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The History of Vegetarian Diets:
The vegetarian diet dates back to before recorded history. The term, “vegetarian”
was coined by The British Vegetarian Society in the mid-1800’s but the vegetarian
diet has been observed in India and Greece for hundreds of years. Many anthropologists
believe that most early humans ate primarily plant foods because the human digestive
system resembles that of other plant-eaters more than it does carnivores. The
Greek mathematician Pythagoras is said to have been a vegetarian, and vegetarians
were often called Pythagoreans until a different word was created. Other historical
figures who observed the vegetarian diet include Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin
Franklin, Albert Einstein, and George Bernard Shaw.
Because of the high cost of meat in early 1900’s very few people ate meat.
Up until the industrial revolution the cost of meat was very high because refrigeration
was not widely available, and distribution was problematic.
In 1971 Francis Moore Lappe released her book Diet for a Small Planet
and the history of vegetarian diets changed forever. Lappe’s book revealed that
it takes 14 times as much grain to feed an animal than what you get out of it
in meat. In turn, she enforced the vegetarian diet urging people to stop wasting
the world’s food.
1971 was also an important year in the history of vegetarian diets because
it was the year that a group of San Francisco hippies started a vegetarian commune
in Tennessee, which they named The Farm. The Farm was largely responsible for
popularizing the use of soybean foods in the U.S, especially tofu.
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