Reading list · 9 books
The history of the movement
From Porphyry and Ovid to cultivated meat, the people and arguments behind vegetarianism and veganism.
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The history
On Abstinence from Killing Animals (opens Bookshop.org)
Porphyry · 2000
The third-century philosopher Porphyry argues that a life of reason requires giving up animal flesh. Gillian Clark's translation is the accessible English edition.
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The history
Metamorphoses (opens Bookshop.org)
Ovid · 8
Book XV of Ovid's poem puts a speech in Pythagoras's mouth against eating animals. The passage is the source of much later vegetarian writing.
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The history
The Bloodless Revolution (opens Bookshop.org)
A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times
Tristram Stuart · 2006
Tristram Stuart traces vegetarian thinking from the seventeenth century into the twentieth, including Indian influences on English thought.
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The history
Vegetarianism: A History (opens Bookshop.org)
Colin Spencer · 1993
Colin Spencer surveys vegetarian and vegan food and thought from ancient India and Greece to the twentieth century, with attention to what people ate.
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The history
The Vegetarian Crusade (opens Bookshop.org)
The Rise of an American Reform Movement, 1817-1921
Adam D. Shprintzen · 2013
Adam Shprintzen follows American vegetarianism from a Philadelphia church in 1817 through Sylvester Graham and the health reformers to 1921.
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The history
Diet for a Small Planet (opens Bookshop.org)
Frances Moore Lappé · 1971
Frances Moore Lappe's 1971 argument that eating lower on the food chain stretches grain further. Her protein-combining chart was later revised by the author herself.
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The argument
The Sexual Politics of Meat (opens Bookshop.org)
A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory
Carol J. Adams · 1990
Carol Adams's 1990 feminist analysis links how meat is marketed to how women are depicted, and it remains widely cited in vegan writing.
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The history
Clean Meat (opens Bookshop.org)
How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World
Paul Shapiro · 2018
Paul Shapiro, a longtime animal advocate, reports on the startups racing to grow meat from cells and the scientists and investors behind them.
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The history
Meat Planet (opens Bookshop.org)
Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft · 2019
Historian Benjamin Wurgaft follows cultured meat from early twentieth-century speculation to today's labs, and asks what people expect from it.
Chosen by the Vegan Brief desk. No publisher pays for a place on this list. Updated September 2026.
More from the shelf
The practical answers, then the daily ones.
These guides answer the questions a vegan kitchen asks once. The morning brief answers the ones the world asks daily: what actually moved veganism forward, quoted and checked. One short read, free.
Free, every morning. No guilt. No preaching.