On this day in vegan history.

263 days written up so far, and counting.

1. December 31 December 31, 2020 Florida's Last Greyhound Race At 11:59 on New Year's Eve, a track in West Palm Beach ran one more race than it needed to, and the biggest greyhound racing state in the country went dark for good.
2. December 30, 2016 China Sets a Deadline to End the Ivory Trade The country buying most of the world's poached ivory told its own carvers and shops they had one year left.
3. December 29 December 29, 2022 The End of Mandatory Animal Drug Testing For eighty-four years no experimental drug could reach a human trial without first going through animals; on December 29, 2022, a bill quietly took that requirement off the books.
4. December 28 December 28, 2017 McDonald's Puts a Vegan Burger on the Everyday Menu After a seven-week trial in one Finnish city sold out, the world's biggest burger chain did something it had never done: made a fully vegan burger a permanent, everyday menu item.
5. December 26 December 26, 1960 India Writes Down What Counts as Cruelty A one-sentence definition of "animal", any living creature that isn't human, became the legal floor under India's fight against cruelty, and the country still stands on it.
6. December 22, 1887 Ramanujan Is Born in Erode A clerk's son in Tamil Nadu who never finished college would reinvent number theory from scratch, and it would cost him his health at the one table in Cambridge that couldn't feed him.
7. December 21, 2000 Congress Outlaws Shark Finning Bill Clinton signs a one-page bill making it a federal crime to slice the fins off a shark and dump the rest back in the ocean, and the fight to close its loopholes runs for another decade.
8. December 20 December 20, 2018 Congress Makes Eating Dogs and Cats a Federal Crime Buried in a farm bill nobody read cover to cover, Congress drew one hard line about which animals are food and which are not.
9. December 19 December 19, 2020 The First Restaurant Meal of Lab-Grown Chicken At a private club on the Singapore River, a plate of chicken bites made from cultured cells and mung bean protein went from lab curiosity to something a paying customer could order.
10. December 18 December 18, 2014 A Court Calls Sandra a 'Subject of Rights' An Argentine court gave a caged orangutan a legal status no animal had held before, then let her sit in that cage for five more years.
11. December 17 December 17, 1972 A Bollywood Star Is Born a Vegetarian Bodybuilder The Bollywood action star who built his physique without meat later used that fame to lobby a government minister to get animals out of India's circus rings.
12. December 16, 1998 The Five-Year Proof: Ornish Shows Reversal Wasn't a Fluke Eight years after Dean Ornish first reported clogged arteries opening up on nothing but diet and lifestyle, his patients came back for another angiogram, and the arteries had kept clearing, with no statin in sight.
13. December 14 December 14, 1943 Kellogg Dies, His Meatless Foods Don't The doctor who built a health empire on oatmeal, cold showers, and no meat died at 91, having already invented the plant-based breakfast and, decades before anyone used the term, the veggie burger.
14. December 13 December 13, 2007 Animal Sentience Enters Europe's Core Law In a monastery in Lisbon, 27 governments signed a treaty that quietly moved animals from a side protocol into the main text of European law.
15. December 12 December 12, 2003 Keiko, the Real Willy, Dies Free The orca who played Willy in a Hollywood tearjerker spent his last year doing what the movie promised: swimming loose in the open Atlantic, until pneumonia caught up with him in a Norwegian fjord.
16. December 10 December 10, 1998 Animal Rights Gets Its Own Day, on Human Rights' Fiftieth A Sheffield campaign group picked the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to launch a day for animals, and the date stuck.
17. December 9, 1970 Nixon Signs the Horse Protection Act For decades, show horses had chemicals painted onto their legs so pain would force a fancier gait; in 1970 that finally became a federal crime.
18. December 8, 2015 How Not to Die Hits the Shelves A physician who ran a free nutrition-science website turned his life's argument into 576 pages, and America bought them by the hundred thousand.
19. December 4, 1822 The Woman Who Made Vivisection a Scandal Born in Dublin on this date, Frances Power Cobbe spent her later decades building the organizations that turned animal experimentation from a private scientific matter into a public fight.
20. December 3 December 3, 1978 Switzerland Votes to Protect Animals Swiss citizens didn't wait for lawmakers or corporations to act: on December 3, 1978, they voted directly, by a landslide, to give animals a federal law of their own, one that would end battery cages fourteen years later.
21. December 2 December 2, 2020 Singapore Clears the World's First Cultured Chicken A regulator looked at chicken grown from real animal cells in a steel tank, ran the safety numbers for two years, and said yes before anyone else on Earth had.
22. December 1 December 1, 2023 Italy Bans a Meat That Wasn't for Sale Yet Before a single lab-grown cutlet reached an Italian plate, parliament made selling one a crime, and did it so fast that Brussels never got the courtesy of a heads-up.
23. November 30 November 30, 2023 The Twin Study That Cornered Genetics Stanford put 22 sets of identical twins on the same clean diet except for one variable, and in eight weeks the vegan twin's cholesterol pulled away from their genetically identical sibling.
24. November 29 November 29, 2006 The FAO Puts a Number on Livestock and the Climate A 390-page UN report did what decades of vegan argument hadn't: it made animal agriculture's climate math impossible for governments to wave off.
25. November 28, 1938 The Man Who Made the Case for Animal Rights Is Born A butcher's assistant from Pittsburgh grew up to argue that animals aren't ours to use at all, and the movement has been arguing from that floor ever since.
26. November 26, 1827 Ellen G. White Is Born in Gorham, Maine A twin girl born on a Maine farm grew up to talk a whole church out of eating meat, and the sanitarium kitchens built to feed that idea invented the veggie burger.
27. November 25, 2019 The PACT Act Closes the Crush Video Loophole For nine years federal law only punished the video of an animal being crushed to death, not the crushing itself, until a signing ceremony at the White House finally closed that gap.
28. November 24, 1877 Black Beauty Is Published A woman who could barely leave her sofa wrote the whole story from inside a horse's head, and it did more for horses than a century of pamphlets.
29. November 23, 2000 Britain Bans Fur Farming Outright Eleven mink farms were still running in England and Wales when Parliament decided that keeping an animal purely to skin it for a coat should simply be a crime.
30. November 22 November 22, 1954 Four Staffers Walk Out and Start the Humane Society of the United States Four staff members left the American Humane Association over a fight about where donations should go, then bet their own life insurance that the breakaway group they started would survive.
31. November 20, 1910 Tolstoy Dies at a Stranger's Railway Station The novelist who called meat-eating a moral injury spent his last week in a stationmaster's spare room, ten days after walking out on his own household at 82.
32. November 18 November 18, 2004 England and Wales Ban Hunting With Dogs After a decade of parliamentary trench warfare, Britain finally banned chasing foxes, deer, and hares to death with packs of dogs, and had to break its own lawmaking rules just to get it done.
33. November 16, 2005 Vegan's Coiner Dies, Cultivated Meat Gets the Green Light The man who named the movement died at 95, and seventeen years later to the day, the FDA said lab-grown chicken was safe to eat.
34. November 14, 1975 Travis Barker Is Born A drummer who nearly died in a fireball on a South Carolina runway came out the other side vegan, and later put his own money into one of Los Angeles's best vegan restaurants.
35. November 12 November 12, 2019 The Rebel Whopper Rolls Out Across Europe In one day, a Dutch farmer's meat-free burger patty went from niche butcher shop to more than 2,500 Burger Kings in 25 countries.
36. November 10 November 10, 2020 Pizza Hut Puts Beyond Meat on the Menu Nationwide The country's biggest pizza chain by store count decided a plant-based sausage pizza belonged next to pepperoni, and rolled it out coast to coast in a single day.
37. November 8 November 8, 2016 Massachusetts Bans the Battery Cage Three out of four Massachusetts voters decided a hen deserves enough room to turn around, and that the rule should follow her eggs across state lines.
38. November 7 November 7, 2006 Arizona Votes to Ban the Crate Voters, not legislators, told Arizona's pig and veal farms that an animal deserves enough room to turn around.
39. November 6 November 6, 2018 California Voters Ban the Cage California voters didn't just ask factory farms for more room. They banned selling the eggs, pork, and veal of anyone who refused, then defended that law all the way to the Supreme Court.
40. November 5, 1959 Bryan Adams Is Born A kid from Kingston, Ontario grows up to sell records by the tens of millions and, along the way, boils his whole case for animals down to one sentence.
41. November 4, 2008 California Votes to End Extreme Farm Animal Confinement In the country's biggest agricultural state, voters told egg, pork, and veal producers that a cage too small to turn around in was no longer legal, by a nearly two-to-one margin.
42. November 3 November 3, 2016 A Chimpanzee Wins Habeas Corpus In Mendoza, Argentina, a judge looked at a chimpanzee alone in a concrete cage and ruled that the law meant to free wrongly held humans applied to her too.
43. November 2, 1950 Shaw Dies at Ninety-Four, Sixty-Nine Years a Vegetarian George Bernard Shaw spent nearly seventy years refusing to eat what he called the scorched corpses of animals, and it was a fall from a ladder pruning his own trees, not his diet, that finally caught up with him.
44. November 1 November 1, 1994 World Vegan Day Is Founded The Vegan Society did not know its own exact founding date, so its chair picked November 1st partly for Halloween and the Day of the Dead, and accidentally created a global institution.
45. October 30, 2019 New York City Votes to Ban Foie Gras The City Council outlawed selling the force-fed delicacy inside the country's biggest restaurant market, and the fight over it is still going.
46. October 28, 1974 Joaquin Phoenix Turns His Oscar Speech Into a Rescue The night he won an Oscar for playing the Joker, Joaquin Phoenix used the microphone to talk about a stolen calf. By the next afternoon he had gone and gotten one back.
47. October 26 October 26, 2015 Bacon Joins Tobacco on the WHO's Cancer List The world's cancer agency put your breakfast sausage in the same evidence tier as cigarettes, and the internet did not take it well.
48. October 25, 1972 Michael Greger Is Born A doctor born in Miami would spend his career trying to talk people out of heart disease with nothing but citations.
49. October 24, 2013 Blackfish Finds Its Real Audience on CNN A documentary about a captive orca aired free on cable news and turned SeaWorld's business into the story.
50. October 23 October 23, 2020 A Veggie Burger Stays a Burger Europe's meat lobby wanted plant-based patties stripped of the word burger; the European Parliament said no, 379 to 284.
51. October 21 October 21, 1884 Peanut Butter Gets a Patent Number A Montreal pharmacist milled roasted peanuts until they ran like lard, and the U.S. government gave the plant kingdom's best protein spread a patent number.
52. October 15, 1995 The Simpsons Makes Lisa's Vegetarianism Permanent Paul McCartney would only voice himself on the Kwik-E-Mart roof if the writers made a promise they've now kept for three decades: Lisa never eats meat again.
53. October 14, 1998 The Critic Who Rescued 577 Burros Dies A syndicated TV critic turned his sharpest lines on sport hunters, then spent a decade filling a Texas ranch with the burros, elephants, and chimpanzees nobody else wanted, and died on October 14, 1998, at 81.
54. October 13 October 13, 1980 The Heavyweight Champion Who Went Vegan Mid-Career David Haye unified the cruiserweight titles and won a heavyweight belt eating meat, then one documentary made him quit it for good, mid-comeback, in the sport built on protein myths.
55. October 12, 2019 California Outlaws New Fur With one signature, the country's most populous state told an entire industry its product had no future within its borders.
56. October 11, 1805 The Man Who Read Rousseau and Gave Up Meat A future street-fighting revolutionary is born in Munich, decades before he trades the barricades for a plate of vegetables and a Stuttgart meeting hall.
57. October 10, 1978 Inspectors Get the Power to Stop the Slaughter Line Congress decided a federal meat inspector's badge should mean more than checking for disease, it should mean the authority to shut the line down the moment cruelty starts.
58. October 8, 2022 The Piglet Rescuers Walk Free A Utah jury heard two activists argue that carrying a dying piglet to a vet is rescue, not theft, and it agreed.
59. October 7 October 7, 2011 California Bans the Sale of Shark Fins Jerry Brown signed a bill that never touched a fishing boat. It just made the fin worthless to sell in California, and that turned out to be enough to matter.
60. October 6, 2006 The PETS Act Becomes Law A nine-year-old boy sobbing over a confiscated dog named Snowball became the image that got Congress to write pets into disaster law.
61. October 4 October 4, 1929 World Animal Day Settles on October 4 A Berlin dog trainer's animal-welfare rally kept missing its intended date until, in 1929, it finally landed on the feast day it was named for.
62. October 2, 1983 A Holocaust Survivor Starts a Day to Mourn Farmed Animals Alex Hershaft picked Gandhi's birthday for the date and grief for the tone, and forty years later the vigils are still happening.
63. October 1 October 1, 1977 North America Gets Its Own Vegetarian Day A young society born to host one conference in the Maine woods decided a single congress wasn't enough and gave the whole continent an annual reason to skip meat.
64. September 30, 1847 The Word 'Vegetarian' Gets an Organization A hydropathic hotel on the Kent coast hosted the meeting that turned scattered flesh-abstainers into a movement with a name and a membership list.
65. September 29 September 29, 2004 The Foie Gras Ban With a Long Fuse Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law against force-feeding ducks for foie gras, then gave the industry nearly eight years to find a way around it, and courts have been arguing about it ever since.
66. September 28, 1934 Brigitte Bardot Is Born France's biggest film star spent the back half of her life proving that fame is just a tool, and she used hers to go after seal hunters, horse meat, and slaughterhouses.
67. September 27, 1962 Silent Spring Arrives A marine biologist published one book about pesticides and reordered how a country thought about its own place in nature.
68. September 26 September 26, 2019 The First Meat Made Off Earth Two hundred and fifty miles above the planet, a bioprinter assembled a sliver of beef muscle without a single cow in sight.
69. September 24 September 24, 1941 Linda McCartney Is Born The photographer who watched lambs play in a field from her kitchen window one Sunday in 1975, looked down at the leg of lamb on her plate, and never ate meat again.
70. September 22 September 22, 2010 The EU Bans Great Apes From Lab Procedures Brussels didn't outlaw animal testing that day. It drew one hard line around chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos and orangutans, and thickened every other line in the process.
71. September 20, 1851 The Schoolmaster Who Argued Animals Have Rights Is Born An Eton classics teacher walked away from a comfortable job to write the book that first argued animals aren't owed kindness, they're owed rights, and a London law student named Gandhi read his work and never looked at his dinner the same way.
72. September 18, 2018 California Puts Plant-Based Meals in the Penal Code With one signature, Jerry Brown made California the first state to require vegan meals for the people who have no say over what's on their tray: prisoners and hospital patients.
73. September 17, 1938 The Mad Cowboy Is Born A fourth-generation Montana rancher who gave up meat after a spinal tumor scare went on Oprah in 1996, said cattle were being turned into cannibals, and got them both sued for it.
74. September 16, 1846 The Doctor Who Refused to Vivisect Her Way to a Degree Born September 16, 1846, Anna Kingsford spent six years in a Paris medical school surrounded by animal experiments she called a kind of hell, and came out the other side with a medical degree and a book that argued the whole system was unnecessary.
75. September 15 September 15, 1906 The Brown Dog Memorial Is Unveiled in Battersea A bronze statue of a small brown terrier, put up to shame a vivisection lab, made a South London park the flashpoint of a national riot.
76. September 14 September 14, 1793 The Soldier Who Wrote The Cry of Nature A Scottish veteran who gave up meat after watching Hindu villagers in India spared their oxen wrote one of the first full books against eating animals, then died leading pikemen for revolutionary France.
77. September 13, 2016 California Outlaws the Orca Show The state that built Shamu into a household name made it illegal to breed a killer whale in captivity or put one through a routine ever again.
78. September 12, 1980 Yao Ming Is Born The tallest man in the NBA grew up to talk an entire country out of shark fin soup.
79. September 11, 1851 The Father of American Vegetarianism Dies The preacher who told America to eat plain bread and drink cold water died at 57, and the cracker that bears his name outlived every sermon he gave.
80. September 9, 1828 Leo Tolstoy Is Born at Yasnaya Polyana The count who would spend his last decades arguing that a moral life has to start with what's on your plate was born into a household of hunting parties and serfs.
81. September 7, 2008 Food, Inc. Opens Eyes in Toronto A documentary about hamburgers and corn subsidies premiered at a film festival and left audiences looking at their dinner plates differently.
82. September 6 September 6, 1634 Thomas Tryon, the Merchant Who Heard a Voice Telling Him to Stop Eating Animals A Gloucestershire shepherd's son grew up to write the books that talked Benjamin Franklin into giving up meat.
83. September 5 September 5, 1866 The Sanitarium That Reinvented Breakfast A Michigan health institute built on Seventh-day Adventist doctrine opened its doors, and within a decade it would turn a doctor's obsession with vegetarian diets into the American breakfast table.
84. September 2, 1910 Donald Watson, Who Coined 'Vegan,' Is Born A Yorkshire schoolboy horrified by a pig slaughter on his uncle's farm grew up to invent a word and start a movement that outlived every critic he ever had.
85. September 1 September 1, 1914 The Last Passenger Pigeon Dies at the Cincinnati Zoo Martha had outlived every wild flock and every mate offered a $1,000 reward, and when she finally died alone in her cage, a species that had once numbered in the billions simply stopped existing.
86. August 30, 1797 Frankenstein's Vegetarian Monster Mary Shelley was born in London to two radical philosophers, and the creature she later invented turned down meat before most novelists thought to give a monster a diet at all.
87. August 29, 1813 The Man Who Stopped Traffic for a Horse Henry Bergh was born into a shipbuilding fortune and spent it building the first American law with teeth against cruelty to animals, then walked the streets in a top hat to enforce it himself.
88. August 27, 1958 Eisenhower Signs the Humane Slaughter Act The federal government finally said an animal should be knocked out before it's killed, then wrote a law so narrow it barely touched the killing floor.
89. August 24 August 24, 1966 The Law That Saved Lab Dogs, Not Farm Animals A stolen Dalmatian and a magazine photo essay shamed Congress into policing research kennels, then lawmakers drew the line exactly at the farm gate.
90. August 23, 1970 River Phoenix Is Born in Madras, Oregon Decades before he became Hollywood's most famous vegan, walking out on a fancy Manhattan dinner rather than watch a friend eat crab, River Phoenix arrived in a small Oregon town most people still can't find on a map.
91. August 22, 1867 The Raw Apples That Started a Diet Revolution A doctor born in Aarau would later treat his own jaundice with nothing but raw apples, then spend his career trying to convince medicine that food alone could heal.
92. August 21 August 21, 2020 A Judge Rules Vegan Butter Can Be Called Butter California told Miyoko's Creamery its cashew spread couldn't be called butter, and a federal judge said the state's confusion argument didn't hold up.
93. August 20, 2010 The EU Shuts Its Market to Seal Fur After a decade of ice-floe protests and one lopsided vote in Strasbourg, Europe closed one of the world's biggest markets for seal fur, oil, and meat in a single stroke.
94. August 19, 1970 Gary Yourofsky Is Born The activist who would turn a blunt Georgia Tech lecture into the most-watched speech in Israeli internet history was born in Detroit on this day.
95. August 18 August 18, 1911 Britain's Patchwork of Cruelty Laws Becomes One Act Nine separate Victorian statutes against cruelty to animals, knackers, and poisoned bait got folded into a single law that would run British animal welfare for the next 95 years.
96. August 17, 1959 The Man Who Followed the Burger Home Eric Schlosser was born in New York City, and grew up to trace the American burger back through the feedlot and the kill floor until a lot of readers put the tray down.
97. August 16, 1991 Luna Lovegood's Actress Is Born The actress who would play Harry Potter's dreamiest outsider was born hating the sight of blood, a detail that turned out to matter more than anyone could have guessed.
98. August 15 August 15, 1876 Britain Licenses the Vivisector The world's first law on animal experiments gave campaigners licenses and anaesthesia instead of the ban they had been marching for.
99. August 13 August 13, 1941 Ford Unveils a Car Grown From Soybeans In Dearborn, Henry Ford showed off a car body built mostly from soybeans, wheat, and corn, and promised he'd grow the next one from the ground up.
100. August 12, 2012 World Elephant Day Puts One Date on the Calendar for Elephants A Canadian filmmaker and a Thai reintroduction foundation picked a single day to make the world look at poaching, ivory, and captivity all at once, and more than a hundred wildlife groups have shown up every year since.
101. August 8 August 8, 2019 The IPCC's Land Report Puts Diet on the Table A hundred scientists produced a report on soil, forests, and food security; the sentence that traveled the world was about what's on your plate.
102. August 6 August 6, 1798 William Alcott Writes America's First Vegetarian Cookbook A Connecticut schoolteacher who built better desks for his students grew up to write the book that put a meatless table into American print for the first time.
103. August 5, 2013 The First Lab-Grown Burger Is Cooked and Eaten A chef fried a patty grown from cow stem cells in a London studio, and two food critics ate it live to find out if meat still needed an animal.
104. August 4, 1792 Percy Bysshe Shelley Is Born The baronet's grandson who would give up meat at nineteen and argue in print that a plate of flesh and an empire built on conquest came from the same rotten root.
105. August 3 August 3, 2015 Idaho's Ag-Gag Law Falls A federal judge looked at a law written to punish people for filming cows getting beaten and called it what it was: censorship dressed up as farm policy.
106. August 2, 1970 Kevin Smith Is Born in Red Bank Decades before he became vegan cinema's most unlikely spokesman, the Clerks director was just a kid in Red Bank, New Jersey, who'd one day need a heart attack to change his diet.
107. July 31, 2009 The Cove Opens in Theaters A team of divers, freedivers, and a former dolphin trainer hid microphones in fake rocks to film what a Japanese town tried to keep off camera, and the result won an Oscar.
108. July 30, 1958 Kate Bush Is Born in Bexleyheath The girl who would top the charts with a song about a ghost on the moors also went on primetime British TV to explain, in plain and startling terms, why she'd stopped eating meat.
109. July 29 July 29, 2015 A Judge Weighs Personhood for Two Chimpanzees A New York judge came within a binding precedent of recognizing two research chimpanzees as legal persons.
110. July 28 July 28, 1947 Naturopaths Vote Themselves a Party Five hundred delegates at a naturopaths' convention in a Manhattan hotel decided vegetarianism needed its own presidential ticket, and ran one, and lost, five times in a row.
111. July 27 July 27, 2016 The Impossible Burger Reaches a Restaurant Table A plant burger engineered to bleed reached its first restaurant table, at David Chang's Momofuku Nishi in Manhattan.
112. July 26 July 26, 1856 George Bernard Shaw Is Born The playwright who made vegetarianism part of his public legend started, by his own account, to save money.
113. July 24 July 24, 1991 Isaac Bashevis Singer Dies The Nobel laureate who gave up meat for the health of the chickens died in Florida at 87.
114. July 23 July 23, 2018 The FDA Clears the Impossible Burger's Secret Ingredient The molecule that makes a plant burger bleed got a clean bill of health from federal regulators.
115. July 22 July 22, 1822 Britain Passes the First Animal Welfare Law A bill to spare cart horses and cattle the whip became, almost by accident, the world's first statute against cruelty to animals.
116. July 21, 1990 The Lifestyle Heart Trial A cardiologist put a strict low-fat vegetarian diet up against standard heart care in a randomized trial, then checked the arteries with angiograms to see who was right.
117. July 20 July 20, 1998 The EU Sets a Floor for Every Farm Animal One directive told every government from Lisbon to Helsinki that an animal's welfare could no longer be left entirely to the farmer's judgment.
118. July 19 July 19, 1999 Europe Votes to Ban the Battery Cage The European Union signed the barren wire cage out of its egg industry, with a twelve-year fuse.
119. July 16, 1953 Dean Ornish Is Born A doctor born in Dallas would spend his career proving that beans, oats, and a lot less fat could do what bypass surgery couldn't, until an insurer finally had to agree.
120. July 15, 1961 Forest Whitaker Is Born The actor who would play Idi Amin so convincingly it scared him has spent decades quietly living the opposite of that role: vegetarian, yoga, a black belt earned the slow way.
121. July 12 July 12, 1817 Henry David Thoreau Is Born The author of Walden kept a fish on his line and a doubt in his head about eating it.
122. July 11 July 11, 2019 The First Animal-Free Dairy Goes on Sale The first ice cream made from real dairy protein that never came from a cow went on sale, and sold out in hours.
123. July 10 July 10, 1953 Neal Barnard Is Born The doctor who turned a low-fat vegan diet into a clinical prescription for type 2 diabetes was born in Fargo, North Dakota.
124. July 9 July 9, 2018 A&W Canada Puts the Beyond Burger on Every Menu at Once A drive-in chain built on root beer and beef bet its fastest product launch ever on a pea-and-mung-bean patty, and rolled it out to every restaurant in the country on the same day.
125. July 8, 1822 Shelley Drowns Weeks After Writing His Case Against Eating Animals The poet who told England that meat fed both cruelty and starvation went down in a storm off the Italian coast at twenty-nine, his argument for a plant-based world barely a decade old.
126. July 7 July 7, 2017 A Federal Judge Guts Utah's Ag-Gag Law Four years after a woman was charged for filming a downer cow from across the street, a federal judge ruled that Utah's ban on undercover farm footage never had a constitutional leg to stand on.
127. July 6, 1946 Peter Singer Is Born in Melbourne A baby born to refugee parents in Melbourne would grow up to write the book that gave the animal rights movement its argument.
128. July 5, 1794 Sylvester Graham Is Born A Connecticut preacher decided the sins of the body started at the dinner table, and spent the rest of his life trying to get Americans to give up meat, whiskey, and soft white bread.
129. July 4, 2015 PlantPure Nation Opens on Independence Day A documentary about a failed Kentucky bill and a plant-based pilot program in a small North Carolina town got a nationwide release timed, on purpose, to the Fourth of July.
130. July 3, 1883 Franz Kafka Is Born in Prague The writer who gave the world a man who wakes up as an insect started, more simply, as a boy in Prague who grew up to feel sorry for the fish.
131. July 1 July 1, 2012 California's Foie Gras Ban Finally Takes Effect Eight years after the governor signed it, California's ban on force-fed duck liver became real law, and the fight over it was only getting started.
132. June 30 June 30, 2021 Brussels Promises to End the Cage Age 1.4 million signatures forced the European Commission to promise a future without cages for hens, sows, calves and rabbits, a promise it would later miss.
133. June 29 June 29, 2021 Animal Cruelty in England and Wales Can Finally Mean Five Years For decades a dog fighter or a farmer who starved his herd faced the same maximum six months as a shoplifter; a law named for a stabbed police dog finally changed that.
134. June 28, 2017 Okja Streams to the World A girl and her genetically engineered super-pig went up against a meat conglomerate, and forty million households could watch the rescue at once.
135. June 27, 1975 Greenpeace Puts Zodiacs Between Harpoons and Sperm Whales Six activists in rubber boats got between a Soviet harpoon cannon and a pod of sperm whales off California, and the footage of the shot flying over their heads changed what the public thought whaling looked like.
136. June 26, 2014 Cowspiracy Asks the Question the Big Green Groups Wouldn't A crowdfunded documentary walked into the offices of the environmental movement and asked why nobody wanted to talk about cows.
137. June 24 June 24, 1920 Ruth Harrison Is Born A Quaker conscientious objector grew up to write the book that made factory farming impossible to ignore, and forced a government to answer for it.
138. June 23 June 23, 2020 Starbucks Puts Plant-Based Sausage on the Breakfast Menu The biggest coffee chain in America decided pork was optional for breakfast, and 22 grams of protein came from a soy patty instead.
139. June 22 June 22, 2023 Canada Closes the Door on Cosmetic Animal Testing A budget bill in Ottawa did what a decade of campaigning hadn't quite finished: it made it illegal to sell a cosmetic in Canada that leaned on new animal-test data.
140. June 21 June 21, 2023 The USDA Clears Cultivated Chicken for Sale After years of asking whether meat grown from animal cells was even legal to sell, two California companies got their answer from the federal government itself: yes, starting now.
141. June 19 June 19, 1927 Henry Spira Is Born A high school English teacher with no money and no staff talked Revlon into funding an end to blinding rabbits, and proved a single determined person could out-negotiate a cosmetics giant.
142. June 18, 1942 Paul McCartney Is Born in Liverpool The most famous vegetarian in pop music started life as a baby in a Liverpool maternity ward, decades before he'd narrate a slaughterhouse documentary and ask the world to skip meat one day a week.
143. June 17, 1980 Venus Williams Turns Raw Vegan to Outlast an Autoimmune Disease Born in Lynwood, California, she became one of the most dominant players in tennis, then had to relearn how to eat just to keep walking onto the court.
144. June 16, 1824 The World's First Animal Charity Is Founded Over Coffee A clergyman, an abolitionist, and the MP who'd already outlawed cruelty to cattle sat down in a London coffee house and started an organization with no legal teeth and no money, and it outlived every one of them.
145. June 15, 2009 Meat Free Monday Launches Paul McCartney and his daughters asked the country for one thing: skip meat on Mondays, and see what happens.
146. June 13 June 13, 2000 The Woman Who Exposed the Factory Farm A quietly written book about cages and crates made a government uncomfortable enough to act, and the rules it produced are still the baseline for what a farmed animal is owed.
147. June 12 June 12, 1929 Brigid Brophy Is Born A novelist's dare of a magazine essay talked animal rights back into public conversation, and the chain it set off ended in Peter Singer's Animal Liberation.
148. June 11, 1949 PETA's Co-Founder Is Born The woman who'd spend fifty years making animal cruelty impossible to look away from arrived in a London suburb decades before anyone had heard of PETA.
149. June 10 June 10, 2019 Canada Bans New Whale and Dolphin Captivity The House of Commons finally shut the door on capturing and breeding whales and dolphins for entertainment, four years after the bill was first introduced and quietly left to die twice.
150. June 9 June 9, 2021 Israel Bans the Sale of Fur With one signature, Israel became the first country on Earth to outlaw selling fur clothing, and left just one exemption standing: a hat older than the ban itself.
151. June 8 June 8, 2008 The UN Makes June 8 World Oceans Day An idea that waited sixteen years for a vote finally got one: the ocean earns its own day on the UN calendar, and with it, a reminder that what gets caught by the ton is still counted one animal at a time.
152. June 7 June 7, 1924 The Farmer Who Turned Against Factory Farming Peter Roberts spent the 1950s milking cows in Hampshire, then spent the rest of his life trying to get farm animals out of cages.
153. June 6, 1832 The Question Bentham Left Behind The philosopher who asked whether animals can suffer, not whether they can reason, died in London leaving a single sentence the movement still stands on.
154. June 5 June 5, 1973 The First World Environment Day One year after the world's governments met in Stockholm to argue about pollution and a planet in trouble, the United Nations picked a single day to make sure the argument didn't stop.
155. June 1, 2018 The Farm Study That Redrew the Diet Debate Two researchers pulled data from nearly 40,000 farms and found that even the greenest steak still loses to the dirtiest bean.
156. May 28, 2018 Scotland Bans Wild Animals From the Circus No lion had toured with a Scottish circus in years, but on 28 May 2018 the law finally caught up and made it official: the country would never let one perform again.
157. May 27, 1907 Rachel Carson Is Born A marine biologist's book about dying birds forced an entire country to ask what its convenience was actually costing.
158. May 26, 1964 Lenny Kravitz Is Born The future four-time Grammy winner arrives in New York City, decades before he becomes one of rock's more visible vegan raw-foodists, growing soursop and okra on his own land.
159. May 25 May 25, 2021 Amendment 171 Is Shelved For seven months, one clause in an EU farm bill threatened to make it illegal for an oat milk carton to look like a carton or taste like it sounded.
160. May 23 May 23, 2000 World Turtle Day Begins A Malibu rescue group set aside one day a year for an animal that outlasted the dinosaurs and is still losing ground to us.
161. May 22, 1987 Novak Djokovic Is Born in Belgrade The kid raised on his family's bread and red meat would spend his career winning majors by cutting almost all of it out.
162. May 21 May 21, 2017 The Greatest Show on Earth Closes Its Tent After 146 years, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus performed its last show on a Long Island ice rink floor, and when it came back six years later, the animals didn't.
163. May 20 May 20, 2020 Brussels Puts Meat Reduction on Paper The European Commission published a plan to remake how 450 million people eat, and quietly admitted that fewer animal products would have to be part of it.
164. May 19, 2017 Okja Gets a Four-Minute Ovation at Cannes A morning screening glitch drew boos, but by that evening a girl and her genetically engineered super pig had the Cannes crowd on its feet for four minutes.
165. May 17 May 17, 2002 Germany Puts Animals in Its Constitution Months after a Muslim butcher won the right to slaughter without stunning, German lawmakers who had blocked animal rights for years suddenly found the votes to add three words to the constitution.
166. May 16, 2016 A Novel About Refusing Meat Wins the Booker International A quiet Korean novel about a woman who stops eating meat, and the violence her family inflicts on her for it, won Britain's biggest translation prize and put its author on the road to a Nobel.
167. May 15, 1850 America's First Vegetarian Society Convenes at Clinton Hall In a rented hall in lower Manhattan, a physician, a minister, and the man behind the Graham cracker turned a scattered health fad into an organized American movement.
168. May 13 May 13, 2009 Ghent Makes Thursday the City's Vegetarian Day A Belgian city known for its butcher shops told its own schools and offices to skip meat one day a week, and the habit stuck.
169. May 11 May 11, 2023 The Supreme Court Upholds Proposition 12 By a single vote, the Supreme Court told the pork industry that a state gets to decide what cruelty it will and won't allow on its own grocery shelves.
170. May 10 May 10, 1979 Europe Signs a Promise to Spare Animals 'Unnecessary Suffering' In a square concrete palace in Strasbourg, a handful of European governments put their names to the first cross-border rulebook for how a slaughterhouse is allowed to kill.
171. May 9 May 9, 2015 New Zealand Puts Animal Sentience Into Law One line added to a statute's opening paragraph made New Zealand the first country under the English legal system to say, officially, that animals feel things.
172. May 8, 1926 David Attenborough Is Born The boy born in a house on a college campus in Middlesex grew up to spend a lifetime filming the natural world, then used his own name and seven decades of footage to tell people to eat less meat.
173. May 7 May 7, 2014 India's Supreme Court Bans Jallikattu The country's top court sided with animal welfare groups and outlawed bull-taming outright, and the backlash brought the sport roaring back within three years.
174. May 6, 2011 Forks Over Knives Sends America to the Produce Aisle A low-budget documentary made a simple, testable claim: eat only whole plants and disease often retreats. Grocery carts changed within the week.
175. May 4 May 4, 2005 A Day for the Chicken In 2005 a small animal-rights group turned a radio host's Mother's Day joke into an annual day for the world's most farmed, least noticed animal.
176. May 3, 2021 Eleven Madison Park Drops Meat The most decorated dining room in New York told The New York Times it was giving up meat, caviar and all, and fine dining had to decide whether to follow.
177. May 2 May 2, 2019 Beyond Meat Goes Public A vegan burger company rang the Nasdaq bell and closed its first day worth $3.8 billion, the best US stock debut since the dot-com bubble.
178. May 1, 2024 Florida Outlaws the Sale of Lab-Grown Meat A year after federal regulators cleared cultivated chicken for American plates, Florida made selling it a crime instead.
179. April 30 April 30, 1991 The Canary Islands Quietly Legislate Bullfighting Out of Existence A regional law that never once uses the word bull closed the door on bullfighting in the Canary Islands, two decades before Catalonia tried the same fight in the open and lost it in court.
180. April 28 April 28, 2022 The Sentience Act Gets Royal Assent Britain finally put something obvious into law: that animals, including the octopus on ice at the fishmonger, can feel pain.
181. April 27, 1927 Coretta Scott King Goes Vegan The widow who kept the civil rights movement moving decided nonviolence belonged on her plate too.
182. April 25, 1878 Anna Sewell Dies Just as Black Beauty Takes Off She wrote the whole novel from a sofa she could not leave, giving a cab horse a voice loud enough to help end a Victorian cruelty she could not stop any other way.
183. April 24, 1979 World Day for Laboratory Animals Is Born A day of protest for lab animals landed on April 24 on purpose: it's the birthday of the Battle of Britain air marshal who spent his retirement fighting vivisection instead of the Luftwaffe.
184. April 23, 1993 Cesar Chavez Dies Still Calling Nonviolence a Whole-Life Practice The farmworker organizer who built a union on fasting and nonviolence died in his sleep in a borrowed bed in Arizona, having spent his last years arguing that kindness to animals was the same fight as kindness to people.
185. April 22, 1970 Twenty Million Americans Take a Day Off to Look at the Planet Before anyone was arguing about diet and climate, the country turned out by the millions just to admit the planet was in trouble.
186. April 21, 2016 Prince Dies at Paisley Park, the Vegan Who Became Vegetarian The musician who once told a magazine he didn't "eat anything with parents" was found dead at his home studio, closing out a decades-long, imperfect commitment to a plant-based diet.
187. April 19, 1939 Henry Salt Dies With His Argument Already Made The Eton classics master turned reformer died a quiet death in a Brighton hospital, decades after writing the sentence that would eventually reach Gandhi and Peter Singer.
188. April 17 April 17, 1998 Linda McCartney Launches a Frozen Vegetarian Range The photographer who spent the decade trying to make meat-free food ordinary died the same year her frozen range had already put beefless burgers in British supermarket freezers.
189. April 16, 1996 Oprah, a Vegetarian Rancher, and the Burger That Stopped Her Cold One talk-show hour about mad cow disease knocked cattle futures limit-down within an hour and, two years later, put freedom of the press on trial in Amarillo.
190. April 15, 1452 Leonardo Buys Birds Just to Set Them Free The man who dissected corpses to understand the body wouldn't, by his biographer's account, let a caged bird stay caged if he had coins in his pocket.
191. April 14 April 14, 1896 The Patent for Flaked Cereal A batch of wheat dough left out overnight by a Seventh-day Adventist doctor became the founding patent of the cereal aisle, and it started life as medicine, not a snack.
192. April 12 April 12, 2018 The Impossible Slider Debuts at White Castle America's oldest hamburger chain put a plant-based patty on the menu at 140 restaurants, and the drive-thru crowd could not tell the difference.
193. April 11 April 11, 2017 Taiwan Outlaws Eating Dogs and Cats After a video of soldiers strangling a dog and dumping it in the ocean set off public fury, Taiwan's legislature made the island the first place in Asia to ban eating or selling dog and cat meat outright.
194. April 10, 1866 New York Charters the First Humane Society A diplomat came home from Russia unable to un-see what he'd watched happen to horses, and within months New York's legislature gave him the power to arrest people over it.
195. April 8 April 8, 2019 Finn's Law Closes the Self-Defence Loophole A police dog who took a knife meant for his handler got the law changed so that hurting a service animal could no longer be waved off as self-defence.
196. April 6 April 6, 2007 England's Pets Get a Positive Duty of Care For nearly a century English law only asked that an animal not be made to suffer; on this day it started asking whether the animal was actually being looked after.
197. April 5, 1973 Singer Puts "Animal Liberation" on the Cover A young Oxford lecturer took a book review assignment and used it to hand a movement its name and its argument in the same nine pages.
198. April 3, 1934 Jane Goodall Is Born She proved chimpanzees make tools, hold grudges, and grieve their dead, then spent her last decades asking why we still eat animals we now know think and feel.
199. April 1 April 1, 2019 The Impossible Whopper Sneaks Into St. Louis Burger King staged an April Fools' joke about a beef-free Whopper, then quietly started selling the real thing at 59 restaurants and dared customers to notice.
200. March 31, 1927 Cesar Chavez Ties Nonviolence to the Dinner Table The organizer who built a union on a strict no-violence rule decided, after a 25-day fast, that the rule had to cover what was on his own plate too.
201. March 30, 1820 The Woman Who Gave a Horse a Voice Is Born Anna Sewell never rode again after a childhood accident, but decades later, from a sofa, she wrote the horse's side of the story and Victorian England finally listened.
202. March 29, 2018 Dominion Premieres in Melbourne A documentary shot with drones and hidden cameras inside Australian slaughterhouses landed in one Melbourne cinema and became one of the most-watched pieces of vegan outreach ever made.
203. March 24, 2021 Seaspiracy Hits Netflix and the Internet Argues About Fish A British filmmaker's dive into industrial fishing landed on Netflix, cracked the global top ten within days, and set marine scientists and vegans arguing about the same movie for entirely different reasons.
204. March 23 March 23, 1868 A Boston Lawyer Starts the MSPCA Two horses raced forty miles to their deaths gave a Boston lawyer the outrage he needed to build an animal welfare group that outlived him by more than a century.
205. March 22, 1980 PETA Is Founded in a Basement A poundmaster and a political science student fell in love, started a group with almost no members, and within a year had the country's first police raid on an animal lab.
206. March 21 March 21, 2023 GOOD Meat Clears the FDA's Second Cultivated-Chicken Review A company that had been selling lab-grown chicken in Singapore since 2020 finally got the FDA to say it had no more questions about eating it in America.
207. March 20, 1985 FARM Launches the Great American Meatout A Senate resolution praising meat got under one activist's skin, and a living-room brainstorm turned it into an annual dare: skip meat for one day, the first day of spring.
208. March 19, 2017 Carnage Imagines a Vegan Future to Get You Laughing Simon Amstell skipped the lecture and built a mockumentary set fifty years from now, where the last carnists sit in support circles trying to explain why they used to eat their friends.
209. March 18 March 18, 2025 Mexico City Votes to End Violent Bullfighting At the world's largest bullring, the animal stopped being the one guaranteed to die.
210. March 17, 2016 SeaWorld Ends Orca Breeding After decades of theatrical Shamu shows and years of Blackfish backlash, SeaWorld announced the orcas already in its tanks would be the last it ever bred.
211. March 15 March 15, 2017 The First Cell-Grown Chicken Gets Fried In a San Francisco kitchen, tasters ate southern fried chicken and duck that had never been part of a living bird.
212. March 14, 1934 The Man Who Named 'Plant-Based' A dairy farmer's son needed a word that would survive a room full of skeptical scientists, so he invented one that ended up outliving the room.
213. March 12, 1888 The Friend to Every Friendless Beast Dies Henry Bergh spent twenty-two years standing in New York's streets between carriage horses and the men who beat them, and on this day the fight lost the man who started it.
214. March 11, 2013 The EU Closes the Loophole on Cruelty-Free Cosmetics After nearly a decade of phase-ins and industry lobbying, the European Union finally made it illegal to sell a lipstick or shampoo anywhere in its 27 countries if it, or any ingredient in it, had been freshly tested on an animal.
215. March 10 March 10, 1910 Battersea's Brown Dog Is Removed Before Dawn A council that wanted the fight over one dead dog to end sent 120 police officers to make sure of it.
216. March 9 March 9, 1940 Vitasoy Starts Its First Delivery Round A Hong Kong businessman built a soy milk company on a fact dairy sellers were ignoring: most of his customers couldn't actually digest cow's milk.
217. March 7 March 7, 2025 The FDA Clears the First Cultivated Pork A San Francisco startup got the green light to sell fat grown from pig cells, and cultivated meat finally stepped past chicken.
218. March 3 March 3, 1873 Congress Tells the Railroads to Let the Animals Off After farmers worried about competition and doctors worried about diseased meat both leaned on Congress, lawmakers passed the country's first federal animal protection law and gave every cattle car a forced stop: 28 hours, then five hours out.
219. February 29 February 29, 1904 The Dancer Who Got India's Animal Cruelty Law Passed Rukmini Devi Arundale spent her mornings reviving a banned temple dance and her afternoons pushing a cruelty law through Parliament, and somehow both jobs stuck.
220. February 26 February 26, 1852 The Doctor Who Made Meatless the Default The baby born in Tyrone, Michigan, on this date would grow up to run a health resort so large it needed a thousand staff, and to feed thousands of guests without meat by inventing the food to make it painless.
221. February 25 February 25, 2021 McDonald's Picks Beyond Meat for the McPlant The world's biggest burger chain put its name behind a plant-based patty, and for a moment it looked like the mainstream tipping point vegans had been waiting for.
222. February 23 February 23, 1904 Helen Nearing Is Born The woman who would talk half a generation of city dwellers into growing their own vegetables started out a vegetarian violinist from New Jersey.
223. February 22, 1888 The Doctor Who Wouldn't Vivisect a Single Animal Anna Kingsford earned a Paris medical degree specifically so she could fight vivisection from inside the profession that practiced it, and never cut into a living animal to get it.
224. February 21, 1977 Jonathan Safran Foer Is Born A novelist who couldn't decide what to feed his newborn son turned that indecision into one of the most widely read cases against factory farming in America.
225. February 19 February 19, 1906 Will Kellogg Breaks With His Brother and Sells the Flakes The flaked cereal a Seventh-day Adventist doctor invented for vegetarian patients got a factory, a spoonful of sugar, and a brother who left the sanitarium to sell it to everyone.
226. February 18, 2005 The Hunting Act Takes Effect Centuries of fox hunting tradition ran into a ban that took effect at one minute past midnight, and neither side has stopped arguing about it since.
227. February 17, 2017 Tom Regan Dies at 78 The philosopher who insisted animals were 'subjects-of-a-life,' not resources, died in Raleigh at 78, three decades after he made the case in a single 400-page book.
228. February 15, 1748 The Philosopher Who Asked If They Suffer Jeremy Bentham was born in London and grew up to ask the one question about animals that all the debates about reason and language had been dodging.
229. February 13 February 13, 2002 Scotland Bans Fox Hunting After three years of parliamentary trench warfare, MSPs voted by more than two to one to make Scotland the first part of the United Kingdom to outlaw hunting foxes and hares with dogs.
230. February 12, 1809 Darwin Makes the Case That Animals Feel Born on this date in 1809, Charles Darwin spent his last major book proving that a dog's guilt and a cat's fury are kin to our own, illustrated with photographs no one had dared print in a science book before.
231. February 11, 1985 Meat Is Murder Puts the Question on the Turntable A British indie-rock album went to number one with a title track that just flatly called eating animals murder, and a generation of teenagers heard the argument for the first time.
232. February 10, 1944 Frances Moore Lappé Is Born A grad-school dropout from a small Oregon town would grow up to hand a generation the arithmetic behind their dinner: 16 pounds of grain in, 1 pound of meat out.
233. February 9, 2020 Joaquin Phoenix Takes His Oscar Speech to a Slaughterhouse Hours after telling the Academy Awards audience how the dairy industry treats mother cows, Joaquin Phoenix walked into a Los Angeles slaughterhouse and carried a newborn calf out of it.
234. February 7 February 7, 2025 Chick Bites Go On Sale A dog treat made partly from chicken grown in a bioreactor went on sale in a London pet shop, and cultivated meat had its first real customer anywhere on earth.
235. February 4, 2022 New York City Schools Go Vegan on Fridays The country's biggest school system put plant-based food in front of more than a million kids at once, and found out fast that scale is not the same thing as buy-in.
236. February 3, 1811 The Editor Who Rarely Ate Meat Horace Greeley, born this day in 1811, built the most powerful newspaper in America and did it on a diet he picked up from a landlord, not a lecture.
237. February 2, 1952 Andrew Linzey Is Born The theologian who would spend a career arguing that Christianity demands mercy for animals, not dominion over them, was born in Oxford on this day.
238. February 1, 2016 The Good Food Institute Opens Its Doors A new nonprofit bet that better burgers, not better arguments, would get people to eat fewer animals.
239. January 30, 1948 Gandhi Is Assassinated in New Delhi The man shot dead in a Delhi garden had once been a shy London law student who couldn't stomach his landlady's cooking until vegetarianism gave him a cause, a community, and an argument.
240. January 28 January 28, 2015 France Retires the Animal-as-Furniture Law After a year of debate, French lawmakers rewrote a line in the Civil Code and animals stopped being legally identical to a chair.
241. January 27 January 27, 1832 The Man Who Wrote Alice Also Took On Vivisection Before he sent a girl down a rabbit hole, Charles Dodgson spent years picking apart the arguments scientists used to justify cutting into live animals.
242. January 26, 1944 Angela Davis Is Born in Birmingham Decades before she framed plant-based eating as revolutionary, the scholar who built a life around unmasking hidden violence was born in Alabama on this exact date.
243. January 25, 2016 "Unlocking the Cage" Brings Chimpanzee Personhood to Sundance A documentary crew that once trailed Bob Dylan and Depeche Mode spent years following a lawyer arguing, with a straight face, that a chimpanzee named Tommy deserves a writ of habeas corpus.
244. January 24, 2009 The Cove Wins the Sundance Audience Award A former National Geographic photographer used hidden cameras disguised as rocks to film a secret dolphin slaughter, and Park City handed him its top prize.
245. January 23 January 23, 2016 The Herbivorous Butcher Opens in Minneapolis A brother and sister who used to haul coolers to a farmers market table opened the country's first standalone vegan butcher shop, and the line went around the block.
246. January 22 January 22, 2019 Canada Retires the Four Food Groups Ottawa tore up seventy years of nutrition orthodoxy and told Canadians, in plain language, to choose plant-based protein more often.
247. January 20, 2020 England Finally Bans Wild Animals From Travelling Circuses The law that ended a 63-year argument took effect on a Monday in January, and by then almost nothing was left to ban but nineteen reindeer, zebras and camels.
248. January 19 January 19, 2018 The Game Changers Premieres at Sundance A mixed martial artist sidelined by injury went looking for proof that meat makes you strong, and the documentary he made instead sent a wave of Netflix viewers toward the produce aisle.
249. January 18 January 18, 2021 A Vegan Kitchen Wins Its First Michelin Star Banks turned down her loans because they said vegan food had no future; the Michelin Guide disagreed.
250. January 17, 1706 Ben Franklin Talks Himself Into (and Out of) Vegetarianism Born in Boston on this day, Franklin spent his teenage apprenticeship skipping meat to buy more books, until a plate of fried cod smelled too good to pass up.
251. January 16 January 16, 2019 The Lancet Draws Up a Diet for the Planet Thirty-seven scientists spent three years answering one blunt question: can the world feed ten billion people a healthy diet without wrecking the planet that grows it?
252. January 15 January 15, 2013 Horse DNA Found in the Beef Burgers A routine DNA test in Dublin turned a cheap frozen burger into a Europe-wide scandal, and one supermarket brand came back nearly a third horse.
253. January 14, 1875 Albert Schweitzer Is Born A doctor who left Europe for a jungle hospital in Gabon came back with one phrase that argued every living thing, not just people, deserves ethical weight.
254. January 12, 1968 Heather Mills Is Born The woman who would build one of Britain's biggest vegan meat and cheese makers was born on this day in 1968, decades before she ever bought a food factory.
255. January 10 January 10, 2022 Beyond Fried Chicken Goes National at KFC After a five-hour Atlanta sellout and two and a half years of testing, KFC put plant-based fried chicken on the menu at thousands of restaurants across the country.
256. January 9, 2024 South Korea's National Assembly Votes to End the Dog Meat Trade After decades of failed attempts, lawmakers in Seoul voted 208 to 0 to shut down an industry that had been raising half a million dogs a year for the table.
257. January 7 January 7, 2019 Impossible Burger 2.0 Debuts, Built for Meat Eaters Impossible Foods rebuilt its plant-based patty from the ground up, gluten-free and blind-tested against real ground beef, and aimed it squarely at people who had no intention of going vegan.
258. January 6 January 6, 2017 Tilikum, the Orca of Blackfish, Dies at SeaWorld The orca captured off Iceland as a calf, blamed for three human deaths, and turned into the face of the case against captivity by one documentary, died in the same tank that made him famous.
259. January 5 January 5, 2020 The Golden Globes Go All Plant-Based For one night the industry that sells everyone else's stories served chilled beet soup and mushroom "scallops" instead of the usual chicken, and said it was about the climate.
260. January 4 January 4, 1813 Isaac Pitman Is Born The man who taught the world to write faster spent sixty years insisting his stamina came from giving up meat.
261. January 3 January 3, 2019 Greggs Puts Quorn in Its Sausage Roll A high-street bakery chain best known for meat pastries put a vegan sausage roll in 950 shops for Veganuary, and Britain could not stop arguing about it or buying it.
262. January 2, 2018 Clean Meat Hits Shelves A former undercover investigator turned Humane Society vice president lays out, in plain English, how the world might grow its meat instead of raising and killing it.
263. January 1 January 1, 2014 Veganuary Begins With 3,325 People A British couple bet that a one-month pledge could outlast January, and every year since, more people have shown up to try it.