On this day in vegan history · 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.
The facts
- Watson's death
- 16 November 2005, in Keswick, Cumbria, aged 95
- Word coined
- "Vegan," 1944, by Watson and Dorothy Morgan
- FDA clearance
- 16 November 2022, UPSIDE Foods' cultivated chicken
- Significance
- First FDA "No Questions" letter ever issued for cultivated meat
Donald Watson, who coined the word vegan in 1944 with his then-future wife Dorothy Morgan by trimming down vegetarian, died on 16 November 2005 in Keswick, Cumbria, at age 95. He had spent decades arguing that farming animals was a habit civilization would eventually outgrow, the way it outgrew slavery. Exactly seventeen years later, on 16 November 2022, the US Food and Drug Administration told UPSIDE Foods it had no further questions about the safety of its cultivated chicken, the first time any government had cleared cultivated meat for human consumption anywhere in the world. One calendar date carries both a word invented and, decades on, a technology approved that makes that word's premise easier to live by.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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We can see quite plainly that our present civilisation is built on the exploitation of animals, just as past civilisations were built on the exploitation of slaves, and we believe the spiritual destiny of man is such that in time he will view with abhorrence the idea that men once fed on the products of animals' bodies.
Donald Watson
Source: Wikipedia -
This is a watershed moment in the history of food
Dr. Uma Valeti, CEO and Founder of UPSIDE Foods, 16 November 2022
Source: PR Newswire
Why it still matters
Watson gave the movement its name and its founding argument that exploiting animals is a moral failure civilization can outgrow. The FDA's 2022 clearance gave that argument, for the first time, a government-approved technological path around the animal altogether.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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