History

The story usually told about veganism begins in a Leicester boardroom in November 1944, when a small group of British vegetarians broke from the parent society to name themselves something new. That founding moment matters, and this article gives it its due. But the ethic it formalized is far older. Twenty-five centuries of argument about killing animals for food — Pythagorean, Jain, Buddhist, Stoic, Christian dissenter, Enlightenment utilitarian, Romantic, hippie, analytic philosopher — sit behind the word Donald Watson coined.

Ancient antecedents

The oldest continuous tradition of principled abstention comes from South Asia. Ahimsa — non-harm to living beings — is central to Jainism, whose most influential teacher, Mahavira, lived in the sixth or fifth century BCE. Jain monastic practice extends non-harm to insects and microorganisms, and Jain laity have kept a strictly vegetarian (and often functionally vegan) table for more than two millennia. Early Buddhist texts share the concept, though the Pali canon is more permissive about almsfood than later Mahayana scriptures, which condemn meat-eating outright. Streams of Hindu practice, especially those shaped by Vaishnava and yogic traditions, have long associated a meatless diet with purity and spiritual discipline.

In the Mediterranean world the reference point is Pythagoras of Samos, active in the late sixth century BCE. What we know of his dietary teaching comes to us through Porphyry, Iamblichus, Ovid, and Diogenes Laertius, rather than from Pythagoras himself, and the historical core is contested. Still, the association was strong enough that “Pythagorean diet” was the standard English name for meatless eating from the Renaissance until the word vegetarian supplanted it in the 1840s. Colin Spencer and Renan Larue both treat the Pythagorean school as the origin point of Western ethical abstention.

Roman Stoicism carried the argument forward in softer form. Seneca, in his ninety-fifth letter to Lucilius, recalls abstaining from animal flesh for a year as a young man under the tutor Sotion, finding the practice salutary before political pressure under Tiberius led him to resume conventional eating. Plutarch wrote two short treatises, On the Eating of Flesh, which ridicule the idea that humans are natural carnivores and insist on the moral weight of the slaughterhouse. The fullest ancient defense is Porphyry’s On Abstinence from Killing Animals (Greek Peri apoches empsuchon), written in the third century CE, a systematic reply to Stoic and Peripatetic arguments for human dominion that remains philosophically alive today.

Early modern revival

After a long Christian-European interval in which meat-eating was the assumed default, abstention re-emerged as a reasoned position in the seventeenth century. Tristram Stuart’s The Bloodless Revolution traces the revival in detail. The English naturalist John Ray, cataloguer of plants and coiner of the biological species concept, argued in the 1690s that anatomy and temperament suited humans to a vegetable diet. Thomas Tryon, a hatter and pamphleteer, published The Way to Health in 1691 and a string of follow-ups defending what he called Pythagorean temperance on grounds that mingled Behmenist mysticism, humane feeling, and practical dietetics. Tryon was read by Benjamin Franklin, who briefly adopted his regime.

The Enlightenment sharpened the question. Jeremy Bentham, in a footnote to chapter seventeen of An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), shifted the moral criterion away from rationality and language. “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” Bentham did not draw the vegan conclusion himself, but the footnote would be quoted in nearly every serious animal-ethics argument for the next two centuries.

Percy Bysshe Shelley took the argument into Romantic polemic. His 1813 pamphlet A Vindication of Natural Diet, expanded from a note to the poem Queen Mab, linked flesh-eating to tyranny, disease, and ecological ruin, and urged a return to fruit, grain, and distilled water. In the United States, the Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham preached a temperance gospel of whole grains, vegetables, and sexual restraint in the 1830s and 40s, leaving his name to the graham cracker and a durable American tradition of dietary reform that would later include John Harvey Kellogg and the Seventh-day Adventists.

The vegetarian movement

The word vegetarian itself is a mid-nineteenth-century coinage, not, as a folk etymology has it, from Latin vegetus meaning lively, but a plain formation on vegetable. The Vegetarian Society was founded on 30 September 1847 at Northwood Villa, a hydropathic hospital in Ramsgate, Kent, bringing together the Bible Christian Church — a small Manchester sect that had required a meatless diet of its members since 1809 — with secular health reformers from the Alcott House community. Its inaugural membership was modest, a few hundred, but the society provided a publication apparatus, annual meetings, and a vocabulary that the argument had lacked.

Sister societies followed on the Continent and in the United States. The American Vegetarian Society was organized in New York in 1850. The International Vegetarian Union, federating the national groups, held its first congress in Chicago in 1908. Through these networks circulated a shared canon of arguments, largely unchanged in shape from the Porphyry-Tryon-Shelley line: health, compassion, economy, spiritual cultivation.

The Vegetarian Society was officially lacto-ovo: its members permitted dairy and eggs. From the 1910s onward a minority pressed for stricter abstention. Mahatma Gandhi, a London law student who joined the society in 1890, took its sufficiency arguments with him back to India. In 1923, the society’s magazine published a letter noting that dairy cows are eventually slaughtered and their calves taken at birth, posing a problem for members who rejected killing.

1944 and the coining of “vegan”

The decisive break came in wartime England. Donald Watson, a Yorkshire woodworking teacher who had stopped eating meat as a boy after watching a pig slaughtered on his uncle’s farm, had become convinced through the 1930s that the dairy industry was ethically continuous with the meat industry. In the August 1944 issue of The Vegetarian Messenger he proposed a subgroup for “non-dairy vegetarians.” When the Vegetarian Society declined to host a regular column, Watson, together with Elsie Shrigley and a handful of others, met in London in early November 1944 and founded a new organization.

They needed a name. Watson and his wife Dorothy, in consultation with the founders, settled on vegan, formed from the first three and last two letters of vegetarian. Watson later explained the choice as marking “the beginning and end of vegetarian” — the position from which vegetarianism started and the destination to which, in his view, it logically tended. The first issue of The Vegan News, edited by Watson, appeared in November 1944 with twenty-five subscribers.

The early society spent several years refining what the new word meant. In 1949 Leslie Cross, a council member, argued that “non-dairy” was too narrow a definition for a movement whose logic was the rejection of animal exploitation as a category. In 1951 the society formally adopted the definition that remains, with minor updating, in use today: veganism is the doctrine that humans should live without exploiting animals. A 1979 deed, executed when the society became a registered charity, enshrined the now-canonical phrasing about excluding “as far as is possible and practicable” all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose.

International spread

The American Vegan Society was founded in 1960 in Malaga, New Jersey, by H. Jay Dinshah, a Parsi-American influenced by Gandhi and by correspondence with Watson. Dinshah added an explicit Jain-inflected vocabulary — his six-pillar ahimsa acronym — and built a small but durable publishing and educational program through the magazine Ahimsa (later American Vegan). Dutch, Swedish, German, and French vegan societies were established through the 1960s and 70s, typically as splinters from older vegetarian bodies. The International Vegetarian Union began admitting vegan-specific affiliates and, more recently, renamed several of its programs to acknowledge the distinction.

Counterculture and the second wave

In the late 1960s and 1970s veganism and ethical vegetarianism were folded into a broader counterculture: macrobiotics, back-to-the-land communalism, yoga, and the nascent environmental movement. Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet (1971) sold three million copies and introduced a generation of American readers to the resource arithmetic of feeding grain to livestock. The book was not strictly vegan — Lappé recommended dairy as a protein complement — but its ecological framing put meat abstention on a new footing.

The philosophical second wave arrived with Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975), written in the wake of an Oxford graduate-student network that included Richard Ryder, who in 1970 had coined the word speciesism. Singer applied a utilitarian framework to factory farming and laboratory experimentation, arguing that the capacity for suffering, not species membership, is the morally relevant fact. Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights (1983) offered a Kantian alternative, grounding the same practical conclusions in the inherent value of subjects-of-a-life. Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990) brought feminist theory to bear on the same material.

These books did not create veganism, but they gave its ethical core a vocabulary acceptable to universities, legislatures, and newspapers.

Contemporary growth

Consumer infrastructure followed. Seth Tibbott founded Turtle Island Foods and launched Tofurky in 1980; the Thanksgiving roast became the first widely recognized American vegan holiday centerpiece. Ethan Brown founded Beyond Meat in 2009, Patrick O. Brown founded Impossible Foods in 2011, and by the late 2010s plant-based burgers were stocked in mainstream supermarkets and fast-food chains. The two companies, alongside a long tail of smaller firms, converted vegan eating from a specialty channel into a category that investors measured in billions.

Campaigns matched the products. Veganuary, a UK nonprofit founded by Matthew Glover and Jane Land in 2014, invited participants to try veganism for the month of January; annual sign-ups grew from a few thousand to more than a million by the mid-2020s. In 2019 the EAT-Lancet Commission, chaired by Walter Willett and Johan Rockström, published a proposed “planetary health diet” recommending sharp reductions in red and processed meat on combined health and environmental grounds. National dietary guidelines in several countries began, haltingly, to follow suit.

Science and regulation moved with the consumer market. Cultivated-meat companies, producing animal cells without slaughter, received their first regulatory approvals in Singapore (2020) and the United States (2023). Plant-based dairy — oat, soy, almond, pea — captured a significant share of fluid-milk categories in several European markets. Animal-rights organizations continued to grow, diversify, and fracture: some pressed for legal personhood for great apes and cetaceans, some for constitutional animal-welfare clauses, some for the abolition of all animal use.

The movement that Donald Watson and Elsie Shrigley began with twenty-five subscribers now has a vocabulary, a supply chain, a scientific literature, and a place in climate policy. It still argues with itself — abolition versus welfare reform, health framing versus ethical framing, consumer strategy versus political strategy — as movements with long histories do. The arguments are recognizably the ones Porphyry was having in the third century.

What this pillar covers

Supporting articles will open out the moments gestured at here. A profile of Donald Watson traces the biography behind the coinage. A focused article on the 1944 founding of the Vegan Society reconstructs the weeks around the first Vegan News. Pythagoras examines the ancient Greek tradition and its reliability. Jainism and ahimsa treats the oldest living lineage of principled non-harm. Animal Liberation (1975) analyzes Singer’s book and its reception. Veganuary follows the contemporary campaign that has become the movement’s largest annual on-ramp.