. It really begins with Pythagoras in the West in the 6th century BC and has reasserted itself periodically ever since. Some of the greatest thinkers in the history of civilization have been vegetarians--people like Plato, St. Francis of Assisi, Leonardo da Vinci, Ghandi, George Bernard Shaw, Leo Tolstoy, inter alios. Likewise, people  tend
to think that vegetarianism is strictly a secular movement. But in fact
the religion that one is born into very often determines that person's dietary
habits. For example if one is born into the Jain or Hindu faiths in India,
the chances are that one will grow up eating vegetarian food. Wheras, if
one is born into one of the Western faiths--Christianity, Judaism or Islam,
chances are that one will grow up eating dead animals. So religion plays
a formative role in our dietary choices. Many of the secular vegetarian
groups that have sprung up in the West have had religious auspices. For
instance the Bible Christian Church, which was the first vegetarian Church
in America (founded in 1817 by William Metcalfe) impelled Sylvester Graham
and the Alcott cousins, Bronson and William to become vegetarian activists.
William Metcalfe, the founder of the Bible Christian Church also helped
found the first secular vegetarian society in New York in 1850. Similarily
Seventh Day Adventism gave rise to such a formidable vegetarian food reformer
as John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of such all-American foods as Corn
Flakes, Peanut Butter, and meat analogs made from wheat gluten, nuts and
soy. More recently Yoga, Vashnav Hinduism in the form of the International
Society for Krishna Consciousness, Taoism, and Zen Buddhism have been instrumental
in popularizing vegetarianism and non-violent eating in the West.
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© 2000 Rynn Berry |