The European Vegetarian Union held its AGM last Sunday, and elected a new board which could bring in major changes on a scale never previously seen in the veg world. The key is the election of four professional CEOs/Directors of...

[updated July 2012] I started writing these blogs in February 2010, and I’ve compiled some of those that have attracted the most interest, including all the historical items, into an e-book. If you want to go straight to the book, it’s at: www.ivu.org/history/Vegan_History.pdf  (6mb)...

A couple years ago Hazel and I went to Los Angeles and San Francisco. This is an update of the blog I wrote at time as it might provide some ideas for those heading for the IVU events in California...

[updated July 2012] Only a few of years ago the title of this blog would have seemed a contradiction, as we didn't know any veg*ns in the Middle East other than our friends in Israel. That has all changed now....

I spent a couple of days in Amsterdam last week, at a joint meeting between the Vegetarian Society UK and the Nederlandse Vegetariërsbond (NVB, founded 1894). They were two of the three founding members of the International Vegetarian Union in...

[updated June 2012] Before the 1980s it was all more serious – vegetarians and vegans had congresses and conferences. Then it all began to change: 1981 – International Vegan Festival – started in Denmark. In the smaller European countries you...

[updated October 2012] India can reasonably claim to be the spiritual home of vegetarianism, with an unbroken line of countless generations over thousands of years. There are currently about 300 million lacto-vegetarians in India, equal to the entire population of the...

[updated June 2012] I was once asked "Why do Africans go vegetarian?" - it was an unexpected question but the reply was simple enough: "For the same reason as everyone else, health, animals, environment or religion, according to their personal...

[updated May 2012] Westerners often seem to be surprised to hear that there are millions of vegetarians, indeed vegans, in China, but this is nothing new. Way back in the 1880s the British and French Vegetarian Societies printed reports from...

This NVW blog began in May 2010 and has now been updated for 2012: We are now in the middle of National Vegetarian Week in the UK, so this is some background to it and what is happening elsewhere. The...

Whether you subscribe to Eve and Adam or Evolution, it is clear that our distant ancestors lived entirely on fast-food. It was growing all around them in the jungle/garden – they just reached out, grabbed some fruit, nuts, berries, leaves,...

I had been to Asia before, to Thailand and a couple of trips to India, so I didn’t expect this one to East Asia to be dramatically different, but it was. In November 2009, the Indonesian Vegetarian Society (IVS) hosted...

A few days ago I went to Amazon books, just searched for ‘vegan’, and got 4,503 results. That sounds great, except that after looking thru dozens of pages all I could see were American cookbooks, finding any mention of the...

And other questions . . . B12 was discovered 1948, the word ‘vitamin’ having first appeared in the early 20th century. So if 19th century vegans had vitamin deficiencies they had no way of knowing it, and would have diagnosed...

By the late 1970s the situation for vegans on opposite sides of the North Atlantic was very different. The 1975 IVU World Vegetarian Congress, held in Maine, USA, had been all plant-food, plus some small separate containers of milk and...

They could have come from the planet Vega for all most other Americans might have known. But they had been around for a long time, living quietly among the flesh-eaters, before more arrived in the big splash-down of 1975 ....

The word ‘vegan’ and the first Vegan Society began in November 1944 in England, but it wasn’t long before the idea spread to other countries. These notes are mostly from The Vegan, the journal of the Vegan Society, all copies...

In 1998 the American Natural Hygiene Society, after 50 years, changed its name to the National Health Association (NHA), on the basis that most people didn’t understand what ‘Natural Hygiene’ meant. Quite right too, for me ‘hygiene’ has always been...

We know there were some journals, published in London in the 1850s, which included only recipes entirely from plant foods and water, and it is possible some were compiled into a book. But until we can find a copy of that...

We now know that the people closely connected with the Alcott House Academy, near London, were the first to call themselves ‘vegetarian’. This is how the school began. James Pierrepont Greaves was born in 1777, and for his first 40...