The Cambridge World History of Food

Hinduism, though not requiring a strictly vegetable diet, has fostered a significant tradition of vegetarianism among certain believers for more than two millennia. Justifications of vegetarianism with arguments dear to the gods were forwarded by several authors in later antiquity. Not until the seventeenth century was there to be any expansion of the brief against meat eating, but then one encounters, in the works of Thomas Tryon, the most broad-based argument yet for the virtues of a vegetable diet. The new climate of distaste for animal cruelty gave vegetarianism added appeal, of course; and though it would remain the doctrine of a small fringe group, membership in the fold did increase significantly around the nineteenth century. Vegetarianism was brought to the U. S toward the end of the 1810s by William Metcalfe, an envoy of the Bible Christian Church. On September 30, 1847, meat abstainers from all parts of England gathered in Ramsgate, Kent, to form the Vegetarian Society.