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...

My recent e-book ‘World Veganism’ has been getting lots of downloads, so I thought I’d write something about a book I wrote 40 years ago, when printing and publishing wasn’t quite so easy in pre-internet days. I started teaching guitar...

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, but the first known ‘vegan’ cookbook came from New York in 1874. Russel Thacher Trall M.D. (right) was born...

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...

In 1850 a British vegetarian, living in India, wrote to a journal in England mentioning that his diet included ‘Graham bread’. Such was the worldwide fame that the American Sylvester Graham had achieved in his promotion of whole-wheat brown flour,...

Francis Newman was President of the Vegetarian Society (the original one in England) for about 12 years in the 1870s and 80s, and almost brought a dramatic change to the course of its history – if he had succeeded, the...

[Feb 2012] I started writing these blogs two years ago, this being #104. To mark the anniversary 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...

In 1875 Gustav Schlickeysen published a book called Obst und Brod - Eine Wissenschaftliche Diätetik – which was translated and re-published in New York, 1877, by M.L. Holbrook M.D. as: Fruit and Bread – a scientific diet. The front cover...

There were people who didn’t eat meat in Medieval Europe, and in Asia, but mostly for very different reasons to what we associate with veganism today. In the western world the time after the fall of the Roman Empire -...

John Frank Newton was a pivotal character in an extraordinary group of people who challenged almost every social convention of the rigid-minded early 19th century England. He was born about 1770 and was educated at Harrow, one of two leading...

In October 2012 the 40th IVU World Veg Congress will join with the Vegsource Healthy Lifestyle Expo in Los Angeles, California. We’ll still be in San Francisco as well, the SF Veg Festival is the previous weekend – October 6-7...

Henry Salt died in 1939, age 88, five years before the invention of the word ‘vegan’, but for his last 55 years he clearly and consistently promoted animals’ rights, and what we now call ethical veganism. He wrote almost forty...