Vegan Info

"Records of individuals following a vegetarian, or mostly vegetarian, diet go back thousands of years and include such notable figures in history as Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, and the Greek philosopher Pythagoras. The 19th-century English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the first prominent Europeans to eschew dairy and eggs, in addition to meat, for ethical reasons. In Shelley’s time those who did not eat meat were referred to as “Pythagoreans.” Shelley wrote A Vindication of Natural Diet in 1813, in which he blamed societal problems on the consumption of meat. The term vegan, a derivative of vegetarian, was proposed in 1944 by British animal rights advocate Donald Watson. That year he and other vegetarians who abstained from dairy formed the Vegan Society and launched a nascent movement that sought to stop the exploitation of living creatures for human consumption and use (including hunting and medical experiments) and to find nonanimal alternatives for food, clothing, and other human uses."
Source Britannica.com