Lesson 1: What is a Vegan? |
Vegetarian vs Vegan
A vegetarian does not consume meat, but does eat eggs, dairy products, honey, etc.
A vegan (strict vegetarian) does not consume meat, dairy products, eggs, honey, or any product derived from an animal source.
There are different types of vegetarian:
Note: Lacto means “milk” and Ovo means “egg”.
NON-Vegetarian diets:
A vegetarian does not consume meat, but does eat eggs, dairy products, honey, etc.
A vegan (strict vegetarian) does not consume meat, dairy products, eggs, honey, or any product derived from an animal source.
There are different types of vegetarian:
Note: Lacto means “milk” and Ovo means “egg”.
- Lacto-ovo-vegetarians eat both dairy products and eggs.
- Lacto-vegetarians eat dairy products, but not eggs.
- Ovo-vegetarians eat eggs, but not dairy products.
- Vegans (strict vegetarians) do not eat any food derived from an animal source.
NON-Vegetarian diets:
- Pescatarian – eats only fish, but does not eat any other type of meat.
- Pollotarian – eats only chicken or other poultry, but does not eat any other type of meat.
- Pollo-pescetarian – eats chicken and fish, but no other types of meat. AKA basically avoids “red meat”.
- Flexitarian – Focuses on eating a more plant-based diet, but doesn’t fully commit to it 100% of the time.
- SAD (Standard American Diet) – eats the typical junk-food-heavy and meat-heavy diet that most Americans eat. (More than 70% of Americans are currently overweight and it is still rising. That is 7 in 10 Americans are overweight. And other countries are fast catching up to us as they eat more like us. In addition, 9 of the 10 Top Leading Causes of Death in the USA are 100% diet-related.)
Name | Livestock | Poultry | Seafood | Dairy | Eggs | Root vegetables | Fruit, nuts, seeds |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Fruitarian | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes |
Vegan | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes |
Lacto-vegetarian | No | No | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
Ovo-vegetarian | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Vegetarian (aka ovo-lacto) | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Pescetarian | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Pollotarian | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Pollo-pescetarian | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
There are several subcategories within veganism itself, depending on why the person decided to go vegan.
We will discuss these categories in detail in Lesson 2.
- Buddhist vegetarianism
- Fruitarianism
- Jain vegetarianism
- Raw veganism
- Junk food vegan
- HCLF vegan
- etc
We will discuss these categories in detail in Lesson 2.
The Ancient History of Vegan diets
Although the origin of the English word “vegetarian” is unknown, vegetarians are as ancient as the human race itself. The earliest records of vegetarianism is found among a significant number of people in ancient India and ancient Greek civilizations. These ideas were usually promoted by religious groups and philosophers with the idea of nonviolence towards animals. It is also known that several orders of monks during medieval Europe abstained from meat for ascetic reasons. Jain and Buddhist sources show evidence of their monks abstaining from meat, either due to the philosophy of nonviolence towards animals or ascetic reasons like the Christian monks.
In the Jewish Torah and the Christian Bible, there is a great deal of material that argues in favor of a vegetarian diet and many Christian and Jewish groups throughout the ages have practiced vegetarianism because of this.
In ancient Greece, the vegetarian diet practice was called “abstinence from beings with a soul” (Greek ἀποχὴ ἐμψύχων).
Often, these communities of Buddhist monks, Jews, Christians, Greeks, etc were eating a 100% vegan diet because their living locations (abbeys and mountaintops) were self-sufficient, meaning growing plants was a lot easier and cheaper than keeping animals around for just dairy and eggs.
Any civilization around the world that settled down to farm became almost 100% vegan. Plants are cheap and that’s really what most peasants would be able to afford to eat. Eating meat, or any animal product, would have been a rare, special treat. Only the royalty and nobility of the region were wealthy enough to regularly consume animal products.
There is even quite a bit of evidence slowly emerging that the so called “hunter gatherers” of ancient humans were actually mostly “gatherers” and rarely “hunters”. Hunting takes a lot more work and would have been a much rarer occurrence that simply gathering the food you needed. Eventually humans turned from gathering to farming, which increased plant food production even further.
Despite all of this ancient history for a vegan diet, the English word “vegan” was created in 1944 when Donald Watson founded the first Vegan Society in England. As veganism slowly grew more popular and entered mainstream society in the 2010s, the term has come to mean many different things to many different people. We will discuss these differences in the future lesson.
I have just given you a very brief overview of the very long and complex history of veganism, so here are a few links to get you started if you would like to research more about the topic:
In the Jewish Torah and the Christian Bible, there is a great deal of material that argues in favor of a vegetarian diet and many Christian and Jewish groups throughout the ages have practiced vegetarianism because of this.
In ancient Greece, the vegetarian diet practice was called “abstinence from beings with a soul” (Greek ἀποχὴ ἐμψύχων).
Often, these communities of Buddhist monks, Jews, Christians, Greeks, etc were eating a 100% vegan diet because their living locations (abbeys and mountaintops) were self-sufficient, meaning growing plants was a lot easier and cheaper than keeping animals around for just dairy and eggs.
Any civilization around the world that settled down to farm became almost 100% vegan. Plants are cheap and that’s really what most peasants would be able to afford to eat. Eating meat, or any animal product, would have been a rare, special treat. Only the royalty and nobility of the region were wealthy enough to regularly consume animal products.
There is even quite a bit of evidence slowly emerging that the so called “hunter gatherers” of ancient humans were actually mostly “gatherers” and rarely “hunters”. Hunting takes a lot more work and would have been a much rarer occurrence that simply gathering the food you needed. Eventually humans turned from gathering to farming, which increased plant food production even further.
Despite all of this ancient history for a vegan diet, the English word “vegan” was created in 1944 when Donald Watson founded the first Vegan Society in England. As veganism slowly grew more popular and entered mainstream society in the 2010s, the term has come to mean many different things to many different people. We will discuss these differences in the future lesson.
I have just given you a very brief overview of the very long and complex history of veganism, so here are a few links to get you started if you would like to research more about the topic: