Articles Reflecting a Vegan Lifestyle used with permission from All-Creatures.org

Mark Mathew Braunstein takes us on a journey through Georgia Wheatley's 1993 An American Vegetarian Resource Directory and reflects on how things have changed since the early days of the contemporary vegan movement.

Vegism 101
From Mark Mathew Braunstein, Main Street Vegan Academy, MainStreetVegan.com
June 2025

Mark Mathew Braunstein and Victoria Moran at CompassionFest in Connecticut, pre-2020
Photo from MainStreetVegan.com

Being fond of books, sometimes I even read the dang things. My bookshelves house books that I’ve already read in case I want to read them again, books I hope to read, and the lost little lambs I’ve lost all hope of ever reading. Occasionally, when a spine might catch my eye of a book I’ve mostly forgotten about, I’ll pull it off the shelf to browse through it. That happened last night with a slim volume titled, An American Vegetarian Resource Directory, authored by Georgia Wheatley.

Published in 1993, it is an historic record of a bygone era when the word Vegetarianism served as an umbrella that described two diets and lifestyles, both Vegetarianism and Veganism. As evidence, the very title of this directory spouts the word Vegetarian even though it lists as many nonprint resources about Veganism. Its back cover displays promotional blurbs from several celebrated advocates of veganism, not just vegetarianism. In the order listed, that includes Michael Klaper, MD, Jim Mason, JD, Neal Barnard, MD, and Victoria Moran.

Thirty-three years later, these same folks remain luminaries of the vegan movement. But back then, the word Vegan and its tenets were not widely known, not even among vegetarians. Times have changed, and along with the times some buzzwords change, too. The North American Vegetarian Society, the sponsor since 1980 of Vegetarian Summerfests, always served only vegan meals at its annual conferences. Two years ago, NAVS updated both names. Voilà! The North American Vegan Society and its Vegan Summerfest.

The word Vegan now appears emblazoned on products as much as the word Vegetarian, for instance on the bottle of my shampoo, on the listing for my hiking shoes (meaning no leather or wool), on the label for my cannabis fertilizer (meaning no feather, shell, bone, blood, pee, or poop), and on the snap-top lid of the medjool dates I ate this morning (as though all other fruits might contain undisclosed animal ingredients).

Thumbing between its front and back covers, a deeper dive into An American Vegetarian Resource Directory reveals a fascinating reality about our changing times and a sobering lesson in the ephemerality of all existence.

First researched during the primordial days of an incipient internet, only five pages of this 95-page book are devoted to “electronic resources” where are found FTP sites, listservs, AOL, and a Prodigy phoneline. But nary a website, a word that had not been coined when this directory was compiled. If compiled today, resources progress so rapidly that such a book would be outdated before anyone got to read it. It instead would be published as a website, and its proportion of websites to other resources would likely be reversed.

Fourteen pages list national and local organizations that educated about living meat-free. I don’t recognize most of their names. Of those I do recall, almost all have disbanded.

Of the twenty magazines cataloged, only three remain in print. These are American Vegan (formerly called Ahimsa), Vegan Journal (formerly called, Vegetarian Journal), and Health Science (while its title has endured, its sponsoring organization has embraced a new name, going from the American Natural Hygiene Society to the American Health Association).

Among the 28 pages of citations of cookbooks, those that feature the word Vegetarian in their titles outnumber those with the word Vegan 25-to-1. Among its nine pages of nonfiction books that explore the tenets (and dogmas!) of both vegan and vegetarian diets, only one includes the word Vegan in its title. Published in 1987, that singular book, Vegan Nutrition Pure & Simple, was written by Dr. Klaper who was ahead of his time. And still is. Published in 1985 and a harbinger of her books to come, Victoria Moran’s book imprints the word Veganism on is cover via subtitle: Compassion the Ultimate Ethic: An Exploration of Veganism. Bold move. As mentioned above, few vegetarians knew the word Veganism or its tenets. During those olden days, if you told someone you were a vegetarian, they might look at you like you had two heads. If you said you were a vegan, five heads. If two heads are better than one, what are five?

That equation skirts another issue. Just as some vegetarians are skeptical of the omnivore mentality, some vegans cast doubt on vegetarianism for being merely a half-step. Yet even plant-based consumerism is still consumerism. I await the day that Vegans and Vegetarians unite under one banner. I’d call it Vegism. And whether with two heads or five on my shoulders, I’ll call myself a Veghead.

Mark Mathew Braunstein, a vegan since 1970 and shown here with tempeh in 2022, is the author of the book, Radical Vegetarianism. Published in 1981, it was branded radical for espousing veganism. You can download a free PDF of the Lantern Books 30th anniversary revised edition at www.MarkBraunstein.Org/radical-vegetarianism

Photo by Ron Pokrasso

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Posted on All-Creatures: July 19, 2025
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