How does animal exploitation increase the emergence of new diseases?

With the world fighting a vicious new pandemic, Ian asks a front-line physician, an epidemiologist, a public health expert and activists about how new diseases spill over from other animals, and how factory farming and the wildlife trade raise our vulnerability.

Play or download (42MB MP3 30min) (via iTunes)

• Dr Aysha Akhtar (@DrAyshaAkhtar)
• Dr Laura-Jane Smith (King’s College Hospital) (@DrLauraJane)
• Prof Jonna Mazet (University of California Davis)(@JonnaMazet)
• Peter Kemple Hardy (World Animal Protection)

You’ve probably heard animal activists linking the Covid-19 pandemic to human treatment of animals well before you listened to my show – part of the reason for doing this show was to give people the information to talk about the link without drifting into hyperbole.

For example, “Earthling” Ed Winters famously got a roasting in the UK’s tabloid press for a viral Facebook post in which he blamed half a dozen new diseases on meat-eating. From what I’ve learnt doing the show, it was his categorical certainty that’s wrong rather than his general point (and, arguably, tone). I thought his later video on the subject was more nuanced.

It took me almost a year to close VegHist after transmitting the final episode, and then I got distracted by UK politics. (Which, in fairness, is very distracting.)

My next goal for The Vegan Option is to do some short videos based on the history series. Of course, as someone who set out to make a series of 10 x 15 minutes but made a ten hour epic instead, I’m not very good at “short”. (I feel a personal sense of triumph that I didn’t have to edit this episode down to the half-hour broadcast slot.)

Theme by Robb Masters. The featured image is CC-BY-SA Scientific Animations, as it is based on their SARS-Cov-2 virus image, combined with a circle of animal kingdom icons for which I’d be happy to credit the original author, if I knew who they were.

The post Spillover Diseases: Covid-19 & Zoonoses, with Jonna Mazet and Aysha Akhtar first appeared on The Vegan Option.

How has western vegetarianism risen, within living memory, from fringe to mainstream choice? And how has veganism gone from nowhere to everywhere?

This final episode recounts the growth of veganism, vegetarianism, and the modern animal advocacy movement.

Ian treads in the footsteps of the handful of pioneers who set up the vegan movement in the 1940s, and meets a life vegan born in 1951.

He investigates the sixties counterculture that combined the philosophy of ethics, activism, and new ways of living and working, visiting one of Britain’s first vegetarian wholefood co-operatives.

And as vegetarian and vegan movements increasingly link up around the world, he looks at developments in China and India. In New Delhi, he meets the vegan politician who is also the most prominent animal advocate in the world’s largest democracy.

Play or download (70MB MP3 49min) (via iTunes) or read transcript.

There was a gap of months between the broadcast edit and the podcast of this episode.

This is partially because the episode had quite a different script for broadcast and podcast. Many of you who listen to the podcast are also part of the movement this episode is about; it’s not like previous episodes, where I can talk about long gone vegetarian groups in the third person on the certain basis that no listeners are part of them.

I also wanted to give the podcast edit more of a global scope. It’s okay for a radio show broadcast in London to centre on London. In this episode, I talk more about what’s going on in the rest of the world.

And I think that trimming the episode to the broadcast slot took a lot of stuff out; the podcast edit is two thirds longer.

The conclusion at the end is completely different – and if you’re interested you can listen to the broadcast edit of Episode 15 on the Resonance FM Mixcloud.

Kickstarter backers and Resonance FM listeners might notice I changed the title. From the start of the project, the final episode title(s) were going to be “The End and the Beginning”, referring to Donald Watson’s comment that “vegan” was the beginning and end of “vegetarianism”.

There were a couple of problems with this. Firstly, I never explained the reference in the show.

In fact, as I learnt from Samantha Calvert during production, Donald Watson originally had a very different background for the word vegan. (Via the Hendersons suggesting “Allvega”, probably inspired by the “Vega” restaurant.)

Plus, coy references for episode titles don’t cut much ice with search engines. So I went for “Liberation”, as a nod to Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation”, and a word that became very important to the movement in the late twentieth century.

As veganism becomes more influential, there are more active debates about its beginnings. My comments on that will be a blog post of their own, but let me confess to leaving a couple of things out of the show.

Dr Samantha Calvert credits Elsie Shrigley as a co-founder of the Vegan Society, because of her role bringing people together. I missed that out because I don’t think it’s that unambiguous, and there wasn’t time to delve into it.

One interesting thing that got cut for time was how the vegan movement got some national attention in its first ten years. I didn’t have time to mention them all in the show:

You can read Mabel Cluer’s “family notes” in the Spring 1959 edition of The Vegan. The Vegan Society published a feature interview with Mabel Cluer on their 70th anniversary. Alan Cluer’s reminiscences of running a health food shop in Wimbledon were printed in the Wimbledon Society Newsletter February 1989 (PDF).

For full disclosure, the Cluers ate honey. No-one in organised veganism seemed to challenge the Cluers’ status as vegans, either then or now, so I haven’t either. (Even though many contemporaries clearly thought honey wasn’t vegan; I suspect people were less likely to jump from “I think that isn’t vegan” to “So you’re not a vegan” back then.)

I tried to trace changes in the numbers of vegetarians, but the number of people who describe themselves as vegetarian varies enormously according to how you ask the question. And most of these surveys haven’t publicly revealed their questions.

The number of vegetarians can be three times higher if you ask “are you vegetarian?” instead of breaking it down into “Do you eat (a) red meat (b) poultry (c) fish? Please tick where applicable.” And the margin of error is often higher than the percentage of vegetarians or vegans.

One ill-constructed British survey in 2003 put 2% of the population as vegetarian, 7% as “vegetarian who eats fish” and 3% as “vegan or other”. This led to much vegan rejoicing, until folk realised that the 3% included confused omnivores.

So the numbers jump up and down. Maurer 2002 p16 put the number of vegetarians in the USA at 1%-2.5%.

In Britain, there was a jump in the numbers identifying as vegetarian in the 1980s – from 2.1% in 1984 to 5.4% in 1997. One person who was across the surveys speculated this represented a real growth in vegetarianism in the midst of the UK’s Bovine Spongioform Encephalopathy (“mad cow disease”) scare, and that some people returned partially to meat-eating whilst still thinking of themselves as vegetarian.

The Vegan Society commissioned a very thorough survey from MORI in 2016, suggesting 3.25% of the British population is vegetarian, including 1.05% vegan. That suggests a slow (if any) rise in the number of vegetarians, but a very dramatic increase in the proportion who are vegan.

Of course, the western vegetarians and vegans are a blip compared to south and east Asia. In India, 40% of the population is vegetarian, including 31% who follow the traditional Indian definition and also exclude eggs.

I’d like to take a moment to remember the people who passed away during the time I was working on the series. (These are also people I never interviewed before it was too late.)

Folk interested in vegetarian history might have followed the prolific work of Rynn Berry, who died at the start of 2014.

Mabel Cluer herself died in 2015. Mary Bryniak, a founder member of the Vegan Society and part of a pioneer veganic gardening family, died later that year. Joan Court was a veteran Animal Rights campaigner who met Gandhi whilst working in India in the 1940s.

And finally, I’d like to mention a place. London’s last vegetarian vestige of the hippy era – Food for Thought – was a victim of rising rents. It was open from 1971 to 2015. Roann Ghosh’s short film about it portrays it perfectly.

The theme music is by Robb Masters. Variations for the Healing of Arinushka by Arvo Pärt is performed CC-BY Markus Staab. Les Sylvains, Op. 60 by Cécile Chaminade is performed CC-BY Takashi Sato, and the clip of “Summer of Love” is CC-BY Saul Rouda. With the voices of Amy Saul, Jeremy Hancock, Brian Roberts, Robert MacDougall, Julie Cummings, Akshay Dave, and Sally Beaumont.

Episode 15 is generously sponsored by Kickstarter backer Jaysee Costa.

The cover picture is of the 2017 Animal Rights march, in London, by “Animal Rights Photography”, used with permission.

The post VegHist Ep 15: Liberation. Veganism, hippies, and the animal rights movement first appeared on The Vegan Option.

In the nineteenth century, in America and Germany, new forms of vegetarianism emerge – from the individualistic consumer vegetarianism of America, to the back-to-nature European “life reform” movement.

As animal agriculture industrialises and meat consumption rises, the ways that food reformers respond are familiar to people today – the plant-based meat, the celebrity athletes, and the reformers who worship nature, sunshine, and fresh air.

Ian goes to the shops to discover just how many vegetarian staples he owes to pioneers like John Harvey Kellogg. In Sabarmati, northwest India, he visits the Ashram of Mahatma Mohandas K Gandhi.

Play or download (62MB MP3 44min) (via iTunes) or read transcript

John Edmundson runs the Henry Salt Archive and the Ernest Bell Library, and blogs a lots about early organised vegetarianism for Happy Cow, including:

The peanut loaf that Kellogg sold as “Nuttolene” (and Granovita sell as “Nut luncheon”) is opened like old-fashioned tinned meat. You open both ends, loosen it with a knife, push it out, and slice it. Here’s what I was eating.

This is one episode where I wanted to find a bit more “colour”, particularly about Lebensreform. But for once, I couldn’t get past the language barrier – I don’t speak German, and was unlucky in terms of finding someone to talk in English, particularly when I avoid recording over the Internet.

The orchard settlement Eden still exists near Berlin (link in German) and has open days. (I regret that I didn’t manage to arrange a visit.)

Nevertheless, I hope the combination of interviews, background music, and readings tells the story engagingly.

It’s hard not to be moved by the vegetarian leaders who seem to be trying to gauge how much they can get away with before they fall foul of the regime. I’m indebted to the German speakers who helped me understand some of the sources. If you want to delve and can read German, Frizten looks fascinating.

With respect to Hitler, I’ve read Rynn Berry’s “Hitler: Neither Vegetarian Nor Animal Lover”, and checked his sources, which are more robust about the 1930s. But when it comes to the 1940s, there is substantial eyewitness evidence. I think the best answer to folk who consider that Hitler’s diet, alone amongst murderous dictators, somehow relevant to animal ethics today is comedian Jamie Kilstein’s hilarious rant on the subject (YouTube).

I had to skip over just how long the French have had a word for a vegan diet.

All the English-language sources I’ve read take at face value Fred Rothwell, who credited the word to the physician Jules Lefèvre in his introduction to his 1920 translation of Lefèvre’s extensive essay (c. 1904) on the vegetarian diet. But Rothwell seems to be wrong.

Lefèvre was one of the “rationalist” vegetarians, who thought that meat was toxic, a gateway drug to worse things like alcohol and tobacco, and even likely to inflame disorderly conduct like going on strike (for these rationalist vegetarians tended to be conservatives).

The word “Végétalisme”, however, was reportedly in the 1890 edition of the venerable French dictionary Larousse. There, it was defined the way Lefèvre used it (and the way it’s used today) – purely as a question of diet.

But I haven’t been able to check Larousse 1890 directly, so I don’t know if it began as purely a dietary term (as it is now), or if it always had the political ascetic flavour associated with the anarchists.

Background advice came from Judith Baumgartner, Renate Brucker, and James Gregory, as well as some archive material from the Ernest Bell Archive.

French translations were by Elisabeth Lyman; German by Annelie S & Anami N. I recorded the health food shop scenes in The Grocery, London.

The theme music is by Robb Masters; “Nature Boy” is written by Eden Ahbe and performed CC-BY Jennifer Orna. The incidental music was John Philip Sousa’s Gladiator March performed by the US Air Force band, Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag performed CC-BY Stefano Ligoratti, “Russian Easter Festival Overture” by Rimsky-Korsakov performed by the Musopen symphony orchestra, and Wagner’s Siegfried performed by the US Marine Band.

The actors were Brian Roberts, Ian Russell, Guillaume Blanchard, Orna Klement, and – as Mohandas K Gandhi – Harish Bhimani.

The cover picture is a public domain photograph of Mohandas K Gandhi.

This episode was originally broadcast on Resonance FM May 2nd 2017.

The post VegHist Ep 14: Diet Reform. Consumerism, Lebensreform, and Gandhi first appeared on The Vegan Option.

In the late nineteenth century, the new vegetarian movement is intertwined with other struggles – including Victorian reformers, the Indian reaction to British colonialism, and most importantly, slavery.

After their foundation in 1847 and 1850, the vegetarian societies in Britain and America rose swiftly faced new challenges.

Dr Adam Shprintzen, author of the history of US vegetarianism “Vegetarian Crusade, tells Ian how the American Vegetarian Society poured its energies into an anti-slavery vegetarian settlement in the Wild West. And how its founder, Englishman Henry Clubb, ultimately took a bullet for the union in the Civil War.

Under British rule, Hindu vegetarianism faced a mix of threat and opportunity. In India, Ian meets historians DN Jha, Burton Cleetus, and Bhaskar Chakraborty, who explain how, faced with rule by distant Christians, vegetarianism became more important as a marker of caste and identity.

Ian also sets off on a cycle tour of vegetarian Victorian London, and talks to the first modern academic to study vegetarian history – Dr Julia Twigg.

Play or download (58MB MP3 41min) (via iTunes) or read transcript

*I couldn’t track down issues of the Truth Tester published that late, so I do wonder if it’s possible that Richard Cubeville made a mistake over the name of the magazine; but he’s been delving into the Vegetarian Society archives and I haven’t. The 1840s and 1850s yielded a confusing array of vegetarian periodicals with the same few overlapping writers and even overlapping titles (“The Truth Tester, Temperance Advocate, and Healthian Journal” being three journals merged together, for example) which doesn’t make citation easier.

This is the rig I used for the cycle tour around London. If the white object poking out of the basket looks a lot like a cat scratching post, that’s because it is – it’s the only appropriately sized object in the flat with a thread that fitted my microphone mount. Mazzy has multiple scratching posts, so she wasn’t deprived.

From left to right, the microphones are:

The theme music is by Robb Masters. Actuality of West Ham United Supporters CC-BY Hooger WS; and Civil War songs sung by the US Army Band (and hence public domain).

The cover picture is a picture of a set of vegetarian magazines from around the world taken from “Fifty Years of Food Reform”.

Featuring Harish Bhimani as Mohandas K Gandhi.

Other parts were played by Chetan Pathak, Matthew Arenson, Ian Russell, Amy Saul, and Orna Klement.

The montage of international vegetarian society foundings also included Jordi Casamitjana, Yuna Sparkle, and Adam Cardilini of VeganSci podcast.

This episode was originally broadcast on Resonance 104.4FM on April 4th. Because I had a hoarse voice at the time, I have re-recorded my narration. This is also a fixed re-post, after it was originally posted with a link to episode 9 (HT Russ Wesp).

The post VegHist Ep 13: The Vegetarians. Abolitionism, colonialism, and Victorian reformers; with Julia Twigg and Bhaskar Chakraborty. In London first appeared on The Vegan Option.

In the 1800s, overlapping circles of utopians, mystics, and romantics in both Europe and America develop arguments against meat until “vegetarianism” finally becomes a real movement.

In the aftermath of the American and French revolutions, the sects and philosophies that embrace a “vegetable diet” multiply – from ecstatic cult to puritan crusades, to utopian community to public-spirited congregation. No longer are they isolated groups – they connect with each other in books, magazines, and letters. Until a single word catches on – “vegetarianism”.

In the United States of America, Ian discovers the the vegetarian sword and shoes of a 1790s “free love” vegetarian sect in a local Massachusetts museum, and visits the failed vegan commune where Louisa May “Little Women” Alcott lived as a child.

And in Salford, NW England, he walks in the footsteps of a nineteenth century vegetarian church, with local historian Derek Antrobus and the vegetarian history specialist Dr Samantha Calvert.

It’s a story that also takes in the French bohemian “cult of the bearded men”, the man who invented the modern idea of Robin Hood, the woman who invented Frankenstein and his creature, Sylvester Graham, and, finally, the creation of modern vegetarianism.

Play or download (65MB MP3 47min) (via iTunes) or read transcript

The debates amongst a medical profession stumbling towards usefulness are a big part of this episode, and although the Victorian Dr William Lambe (and other “water cure” fans) were wrong to think distilled water can heal, the converse is true. Polluted water can be very harmful indeed.

Dr John Snow is widely known as the man who identified sewage-contaminated water as the cause of the 1854 London cholera epidemic, and removed the handle of the water pump to halt it; and as the father of epidemiology who mapped cholera cases to show this. But he was also a follower of Dr William Lambe and spent many years of his life on a vegan diet.

It would have taken too long to describe all that in the show. But I wonder (and it should be possible to check) what part his belief in the importance of pure distilled water played in forming the idea that polluted water could transmit epidemic disease.

Back when this series was just an idea, the Messy Vegetarian Cook, Kip Dorrell, mentioned to me at London Vegan Meetup that she had a distant relative who ran some kind of American vegetarian sect long ago. Little did I know I’d end up photographing his shoes next to mine.

It was a stroke of luck that my life took me to New England in 2015 – I hadn’t originally planned to visit anywhere in America for the series. We did try to find the hill where the Dorrelites once lived, and though we ran out of road, we ran into a woman who lived there and knew that it had once held some kind of vegetarian cult. The locals really do still tell stories about William Dorrell.

We also spent half an hour looking for the grave in what’s meant to be his cemetery, but didn’t find it. It’s said to be marked “Soldier of the Revolution” – artfully eliding which side he fought on!

As you can tell from the recording, it was very rainy in Salford; my next fundraising goal might include a mic with a proper windshield.

The curators of the two American sites we visited this episode, Timothy Neumann and Mike Volmar, gave me enormous help with the primary sources on these characters. Photographs of them are by Heidi White, who also drove me up and down Vermont and Massachusetts on the trail of vegetarian history.

The theme music is by Robb Masters. The actors were Jeremy Hancock, Guillaume Blanchard, Amy Saul, Matthew Arenson, Orna Klement, and Ian Russell.

The Romantic period music was by Ludvig van Beethoven – for the Bracknell Circle, his “Pastoral” Sonata No. 15 performed by Paul Pitman (PD), and for Shelley’s circle, his Piano Concerto no. 3 performed by Stefano Ligoratti (CC-BY).

The Bible Christian vegetarian hymns were very kindly performed by The Choir of St. Mary’s Nottingham, directed by John Keys.

The cover picture is from Asenath Nicholson’s “Nature’s Own Book”, 1848 edition.

Originally broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM March 7th 2017, with a very hoarse narration. I re-recorded once my voice had recovered.

The post VegHist Ep 12: Radicals & Romantics. Bible Christians, Grahamites, and Transcendentalists first appeared on The Vegan Option.

The philosophers of Paris discuss reports of Indian vegetarianism, question the morality of eating animals, and inspire radicals who preach vegetarianism from the barricades of the French revolution.

Ian traces a winding path of vegetarian inspiration from the personal diary of an Indian vegetarian working for the French, to the darkest corner of British imperial propaganda, to the Enlightenment’s favourite Paris café, to a rural retreat that inspired a social revolution, and to the squares where citizens plotted a real one.

Play or download (61MB MP3 43min) (via iTunes) or read transcript

There are many vegetarians in eighteenth century southern India, but only one, Ananda Ranga Pillai, who kept a diary of his daily life – whilst serving as a senior aide to the French governor. Ian meets historian Prof B. Krishnamoorthy in a temple Pillai had built in the French capital.

Meanwhile, the British produced a governor of Calcutta – John Zephaniah Holwell – whose fascination for Indian culture crosses into Hindu vegetarianism. Ian meets Prof Partha Chatterjee, an expert in the incident – the Black Hole of Calcutta – that made Holwell famous.

Paris was the heart of the enlightenment, where the Lumières condemn organised religion and discuss the nature of humanity over coffee.

Holwell and other writers out of India inspire the leading figure of the French Enlightenment, Voltaire, to criticise Christian attitudes to eating animals, and Ian meets vegan Voltaire expert Renan La Rue in the Lumières’ favourite haunt, Café Procope.

Then Ian and Renan visit the hillside home of Voltaire’s sentimental rival Rousseau, who suggested that children should be raised without the corruption of meat-eating, along with Prof Christophe Martin of the Sorbonne.

The ideas are revolutionary; but it takes the radicals of the revolution to put them into practice. Ian visits Prof Pierre Serna at the Sorbonne, and travels to the heart of the French Revolution with Matthieu Ferradou to discover the vegetarian Scotsman who led the French revolutionaries in battle, and the Pythagorean aristocrat who dressed like an ancient Greek and was rumoured to have made possible the storming of the Bastille and the beginning of the revolution.

It’s a chain that links the conservative vegetarianism of southern India to the heart of European radical politics.

The “Black Hole of Calcutta” we visit this episode is almost certainly the namesake of the cosmological phenomenon.

The theme music is by Robb Masters.

With the voices of Guillaume Blanchard, Brian Roberts, and Selva Rasalingham.

My thanks to Vincent Migeotte, who acted as my volunteer fixer in Paris – in particular setting up location interviews at Café Procope and the Musée Rousseau; and to Elisabeth Lyman for translation and swapping flats.

The featured image is “Banyan tree with Hindu temples at Agori, Bihar” by Thomas Daniell, 1796, CC-BY Wellcome Trust – an early colonial vision of Indian religion to match the information about Indian religion that sets the episode in progress.

This episode is kindly sponsored by Kickstarter backer Martin Taylor Costumes, which specialises in vegan costumes, particularly ones for the eighteenth century, the period of this episode.

If you’re interested in hearing more of John Oswald, the vegetarian pikeman of the French revolution, Colleen Patrick-Goudreau recorded a podcast episode in which she read excerpts from his books (also on SoundCloud).

And I came across history blogger Rodama reviewing Renan LaRue’s work on the treatment of vegetarianism by Voltaire, which is interesting further reading.

The post VegHist Ep 11: Enlightenment. Colonial India, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Les Bardus first appeared on The Vegan Option.

When printing lets ordinary people access a world of ideas, including Indian vegetarianism, some European radicals and diet gurus begin to oppose meat-eating.

In England, the 1600s are a century of revolution. The artisans and yeomanry are picking up books – and the New Model Army is picking up pikes and muskets to turn the world upside down.

Ian meets Dr Ariel Hessayon, a lecturer in the radicals of the English Civil War at a Thameside pub that was there during the 1600s, to discover tabloid scares and firebrand sermons about people who ate only bread, and water and fruit.

In Ahmedabad, India, he visits the kind of animal hospital that astounded European travellers. And he hears from author Tristram Stuart about the impact stories of India had on Europeans, and how they shook Christendom’s moral certainty.

Dr Anita Guerrini researches the first vegetarian diet gurus, whose books about food and medicine interpreted the intellectuals of the Republic of Letters for everyone else. And she tells Ian about the secret religion of Sir Isaac Newton.

Play or download (62MB MP3 44min) (via iTunes) or read transcript

This is really where the story breaks open in the west and a “Pythagorean” diet re-enters the popular consciousness for the first time since antiquity. Frustratingly, I had to leave out a lot, such as how Thomas Tryon follows the mystic Jakob Boehme (quite a lot of early vegetarians are mystics) .

In particular, George Cheyne has a very specific theory of how the nervous system works, based on the physical laws of Newton. But I can’t go into detail on all the theories that have fallen and risen as “natural history” stumbles towards a useful understanding of the body.

The monument to Roger Crab is still in St. Dunstan’s, Stepney, London, though unfortunately I haven’t been able to locate it. As I live near there, it would be nice to pay our vegan predecessor some respects.

The broadcast of this episode was on 6 Dec 2016. The podcast release was severely delayed. Rather than date this page with the broadcast date (as usual) I’m dating it to the January broadcast slot that was superseded by Resonance FM’s holiday schedules. Content (whether books, journal articles, or programmes) tends to be identified by its publication year, and so I thought it particularly important that that stays accurate.

The theme music is by Robb Masters.

The period music was Greensleeves performed by Paul Arden-Taylor and Carol Holt (PD); slow reels (dances) “Long Acre” and “Kerry Fling” performed by the “Peak Fiddler”; Papalin’s performance on recorders of Henry Purcell’s Sonata in D Major (CC-BY) to again evoke turn-of-the-century London, and Telemann’s performance of Händel’s recorder Sonata.

With the voices of Jeremy Hancock, Ian Russell, and Brian Roberts.

Nimi Hirani gave me enormous help and assistance in Ahmedabad, and in India in general.

The cover picture (by me) is some of the books in the readings: “Acetaria” (Evelyn) , “The English Hermit” (Crab), a pamphlet attacking Crab, and “Guide to Health, Long Life and Happiness” by George Cheyne.

The post VegHist Ep 10: Revolution. English civil war, diet gurus, and the poetry of Sensibility first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Ancient philosophers inspire Renaissance thinkers to challenge the old hierarchy of man over beast.

Old medieval certainties are cracking under the combined assault of new sciences and rediscovered classics. It’s an age when “natural philosophers” combine scientific discovery with philosophical treatises, and when their Republic of Letters transcends political boundaries in the name of free thought.

It’s the age of Descartes, whose mechanical philosophy dismisses animals as “automatons”. But rivals like Gassendi suggest that animals have more in common with humans than he thinks. Ian traces the trail from Paris to the Mughal Court and back to the medical schools of the Enlightenment. He discovers the forgotten story of how Christian mythology, early anatomy, classical thinkers, and Indian medicine came together in respected medical schools that taught students to prescribe a vegetable diet.

Play or download (61MB MP3 44min) (via iTunes) or read transcript.

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Descartes’ readings represent the course of his philosophy, but aren’t in chronological order in the show. Descartes first propounded his mechanistic ideas about animal “automatons” in his 1638 “Discourse on Method”, but articulated it more clearly for us in a letter from 1649. He didn’t touch on it in his First Meditations (1641), but Gassendi did raise it in his response.

Just Lady Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. And all the characters in the show who are leading scientists.

Background advice came from Renan LaRue and Antonia Lolo. Location photographs are by Vincent Migeotte, my production assistant in Paris.

The theme music is by Robb Masters.

The period music was Anna Simboli’s performance of ‘Signor, quell’infelice’ from L’Orfeo by Montiverdi (CC-BY); and, to evoke 1700 London, Papalin’s performance on recorders of Henry Purcell’s Sonata in C Major (CC-BY), which is dedicated to Lady Rhodia Cavendish.

Archive monastery bells recorded by Robin Whittaker, Gregorian chant CC-BY Ramagochi, fast ticking recorded CC-BY Patrick Liberkind, and clockwork toy recorded CC-BY Steven Brown.

The cover picture is The Garden of Eden, by Jan Brueghel.

I’m very grateful to the actors of historical drama group Joot Theatre Company, at the University of Dundee – Connor Ogg (Monro), Iain Brodie (Cullen) and Vachel Novesha. Dr Jo George is their director of Joot Theatre Company, and was extremely helpful in helping set this up, and Brian Hoyle was their studio producer. Other parts were played by Sally Beaumont (Margaret Cavendish) and Guillaume Blanchard.

The post VegHist Ep 9: Renaissance. Descartes, Montaigne, Gassendi, and the “sparing diet” first appeared on The Vegan Option.

When conquerors who profess Islam or Christianity rule over Indian vegetarians, the conversations about food ethics go both ways.

Ian discovers the ecstatic dancing and singing shared by Sufis and Hindus – including westerners singing Hare Krishna in London’s main shopping street. In Delhi, he finds out about the inquisition that started with European antisemitism and ended with Indians being forced to eat beef.

And in the royal city of Agra, he visits a shrine built to commemorate a conversation about religion and vegetarianism between a Jain saint and the Mughal emperor Akbar. He uncovers the fascinating story of this heretic emperor who advocated vegetarianism.

At the halfway point of this 15-part history of vegetarianism, the traditions of East and West come together. From hereon, it’s all one story.

Play or download (52MB MP3 37min) (via iTunes) or read transcript.

The Italian and Portuguese sources used the word “gentoo” (related to “gentile”, but from the perspective of Christians). Here I variously translated it as “Hindu” or “Infidel”, but I’m wishing I’d translated it as “pagan”.

Andrea Corsali’s letter is famous for more than casually implying that Leonardo da Vinci was vegetarian. He was the first person to draw the constellation of the Southern Cross, which is part of the Australian flag. There is a copy of the letter (ironically on animal skin) in the State Library of New South Wales.

I tried to find readings from some of the Sufis mentioned early in the show. But their words do not seem to be published in the vernacular, let alone in translation.

So again, I’ll leave these footnotes here in the hope that scholarly specialists will one day come across them!

Hamid ud-Din Nagori’s commitment to animals is mentioned on p221 of Sururu’s Sudur, which is in the Habibganj collection at Aligarh University.

Nuru’d-Din’s admission that he considered meat-eating cruelty despite it being allowed under Shari’a is in the Asraru’l-Abrar (“The Secrets of the Pious”) by Dawud Mishkati (ff. 236a-b), published 1654. I haven’t been able to find it anywhere.

There’s a well-worn debate about vegetarianism amongst Sikhs, including a seventeenth century account that the early Gurus (in the early sixteenth century) were vegetarian. There are arguments over whether particular verses condemn meat-eating, or just the ritual killings of Muslims and Hindus.

Some of the strongest lines against eating animals seem to come from the poet Kabir. (He may have inspired the first Sikh guru, and the Sikh scriptures include his poetry.)

But even Kabir’s rhetoric is open to interpretation; much of it seems directed at particular kinds of slaughter. It seems reasonable to assume he was vegetarian, but it’s not absolutely explicit (either in the poetry, or in my script). For example, there is one line of the Bījak quoted in Religious Vegetarianism from Hesiod to the Dalai Llama that seems to advocate vegetarianism, but I had no reasons to choose their translation of “You should not eat fishes or flesh over what grows in the fields” over the very different “You eat animals and fish as if they grew in the fields“. I’m grateful to Brianne Donaldson and Susan Brill for that discussion.

The original Hindi text is online, should anyone wish to discuss the translation in the comments.

The non-vegetarian interpretation of the Kabir lines in the show would be to claim that throat-cutting was about Islamic ritual slaughter, rather than killing in general. But Kabir obviously isn’t suggesting a different way of killing; he’s suggesting kichri.

(“Kichri” is the name of the dish of rice and beans. Its seasoning of salt was described as “amrit”, literally “un-death”, which after talking to a helpful Sikh vegan I rendered as “bloodless salt”.)

With time, I could have delved into Sikh vegetarianism more. As it happens, the oldest marathon runner in the world is a Sikh vegetarian who (like me) lives in East London. I didn’t go into detail in part because I couldn’t find a consistent strand that goes back to the sixteenth century; the movements towards vegetarianism within Sikhism are informed by its own sense of self-discipline, the conversation with the other religious traditions of India, and the basic principle of compassion.

Jahangir is Akbar’s son and successor. He kept lurking at the fringe of the story, barely doing enough to be properly featured.

Most interestingly, there’s his complex relationship with Akbar.

He ordered the murder of Akbar’s vizier (who described the Hall of Worship in this episode). His guilt over this might be a driver of his own dalliance with vegetarianism (see Findly). Which might be why he wrote so admiringly of the Rishis (also in the episode).

He also ordered the death of the Sikh leader Guru Arjan, which pushed the Sikhs into becoming the martial religion we know today.

“Ferengi” / “Farang” is the word for foreigner throughout Asia – not just in Hindi (and Tamil, which is what the Jesuit Roberto de Nobilis spoke with locals) – but in Persian and Thai and Chinese as well. It derives from “Franks”, which became the Arab name for Western Europeans back when Charlemagne’s Frankish empire was its main power.

For most westerners, though, it was familiar for another reason. Writers chose the Asian word as the name of an acquisitive species in Star Trek who would rival the East India Companies for greed.

Archive Qawaali and Sikh Temple audio CC-BY Vintage Sense and Casa Asia, respectively.

The theme music is by Robb Masters. The actors were Sandeep Garcha, Selva Rasalingham, and Jeremy Hancock.

This episode is sponsored by Kickstarter backer Jaysee Costa.

A bar over a vowel (“ā”) lengthens it.

I particularly recommend the chapter of Rizvi that deals with the interactions with Bakhtis – it’s on the Internet Archive.

The post VegHist Ep 8: Contacts. Indian Sufism, Bhakti, Akbar, Portuguese Christianity, and Gaudiya Vaishnavism first appeared on The Vegan Option.

In the Middle Ages, three very different monastic orders spread from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea, surrounding themselves with lay believers and challenging the norm of meat-eating.

A string of religious groups across medieval Eurasia shared one common belief: that this world was a terrible place; and to escape its cycle of rebirth and redeath you needed to be ordained into a pure life, abstaining from violence. They all have some level of abstention from flesh, up to and including a vegan diet. But they all face suspicion.

Discover why the “good men” of the Cathars and Bogomils eschewed sinful flesh, why the men and women of the Manichaean Elect followed a vegan diet, and how the monks and nuns of Buddhism were shamed by their layfolk. And how a vegetarian culture spread throughout east Asia.

Ian joins a Chinese Buddhist congregation in London for its full moon service. He discovers how Buddhism not only spread across China, but made vegetarianism part of Chinese culture. He discovers a war against pescetarian heretics in Europe, the medieval Chinese horror stories that encouraged kindness to animals, and visits his local Tofu maker.

Play or download (67MB MP3 48min) (via iTunes)

This episode returns to themes that previous shows have explored in depth.

A thousand years ago, Al-Ma’arri was writing Arabic poems of extreme complexity, promoting a rational ideal and most remarkably, making an ethical case for veganism. We tell the story of his life in conversation with fellow vegan rebel poet Benjamin Zephaniah.

This show compiles some of my first experiments in vegan podcasting, whilst travelling through Southeast Asia in 2009. It includes my experiences of the many vegan ethnic Chinese restaurants.

It was also the first time I met Peter Flugel, an expert in Jainism featured in previous (and forthcoming) episodes of #VegHist.

There were some questions I did not manage to get to the bottom of. I leave them here, in the hope that scholarly specialists will one day come across them!

The Qarmatians were a religious and political rival to Islam in the ninth and tenth centuries. They controlled eastern Arabia, the gulf archipelago of Bahrain, and (at points) southern Iraq. At one point, they scandalised the Islamic world by stealing the meteoric black stone that lies at the spiritual heart of Mecca. The first sources I read painted them as communist vegetarian bandits, who followed a breakaway religion that owed as much to Manichaeanism as Islam. (Cyril Glassé’s New Encylopedia of Islam suggests they were mainly vegetarian. I do not trust his independent un-referenced work; not least because he calls the ethical vegan Al-Ma’arri a “crypto-Manichaean”. I found no evidence of this when doing a show about Al-Ma’arri in 2012.)

Less romantic sources, such as the Encyclopedia Iranica, position them simply as radical Shia Muslims.

The people nicknamed “al-Baqliyyah” (UK: “Greengrocers” US: “Produce sellers”) in southern Iraq were Qarmatians. My final script is based on M G S Hodgson’s entry in the Brill Encyclopedia of Islam, with some information from Wilferd Madelung.

I also found multiple versions of the etymology of al-Baqliyyah; some of which had nothing to do with vegetarianism.

But I really think someone who can read the primary sources (in classical Arabic) would be able to dig deeper than the brief outlines from Hodgson and Madelung. Cyril Glassé was of the opinion that orthodox Qarmatians put pressure on the rest to be vegetarian, and I don’t know where that idea came from. Farhad Daftary (author of the Encyclopedia Iranica article) tells me that “we cannot consider them as vegetarians”.

I’d be happy to share my detailed notes with anyone who wants to take this further.

One academic told me that there was a source that suggested the Bogomil clergy followed a vegan diet. This would not be a surprise – it would be a logical extension of existing orthodox fasts. and if the Manichaeans did, why not the Bogomils? (The Bogomils presumably never met any Manichaeans, but they were part of scholarly common knowledge in Christendom.)

I asked every relevant academic I could find, and didn’t find anyone who had heard of a direct reference. We know a lot about the Cathars because of the papacy conducted a detailed inquisition and kept the records. On the other hand, the Byzantine empire didn’t gather as much information about the Bogomils, and much of has been lost over the past few hundred years.

Wu of Liang wrote an essay about why we should be vegetarian. It’s on Wikisource. It’s just never been translated into English. It’s as important to the history of vegetarianism as the writings of ancient Greek or Indian vegetarians, which have been available in English translation in some cases for centuries.

So if you happen to be able to read T’ang dynasty Chinese and can translate it into English please consider having a read of “Of meat and wine” (at least, I think that’s what 断酒肉文 means) by Emperor Wu of Liang. There’d probably be quite a few English speakers interested in reading it too.

When it came to Buddhist vegetarianism, I was fortunate that John Kieschnick had already written an excellent overview.

But the rest of the continent required me to dive deep into research into Bogomils, Cathars, and Islam. Even letting the show run to 46 minutes – the longest yet – I had to leave a lot of stuff out. And in the process of research, I came across a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with vegetarianism, but it pained me to leave out anyway.

At first, Buddhism was slotted into traditional Chinese religion, perhaps as additions to the Daoist pantheon. And these additions sometimes ran ahead of the monks and nuns who actually understood the Buddhist dharma.

In 166 CE, the emperor was reported as having sacrificed animals jointly to the Buddha and (the legendary founder of Daoism) Lao-tse. Opposition to animal sacrifices has been a defining feature of Buddhism since the beginning, so he rather missed the point.

When I look into a cultural movement whether it’s the mystery religions of ancient Greece or the anti-clericals of medieval France, I pick out the vegetarian threads, but wish I could have included the whole movement. And I wish I could have included more of the interview with Dr John Arnold – but I need to put a limit on episode length!

The Cathars were just one aspect of the challenge to the church. Other groups also eschewed the trappings of the establishment to rework Christianity.

A similar semi-heretical movement, the Waldensians, had even produced a translation of the New Testament in the local language Franco-Provençal. Even the Bishop who was forced to disavow heresies in the tenth century plays his part – he was credited with introducing the abacus from neighbouring Arab Iberia.

The Waldensians aren’t the only group that survived. The early Cistercians were also living monastic abstemious lives that reminded people of Jesus’ apostles. And they’re still an active order of Roman Catholic monks.

The European events of this episode also accidentally created France. The Albigensian crusade was an excuse for King of France (based in the north) to annex the Mediterranean lands.

In the show, I recount the first mention of vegetarianism in the context of Islam – when the preacher ‘Amir ibn ‘Abd Qays is questioned on behalf of the Caliph about ‘Amir’s (overblown) reputation for vegetarianism.

The person who quizzed ‘Amir (Mu‘Āwiyah) goes on to become Caliph, and fight the war that sunders Sunni from Shia. This is the central divide in Islam.

Is in the episode itself, and shouted by our troupe. The Chinese word for “Demon” (“Mo”) is also how the Chinese pronounce “Mani”. Many academics suspect that the shout of “Vegetarian Demon Worshippers” is a play on words that references Manichaeans.

I had to rely on even more academic advice than usual for this episode. I’d like to thank Claire Taylor, Yuri Stoyanov, John Kieschnick, Renan LaRue, Erica Hunter, and Andrew Chittick.

The ambience in the fable of Zhi Zhong is CC-BY Klank Beeld; the recording of a Niger village muezzin call was contributed to the public domain by Felix Blume; and the monastic chanting by singer Jayme Amatnecks. The Uyghur folk song “Mira Jihan” was sung by the London Uyghur Ensemble, and featured by their kind permission.

The theme music is by Robb Masters. The actors were Sandeep Garcha, Chetan Pathak, Selva Rasalingham, Jeremey Hancock, Guillaume Blanchard, and Yasser Sha’aban, with additional laughter by Orna Klement.

A bar over a vowel (“ā”) lengthens it.

The post VegHist Ep 7: Heresies. On Chinese Buddhists, Cathars, Bogomils, Islam, and Manichaeans first appeared on The Vegan Option.