Our understanding of vegan nutrition has come a long way in the last 200 years, but it had to start somewhere, and William Lambe (1765-1848), Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, was the first to be specific about it...

Last Saturday Hazel and I went just over the border to Llangollen in North Wales to visit the ‘Vegan Café 4 the Day’ in one of the old halls in the middle of town. The FREE Café tours Wales, setting...

The formal name will take a while to evolve, but the IVU International Council has just made an historic decision about our major event. The International Vegetarian Union began at a Congress in 1908, in Dresden, Germany, and for about...

The Truth Tester was first published in England in 1845, as a temperance (anti-alcohol) journal. In August 1846 a new editor, William Horsell, based near London, took over and incorporated ‘The Healthian’, first published in 1842 by the strictly vegan...

A couple of weeks ago Hazel and I went to the annual BBQ organised by the Wolverhampton Vegans and Veggies – a really nice laid-back afternoon, in some hot sunshine for a change. The city’s football team is called The Wolves,...

The USA’s annual Animal Rights National Conference kicks off next week, coordinated by FARM (Farm Animal Rights Movement) and supported by a host of other AR groups from across the country. Despite the title there are always people from other...

The 37th NAVS Summerfest begins next Tuesday, July 5, and runs until the 9th. Places may still be available at this all-vegan event, see the link at the bottom. Way back in 1975 IVU played a major role in launching...

Andalucia is the southernmost region of Spain – where the recent International Vegan Festival was held. As a guitarist who has tried to play flamenco from time to time, though rather badly, this part of the world has particular interest...

The 13th International Vegan Festival ended last Sunday after eight days in sunny Spain. Everyone attending came away with very different personal highlights – mine were giving a couple of talks on the history and geography of veganism, and having...

This is being uploaded during the 13th International Vegan Festival, near Malaga, Spain, there will be some photos of that next week. Meanwhile the photos below are all from last week. We were delighted that our good friend Susianto was able...

You’ve all read it somewhere: “The word vegetarian has nothing to do with vegetables, it was derived from the Latin ‘vegetus’ meaning whole, fresh, lively, vigorous” etc… Whilst all the dictionaries simply suggest the derivation as ‘vegetable+arian’. Most of us...

This is a brief summary of a talk I gave at the International Vegan Festival in Malaga, Spain, June 4-12, 2011, and at the Midlands Vegan Festival, Wolverhampton UK, October 29, 2011. 1806 – Dr. William Lambe FRCP, in London, England,...

After a couple of months of lively, and even heated, debate about the meaning of the word ‘vegetarian’ the IVU International Council finally reached a unanimous proposal. The Council currently consists of 16 voting members from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, India,...

A few years ago we rarely had more than one international veg event per year, and nearly all in Europe or North America – last year there were at least nine of them, on every continent of the world (well,...

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how much is a video worth? Last year a friend sent me a link which she said had some info I was looking for. It turned out to be a young...

In a poll of British doctors in 2003 John Snow was voted as the greatest physician of all time. Though probably few of them would have known he was what we now call vegan. He grew up in the North-East...

The perpetual problem in promoting the plant-food diet:  the meat-eater says he/she would like to switch to plant-food only but, for whatever reason, says it’s too difficult to make the change all at once. Do you: 1 – scream about...

Dr. William Lambe FRCP (1765-1847) Back in 1815, in London, Dr William Lambe, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (FRCP), published his ‘Water and Vegetable Diet’ in which he stated: “My reason for objecting to every species of matter...

Oh no, not another –ism… Well, everyone else is inventing words… by plantism I mean eating only plants – and ideally wearing plants, growing your own plants for food and conserving plant habitats for other species – vegan self-sufficient environmentalism...

[slightly updated November 2011] Amos Bronson Alcott was an abolitionist vegan in a way that few today are emulating – in the 1830s he was taking a stand against human slavery in the USA. In some parts of the world...