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This digital document is an article from Vegetarian Journal, published by Vegetarian Resource Group on October 1, 2009. The length of the article is 423 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Vegetarians and eating disorders.(Scientific Update: A Review of Recent Scientific Papers Related to Vegetarianism)(Author abstract)(Report)
Author: Reed Mangels
Publication: Vegetarian Journal (Magazine/Journal)
Date: October 1, 2009
Publisher: Vegetarian Resource Group
Volume: 28Issue: 4Page: 16(2)

Article Type: Report, Author abstract

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Product Description
This digital document is an article from Environmental Nutrition, published by Belvoir Media Group, LLC on June 1, 2010. The length of the article is 495 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Sample a semi-vegetarian lifestyle with a flexitarian diet.(Ask EN)
Author: Unavailable
Publication: Environmental Nutrition (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 1, 2010
Publisher: Belvoir Media Group, LLC
Volume: 33Issue: 6Page: 7(1)

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Product Description
More and more people are deciding to turn vegetarian - including almost a quarter of teenage girls.A diet high in plant foods has many benefits, but a haphazard vegetarian choice can lead to problems - such as iron-deficiency anaemia, low calcium intake and deficiencies of other minerals and vitamins.Healthy Vegetarian Eating describes the health benefits of a vegetarian diet and shows how to avoid the pitfalls.Many choices are listed which will provide an adequate intake of all nutrients.Rosemary Stanton uses her great experience as one of Australia's leading nutritionists to debunk a number of common myths about vegetarian eating.This concise, practical book has been written particularly with those in mind who come from traditional meat-eating families and need more information on healthy vegetarian eating. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a book on pregnancy nutrition you'll actually understand, explained in stages to make it easy for you to give your baby the best chance at being born healthy and happy.This book is among the first books to be written with the expertise of a medical expert and from the viewpoint of the average, mother to be.inside this guide....* The various stages of fetal development* How nutrition affects how your baby grows* The role that nutrition plays in determining whether or not your child has a birth defect* How to have a healthy baby without giving up your favorite foods* What to do when you can't follow a regular pregnancy “diet”* How to lose those pregnancy pounds afterward quickly and painlessly, even if you’re nursing. ... Read more

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Combines interviews with vegetarian spiritual leaders from each of the world's religions, essays on vegetarianism and selection of vegetarian recipes. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A 'cookbook' for the inquisitive mind!


This book is a remarkable insight into dietary religious morals and philosophy.....it's a 'cookbook' for the inquisitive mind.

If you are a person of faith, this book gives an easy to understand history of how the history of your particular religious faith has been impacted by diet and moral choices of eating habits throughout the ages. Every person of faith restles with matters of principles and moral philosophy....that's why this book is important for you.

If you are not a person of faith but you are intrigued by the issue of a vegan / vegetarian diet and an ethically compassionate life and how this may effect others around you who do follow a religious lifestyle / belief, then it is a very worthwhile book to read and get familiar with. I constantly use this book as a resource in my writing.

Really Good!!!
How much do you know about world religions and veganism? How much do you know about your OWN religion and love of animals? This book will educate you quickly about most religions and the basic tenet of all which is to treat all life as sacred. Quite an interesting read...

A New Look at History
Rynn Berry's Food for the Gods does a remarkable job of tracing the vegetarian link in the major religions of Hindiusm, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam, and Catholicism, but also to the relatively small but intriguingnon-violent religions of India's Jainism and the British Order of theCross.The history of religion will never look the same after reading thisbook. ... Read more

Product Description
The modern world challenges our bodies from every imaginable perspective. A well-balanced diet may not be enough to achieve optimal health. We have become increasingly aware of the serious impact on our food sources due to soil depletion and the rapid nutrition loss sustained during transportation from farm to plate. While a raw food plant-based diet remains ideal, Superfoods are a remarkable dietary addition to ensure that the full nutrient spectrum is available in optimal amounts. In Superfoods, readers are introduced to the Superfoods concept and why they are beneficial. A guide to understanding the potential benefits of Superfoods, a power-packed recipe, and a useful "Buyer Beware" section help to give every consumer the Superfoods edge! ... Read more

Product Description
Vegetarianism has often been closely allied to radical movements in religion and philosophy. The mythical Hyperboreans lived for a thousand years on a vegetable diet, Pythagoras, Ovid and Seneca were vegetarians as were Sir Thomas More, John Evelyn, Leonardo da Vinci, Rousseau and Shelley. In the Dark Ages religious philosophers began to interpret Biblical texts looking for God's law on what people should eat. And not consuming blood but still eating meat became a great anxiety in the Christian West after the Renaissance. From the sixteenth century animal rights were rediscovered (it had been a concern of the Ancient World) and was linked to slavery and socialist ideals. In the twentieth century the idea that vegetarians lacked aggression took a severe blow after the example of Hitler as vegetarian. This history of vegetarianism could also be viewed as a history of radical movements which have questioned society's orthodoxy. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Overcoming a long tradition by uncovering another tradition
My son asked if one could survive only on meat. Contrarily, I looked this book up to find out. Orthodoxy and conformity long allied with the herding & consumption of animals. To those in control, those refusing to eat flesh posed a social and moral threat. Not eating meat equalled rebellion against the state, the faith, and the norm.

Spencer starts with early hominids and ends with fast food. He roams necessarily widely, if focusing most modern attention to the British take on vegetarianism. Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, and India all earn ancient testimony for a long-lived counter-cultural tradition. While Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures appear to have come down harder on what become known as "Pythagorean" practices, the Hindus seem to have had a more balanced approach. A "dharma-sutra" ca. 600 BCE counselled: "In eating flesh, in drinking intoxicating liquors and in carnal intercourse there is no sin, for such enjoyments are natural, but absention from them produces great reward." ((qtd. 76)

For the West, however, resistance to meat-eating smacked more of deprivation than moderation. Spencer defends deftly the reputation of Epicurus as more principled than "epicurean" today connotes. Gluttony came from satiation which left one more deprived than before, Epicurus reasoned. So, as with any addiction or longing, the cure stemmed from avoiding anger, irritation, and lust. Pleasure, thus controlled, did not lead to overindulgence but to self-restraint as "the absence of pain."

But such subtleties were lost on many pagan and Christian critics. Sacrifice harbored in its action food plus energy to equal meanings charged with much more than merely roasting a beast. As with Jews, Muslims, or Hindus in their dietary choices, it was impossible to keep secret one's preferences: "the lifestyle is an unspoken criticism." (97) For a radical, it became a mark of humanity and higher standards that often "makes meat-eaters uneasy and they often react aggressively."

The heretical associations of vegetarianism in the Bogomil, Gnostic, and Cathar movements outraged the Church. The renunciation of meat did come out of a more negative refusal by the dissenters to separate themselves from the profane, rather than a celebration of the natural realm as deserving of its own rights. "It is a doctrine that expresses fear of humanity more than a love of God. With such ideas, animals became too easily associated with the devil and his evil minions, hence the domestic cat came to be seen as the witch's familiar."(161)

For most people now as then, vegetarianism may have been involuntary, furthermore. Not out of religious objection or ethical solidarity, but because of poverty. Only when surpluses exist can a community afford a minority to find alternative foods. For a few faithful Christians, monks and saints, renunciation of meat was not identical with vegetarianism, perhaps oddly to us. Heretics were linked to vegetarianism, but clerics were not. "For a vegetarian philosophy to exist, it needs an ethical system of greater power and significance than the prevailing code in society." (181)

The glimmers of this began for the West with those who chose, for ideological reasons, to eschew meat. The Renaissance alerted Leonardo da Vinci and Giordano Bruno to the options argued by classical predecessors. Here, as in Bruno's proto-holistic system, or Leonardo's rarely cited vegetarianism, a sympathy for animals within the cosmos begins to emerge. Suffering elicits sympathy, and rather than a Christian solution, humanists begin to compete with the Church for an earth-based understanding of harmony and kinship.

As modernity dawns, Spencer concentrates on Britain. The Victorian denial of flesh and its promotion of unadulterated, but often unsalted or unspiced foods, formed the common English stereotype of sandals and nutloaf, bland pablum as fare for pale aesthetes and bearded cranks. This was a wise reaction to the horrors of slaughterhouses, true, but one that went so far in its po-faced rejection that its grim, ascetic influence lingers nearly two centuries later. Dogmatic puritans, the 19c and early 20c proponents of vegetarianism often carried with them a severe air.

George Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter, and Leo Tolstoy, famously, symbolized theintellectual contingent. George Orwell fulminated in 1930: "One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England." (qtd. 299)

Orwell objected to a vegetarian, for not being able "to relate to the working classes," in Spencer's interpretation-- as "a person out of touch with common humanity." Faced by such prejudice, our author wonders if Orwell's disgust is with the bourgeoisie associations; "If Orwell could have found a vegetarian coal miner he might well have written differently." (300) Orwell continues his own holy war against what Spencer labels a "secular heresy" for the Victorians. Immorality, sexual license, and fervent egalitarianism allied with it in popular opinion.

The book moves predictably if appropriately into an outcry against factory farming and ecological degradation. The examples are well-chosen, if again largely British. This is one shortcoming, perhaps, for readers expecting a global treatment; the book narrows as it nears the present into a study of British reactions to the vegetarian refusal. Spencer writes with verve and compassion, and has read widely. The book can be a bit repetitious, but he makes his claims and supports them well.

We face, he concludes, a dual challenge. Consumption of meat psychically for most of us still marks a celebration, an entry into affluence, a fine night out to cash in a bonus or impress a date. Yet, he reminds us that, despite the persistence of the off-beat vegetarian caricature, abstention from meat also runs through our history back to ancient times as a reminder of our higher nature, in league with Nature.

Today, the notions may persist of woolly-headed middle-class do-gooders, but Spencer, writing this in 1995 (reprinted 2002 as "Vegetarianism: A History"), also notes a sea-change in attitudes among those who came of age in the hippie era. Urbanization perhaps ironically or appropriately drove together the scattered rural-based resisters to the meat-eating rule, and the media and markets allowed people in cities to rally, shop together, and raise their own crops in gardens. The seeds of today's farmer's markets, locavores, and green cuisine might be planted a century ago in such alliances.

A brief review
1. Nearly ever major religion has had some sects that practiced vegetarianism in some form.If you want a lot of details about that, this book has them. Some of the coverage of early vegetarianism, particularly ancient Egyptian vegetarianism, seems excessively speculative.

2. The vegetarian food of 1700-1800s Britain sounds awfully bad and seems to consist almost solely of starches and sugary dishes.

3. The world, or at least the US and Britain, appears to have been having the same arguments about vegetarianism for about 250 years.

4. Post 1700, the book centers on Britain.

I would have preferred more culinary history (for example on the origins of seitan and tofu) and fewer statements of the author's opinions (such as that, for example, a certain writer argues well), but the book is a useful reference of famous vegetarians and vegetarian sympathizers over the last 2500 years. Also, the sections that briefly discuss animal trials and pre-industrial slaughter methods are fascinating.

A Feast for the Reader!
Well written and comprehensive book on the origins of vegetarian and non-vegetarian dietary habits.It is perfect for those vegetarians who want to understand the historical roots of the movement.Also recommended for anyone 'on the fence' about becoming a vegetarian or consuming less animal products.Here you will find concrete facts on the history, health benefits, and compassionate considerations of vegetarianism.You will be inspired by the stories of history's greatest minds choosing to abstain from meat for either health or humane reasons.Vegetarians can count Pythagoras, Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Shelley, and Gandhi among their historical supporters.This book will motivate readers to consume more healthy non-animal foods and recognize the compassion behind vegetarian choices.
But, you don't have to be a vegetarian to enjoy this book.There is a wealth of information on how history, religion, and social development are related to food.

I agree, humans should have priority
"A reader" says that humans should have priority.I agree with that.That is why I'm vegetarian.By doing so, I make more food available to others, and decrease my chances of degenerate disease in the process.

I thought the book sometime spent too much time on some subjects, and too little on others.But still, overall, a good book.

Lots of people have tried to make an issue about Hitler's claimed vegetarianism.Of course whether he was or wasn't has no bearing on his actions.But since so many people make an issue of it, Spencer had to cover Hitler.What Spencer says about Hitler isn't the same as what I had heard from other sources.Most other sources I thought said Hitler enjoyed meat, but gave up most meat due to digestion problems.Spencer says that Hitler was vegetarian just to be different then everybody else.Which is true, I don't know, but I would assume that Spencer knows what he is talking about.

An excellent starting point
Colin Spencer does an excellent job of covering the last couple million years of vegetarianism.This book is not an easy read, especially in the sections about the diet of early man, and the analysis of some of the early Christian sects.You'll learn why mainstream society traditionally looks at vegetarians as "cranks"Puritanical, or just plain heretical. This is slowly beginning to change, but I think that in some areas of the world, (esp. where I live) vegetarians are still those weird outsiders who are thumbing their nose at the hallowed institution of eating meat.You'll also learn that early vegetarians weren't vegetarians for animal welfare reasons.For the Greeks like Plutarch or Pythagoras it was all about reincarnation (metempsychosis or transmigration of souls) For the early Christian sects eating meat was a symbol of man's Fall from grace.Some early Christian hermits also abstained from meat & alcohol because they thought consuming these didn't jive with the ascetic lifestyle; you had to deprive yourself of luxuries to become spiritually closer with your God.

My only quibble is that Spencer could've covered the last 100 years in more depth.The last 50 pages is surprisingly lacking in the same kind of detail that Spencer devoted to, (for instance) the Early Christian era.Maybe the last 100 years has been covered better in other books?I don't know, since this is the first book of its type that I've read.

OK, actually I have one other quibble.....In the last 20 pages, Spencer goes off on a rant about corporate farming, the effects of livestock farming on the environment, the dangers of eating meat (salmonella, heart disease, cancer). I thought this was a "history" of vegetarianism??? I mean, I agree with all the things he says about the above topics.I'm an ardent vegetarian myself, but I wish he had devoted more space to the last 100 years of vegetarianism, instead of the polemic.

Another thing to consider is tha Spencer goes go more in detail about vegetarianism in Europe and the UK.If you want a lengthier discussion on vegetarianism in the U.S try somewhere else.This is still an excellent book for a history of vegetarianism.I hope that other authors will take up this topic. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Vegetarian Journal, published by Thomson Gale on January 1, 2006. The length of the article is 656 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Encouraging humane organizations to go vegetarian for fundraising events. (Vegetarian Action.(stop non-veg)
Author: Mark Rifkin
Publication: Vegetarian Journal (Magazine/Journal)
Date: January 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 25Issue: 1Page: 35(1)

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Product Description
This digital document is an article from Vegetarian Journal, published by Vegetarian Resource Group on March 1, 2005. The length of the article is 978 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Vegetarian businesses and the role of nonprofits.(Note from the Coordinators)
Author: Debra Wasserman
Publication: Vegetarian Journal (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 1, 2005
Publisher: Vegetarian Resource Group
Volume: 24Issue: 2Page: 4(2)

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Product Description
This digital document is an article from Vegetarian Journal, published by Vegetarian Resource Group on January 1, 2009. The length of the article is 2199 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: "Teach ... your children well ..." A vegetarian lesson plan for high school students.(Viewpoint essay)
Author: Philip Becker
Publication: Vegetarian Journal (Magazine/Journal)
Date: January 1, 2009
Publisher: Vegetarian Resource Group
Volume: 28Issue: 1Page: 11(3)

Article Type: Viewpoint essay

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Product Description
This digital document is an article from Vegetarian Journal, published by Vegetarian Resource Group on March 1, 2005. The length of the article is 954 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: VRG catalog.(Books)
Publication: Vegetarian Journal (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 1, 2005
Publisher: Vegetarian Resource Group
Volume: 24Issue: 2Page: 33(2)

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This digital document is an article from Vegetarian Journal, published by Vegetarian Resource Group on October 1, 2009. The length of the article is 811 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: VRG catalog.(vegan cookbooks)(Recommended readings)
Author: Unavailable
Publication: Vegetarian Journal (Magazine/Journal)
Date: October 1, 2009
Publisher: Vegetarian Resource Group
Volume: 28Issue: 4Page: 33(2)

Article Type: Recommended readings

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Product Description
If you’ve eaten meat and animal products your whole life, you might think, why switch to a vegetarian diet? You’ve lived your whole life eating eggs, hamburgers, hot dogs, poultry, so why switch now?

There could be many reasons to switch. Start by looking in the mirror. Are you at a healthy weight? Do you look and feel good most of the time? Do you wake up energized? Or do you wake up tired and sluggish?

How is your general health? Is your blood pressure within a healthy range? Are your cholesterol and blood sugar ranges normal? If they’re not, consider what you’re eating on a daily basis.

Inside Easy Vegetarianism:Why Becoming a Vegetarian Will Add Years to Your Life is perfect for someone who wants to makes the switch from meat eating and it also helps current vegetarians keep on going!
... Read more

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1912. Social Considerations; Lectures on Pure Diet; A Lecture on Food; The Best Food for Man; The Physiology of Vegetarianism; Historical Aspects of Food Reform; Addresses to Vegetarians; Evolution and Flesh Eating; Extracts from England and Islam; Vegetarianism in its Higher Aspects; Man's Best Food; Vegetarianism and Antiquity; Vegetarianism and the Bible; Index. ... Read more

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So, a physician and cardiologist treating heart disease cannot recommend non-vegetarian food heart patients and even to those who want to prevent heart disease. ... Read more