105 Fun Facts About Vegan

The word 'vegan' was coined in Britain during which war?

The Second World War was in its last year when a few vegetarians who also shunned milk and eggs, refused their own section of the Vegetarian Society, met in London and founded the Vegan Society.

Vegan singer Billie Eilish wore Oscar de la Renta to the 2021 Met Gala only once the label gave up what?

Fur: Eilish, a co-chair of that year's gala at 19, made a fur-free pledge her condition for wearing the gown, then publicly urged every other designer to do the same.

Who coined the word 'vegan'?

Donald Watson, a woodwork teacher, coined 'vegan' with his future wife Dorothy Morgan, co-founded the Vegan Society and edited its first newsletter almost single-handed.

World Vegan Day falls on the day after which holiday?

Halloween: World Vegan Day is 1 November, a date Vegan Society chair Louise Wallis picked partly because it sits beside Halloween and the Day of the Dead, traditional times of feasting.

What was the Vegan Society's first newsletter, a quarterly launched with the society, called?

The Vegan News was the quarterly newsletter the society's founder produced himself; it was later retitled simply The Vegan.

Which name did Britain's first vegans weigh up and reject before settling on 'vegan'?

Dairyban was rejected along with 'vitan' and 'benevore'; the founders wanted one word more concise than the 'non-dairy' label they had been using.

The first vegan society in the United States was founded in 1948 in which state?

California: Catherine Nimmo and Rubin Abramowitz founded it at Oceano in 1948 and passed round the British society's newsletter; it lasted until a national society took over in 1960.

The American Vegan Society's founder built it around 'ahimsa', a Sanskrit word usually translated as what?

Non-violence: H. Jay Dinshah founded the society in 1960, three years after a visit to a Philadelphia slaughterhouse made him vow to work until every one was closed; he named its magazine Ahimsa.

Which Romantic poet published 'A Vindication of Natural Diet' in 1813?

Percy Bysshe Shelley argued in the 1813 pamphlet that eating meat was unnatural; five years later his wife Mary had Frankenstein's creature say it lived on acorns and berries.

Asenath Nicholson, author of an early vegan cookbook in 1849, wrote an eyewitness account of which crisis?

Irish famine: Nicholson, whose recipe book has been called the first vegan cookbook, ran her own soup kitchen in Dublin in 1847 and published what she saw as Annals of the Famine.

Which organisation did Leslie Cross found in 1956 to develop a dairy-free milk?

The Plantmilk Society, founded by Leslie Cross in 1956, became Plantmilk Ltd in 1965 and made one of Britain's first widely sold soy milks; it later traded as Plamil.

Which news magazine declared 2019 'the year of the vegan'?

The Economist made the call in its special edition 'The World in 2019'; within months Beyond Meat had floated on the stock market and Burger King was selling the Impossible Whopper nationwide.

The Herbivorous Butcher, billed as America's first vegan butcher shop, opened in 2016 in which Mississippi River city?

Minneapolis: siblings Aubry and Kale Walch began in 2014 with five meat-free products at the city's farmers market, and a fast-growing following carried them into a full storefront two years later.

Europe's first vegan supermarkets, Veganz and Vegilicious, opened in 2011 in which country?

Germany: Vegilicious opened in February 2011 in Dortmund, a blue-collar city better known for beer and bratwurst, and Veganz followed in Berlin that summer.

Which festival offered vegan dishes for the first time in its 200-year history in 2013?

Oktoberfest, the Munich beer festival famous for pork knuckle, sausages and roast meats, put vegan dishes on its menus for the first time in 2013.

Which tech founder was an early backer of both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods?

Bill Gates was among the investors who put more than $150 million into Impossible Foods before it had served a single restaurant burger, and he backed Beyond Meat years before it went public.

Veganuary, the pledge to eat vegan for January, was founded in which historic northern English city?

York: Jane Land and her husband Matthew Glover launched Veganuary from their kitchen there in 2014, and by 2020 some 400,000 people a year were signing up.

Chef Claire Vallée's ONA won a Michelin star in 2021, the first for a vegan restaurant in which country?

France: Vallée opened ONA, short for Origine Non Animale, near Bordeaux in 2016 after a crowdfunding campaign, with more than 80 volunteers helping to fit it out.

The name 'aquafaba' was coined in 2015 from Latin words meaning what?

Water and bean: Goose Wohlt coined the name in 2015 after showing that the cooking liquid from garbanzo beans and sugar alone whip into an egg-free meringue.

Impossible Foods founder Patrick Brown was a biochemistry professor at which university when he started the company in 2011?

Stanford: Brown spent an 18-month sabbatical asking how to do the most good, decided that farming animals for food was the biggest environmental problem he could tackle, and set out to build a rival product.

The heme protein that makes an Impossible Burger 'bleed' is modelled on a molecule found naturally where?

In soybean roots: Impossible's heme is soy leghemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein of soybean root nodules, made at scale by genetically engineered yeast rather than harvested from plants.

The primary protein in Beyond Meat products comes from which plant?

Peas: Beyond Meat builds its burgers and sausages on pea protein, and adds red beet juice so that the raw patty 'bleeds' like beef.

Which meat giant sold its stake in Beyond Meat ahead of the plant-based firm's 2019 stock-market debut?

Tyson Foods bought 5% of Beyond Meat in 2016 but sold out before the flotation because it wanted to sell plant-based protein of its own; the shares then jumped 163% on their first day.

Beyond Meat's first product, sold at Whole Foods in 2012, imitated which meat?

Chicken: the frozen strips used a formula licensed from two University of Missouri professors and arrived four years before the Beyond Burger; the company quietly dropped them in 2019.

Tempeh is a traditional fermented soybean food from which country?

Indonesia: tempeh comes from the island of Java, where it is a staple protein, and it is the only major traditional soy food that did not originate in China or Japan.

What kind of organism binds soybeans into a cake of tempeh?

A mould: Rhizopus oligosporus (or R. oryzae) sends white mycelial threads through the cooked soybeans and knits them into a firm cake.

Seitan, the chewy meat substitute, is made from what?

Wheat gluten: seitan is the stretchy mass left when wheat dough is washed in water until its starch rinses away; the result is chewy enough to be sold as 'wheat meat'.

The word 'seitan' was coined in 1961 by George Ohsawa, an advocate of which diet?

Macrobiotic: George Ohsawa, the diet's Japanese founder, coined 'seitan' in 1961, and the word reached English within a decade, after an American health-food company began importing the product.

What is the informal nickname for nutritional yeast?

Nooch: nutritional yeast is grown on molasses and then killed with heat, which is why its nutty, cheesy-tasting flakes can season a dish but will never make dough rise.

When nutritional yeast contains vitamin B12, where does the vitamin come from?

It is added separately: yeast cannot make B12, so fortified brands add the vitamin during manufacturing, and unfortified flakes contain only what the yeast produced as it grew.

Isinglass, long used to clarify beer and wine, is made from what part of an animal?

Fish swim bladders: isinglass is dried swim-bladder membrane, mostly from sturgeon or cod, and its use as a fining agent meant many traditional cask ales were not vegan.

The red food colouring carmine (E120) is made from which creature?

Cochineal insects: carmine is extracted from the dried bodies of the scale insect Dactylopius coccus, which feeds on prickly-pear cactus; the dye turns up in yogurts, candy and lipstick.

Which insect secretes the resin sold as food glaze E904 and as a wood finish?

The lac bug: females secrete shellac onto forest trees in India and Thailand, and the same resin was pressed into gramophone records until vinyl replaced it.

Gelatin, found in most gummy candy and marshmallows, is derived from what?

Animal collagen: gelatin is made by boiling the skin, bones and connective tissue of livestock and fish; agar and pectin are the usual plant-based swaps.

What is the traditional coagulant used to set Chinese-style tofu?

Calcium sulfate, better known as gypsum, is the traditional Chinese tofu coagulant; Japanese makers classically use nigari, magnesium chloride from seawater.

Chinese legend credits tofu to Liu An, a prince of which dynasty that ruled about 2,000 years ago?

Han: Liu An was a grandson of the dynasty's founding emperor; no reliable record backs the story that he invented tofu, yet it is the best known of all the accounts of how the food began.

Which giant tropical fruit, the national fruit of Bangladesh, is cooked unripe as a vegan substitute for meat?

Jackfruit works because its unripe flesh has the chew and texture of shredded meat, which is why vegans pile it into barbecue sandwiches in place of pulled pork.

Oat-milk brand Oatly was founded in 1994 in which country?

Sweden: food scientist Rickard Öste built Oatly on Lund University research into turning oats into a milk-like drink, founding it with his brother Björn in 1994.

In 2025 the Vegan Society, the world's oldest vegan group, was based in which English Midlands city?

Birmingham: the society is run from an office there today, though its six founders held their first meeting in London, at a club in Holborn.

JUST Egg, the pourable scrambled-egg substitute, is made from which legume?

Mung beans: JUST Egg relies on mung-bean protein to scramble in the pan like beaten egg, and takes its yellow from turmeric and carrot extracts rather than yolk.

Which country was first to approve the sale of cultivated (lab-grown) meat, in December 2020?

Singapore: its food agency cleared Eat Just's lab-grown 'bites' after a safety review, and the restaurant 1880 put them on sale soon afterwards, the first time such meat had been sold.

Which animal-rights group, co-founded by Ingrid Newkirk in 1980, moved its headquarters to Norfolk, Virginia, in 1996?

PETA first made headlines in 1981, when co-founder Alex Pacheco took a post in a Silver Spring monkey lab, photographed the conditions and took his evidence to the police, who raided it.

The earliest record of soy milk is on a stone slab unearthed in China from which dynasty?

Eastern Han: the slab, dated to AD 25–220, depicts soy milk being made; the West's first soy dairy, Li Yuying's Caséo-Sojaïne, opened at Colombes near Paris in 1910.

Strict Jains avoid potatoes, onions and garlic for what reason?

They house countless tiny souls: Jain teaching treats a root or bulb as one body shared by infinite lives, and pulling it up also kills the whole plant, unlike picking a fruit.

Ital, the Rastafari plant-based diet, takes its name from which English word?

Vital: Rastafari speech swaps the opening sound of many words for 'I', so vital became 'I-tal'; the food it names is pure and unprocessed, and for most followers meat-free.

Which 2011 documentary follows two researchers who argue that diet can reverse chronic disease?

Forks Over Knives traces how T. Colin Campbell and former surgeon Caldwell Esselstyn, working independently, each came to blame animal-based and processed foods for chronic illness.

Which actor executive-produced the 2015 Netflix cut of the documentary Cowspiracy?

Leonardo DiCaprio executive-produced the re-cut that Netflix released worldwide in September 2015; the original 2014 film had been crowdfunded by supporters on Indiegogo.

James Wilks, who fronts the 2018 vegan-athlete documentary The Game Changers, competed in which sport?

Mixed martial arts: Wilks, a former UFC fighter, used the downtime from an injury to research recovery diets, starting with evidence that Roman gladiators ate mostly plants.

Vitamin B12, which vegans are most often told to supplement, is made naturally only by which organisms?

Bacteria and archaea: only these microbes synthesise B12; plants and animals cannot, and livestock get it from gut microbes or fortified feed.

Which metal sits at the centre of the vitamin B12 molecule?

Cobalt: a single cobalt ion sits in the corrin ring of B12, which is why the chemical name is cobalamin; iron plays the same role in haemoglobin.

The man who coined 'vegan' gave up meat at 14 after watching which animal slaughtered on his uncle's farm?

A pig: its slaughter turned his uncle's farm, as he later put it, from an idyll into a death row for animals, and at 14 he made a New Year's resolution never to eat meat again.

Al-Ma'arri, an 11th-century vegan poet, urged readers to spare which food because its makers 'did not store it' for others?

Honey: Al-Ma'arri, a blind poet from Syria, also gave up meat, fish, milk and eggs, arguing that each was taken unjustly from the creatures it belonged to.

The Vegetarian Butcher, the first known vegetarian butcher shop, opened in 2010 in which country?

Netherlands: Jaap Korteweg, a ninth-generation farmer who gave up meat after the 1997 swine-fever outbreak, opened De Vegetarische Slager in The Hague in 2010; Unilever bought it in 2018.

What flower appears on the British Vegan Society's certification logo?

A sunflower: the society has licensed its sunflower Vegan Trademark since 1990; the Leaping Bunny logo, by contrast, promises only that nothing was tested on animals, so its products may still not be vegan.

A 2018 study found plant-only diets worldwide would cut agricultural land use by how much?

76%: Poore and Nemecek's study of almost 40,000 farms found that meat and dairy supply just 18% of the world's calories while taking up 83% of its farmland.

Which animal fat was used in the creme filling of Oreo cookies until Nabisco replaced it in the 1990s?

Lard was dropped when health concerns prompted Nabisco to switch the filling to partially hydrogenated vegetable oil.

Which milk protein, found in many coffee creamers sold as 'non-dairy', makes them unsuitable for vegans?

Casein contains no lactose, which is why creamers made with it can still be described as non-dairy even though the protein is taken from milk.

In 2016, vegans objected after the Bank of England confirmed that its new polymer £5 note contained traces of what?

Tallow, an animal fat, stayed in: despite a petition calling it unacceptable to vegans and several faiths, the Bank announced in 2017 that future notes would keep using it.

Which American Founding Father posted soybeans home from London, describing a curd the Chinese made from them?

Benjamin Franklin's 1770 letter to the botanist John Bartram is the first known mention of tofu by an American, and he enclosed a few soybeans with it.

Vegans avoid castoreum, once used in strawberry and vanilla flavourings, because it is secreted by which animal?

Beaver castor sacs produce the yellowish substance, which the animals use to scent-mark territory; food makers now get through only about 100 kg of it a year.

More than three-quarters of the world's soy crop, the bean behind tofu and soy milk, ends up as what?

Animal feed takes about 77% of global soy, raising livestock for meat and dairy; only around 7% is eaten directly as foods such as tofu and soy milk.

Which tech company got its name after a co-founder on a fruit-only vegan diet came back from a fruit farm?

Apple was Steve Jobs's suggestion: he was following a fruitarian diet, which is stricter than ordinary veganism, and had just visited an apple farm.

McDonald's paid $10 million in 2002 to settle lawsuits over which undeclared ingredient in its American French fries?

Beef flavouring was added when McDonald's moved its fryers to vegetable oil in 1990, and customers who avoid meat sued because the fries had been described as meat-free.

Medieval European cooks, barred from dairy on Catholic fast days, made a substitute milk from which ingredient?

Almonds were ground and simmered in water to make a milk that replaced the cow's kind on fast days; it was expensive, so it marked out aristocratic kitchens.

Which vegan pop star agreed to wear Oscar de la Renta to the 2021 Met Gala only if the label dropped fur?

Billie Eilish, who was raised without meat before going vegan, got her way: the fashion house agreed to end its use of real fur permanently.

Traditional Worcestershire sauce, including the original Lea & Perrins, is not vegan because its recipe includes what?

Anchovies supply the savoury depth, so several anchovy-free versions are now sold for vegans and for people who are allergic to fish.

Some refined cane sugar is off limits to strict vegans because refiners whiten it by filtering through what?

Bone char, made by charring cattle bones, strips the colour from cane sugar; beet sugar is never processed with it.

Vitamin D3 in many supplements and fortified foods is not vegan because it is made from lanolin, a grease from what?

Sheep's wool grease holds a compound that turns into vitamin D3 under ultraviolet light; vegan versions of the vitamin are made from lichens instead.

Which famous beer, brewed since 1759, became suitable for vegans only after Diageo dropped isinglass from its filtering?

Guinness used isinglass to settle yeast out of the vat, and minute quantities could carry over into the beer, so a new filtration process replaced it.

Vegans are advised to eat iron-rich leafy greens with which vitamin, because it improves the absorption of plant iron?

Vitamin C has been shown to improve the uptake of non-heme iron, the form found in plants, which the body otherwise absorbs at a low rate.

Vegan supplements of DHA and EPA, the omega-3 fats in fish oil, are made with oil from what instead?

Microalgae make the omega-3 fats in the first place: fish do not synthesise them and only build them up through their diet, so algal oil cuts out the middle step.

Which jelly-setting agent, named from a Malay word and extracted from seaweed, do vegan cooks use in place of gelatin?

Agar melts at a higher temperature than gelatin, which is also why laboratories adopted it as the jelly on which microbes are grown.

Marmite, the salty British spread that is suitable for vegans, is made from a by-product of which industry?

Beer brewing leaves behind spent yeast, which is concentrated into the paste; Bass Brewery supplied the yeast for the early jars.

Whey, an ingredient vegans look out for on food labels, is the liquid left behind when which food is made?

Cheese making curdles milk and strains off the solids, and the liquid that remains is whey, which is itself cooked into ricotta and Norwegian brunost.

Traditional Korean kimchi is usually not vegan because its seasoning includes jeotgal, which is what kind of ingredient?

Salted seafood such as shrimp or croaker goes into the seasoning with chilli powder and ginger, though northern recipes use less of it.

Miso soup is often not vegan because its dashi stock is made with katsuobushi, shavings of which dried fish?

Skipjack tuna is simmered, smoked and fermented before being shaved into flakes; a stock of kelp or dried shiitake gives a plant-only alternative.

L-cysteine, a dough improver labelled E920 in bread, is mostly obtained by breaking down which animal material?

Bird feathers, chiefly from poultry, are broken down to release the amino acid; despite a widespread rumour, human hair is rarely used.

Conventional silk is not vegan because the pupae inside the cocoons are usually killed in what way?

Boiled in water before the adult moths can emerge, the pupae die so that each cocoon can be reeled off as one continuous filament.

Until the 19th century, English speakers who refused meat were named after which ancient Greek thinker?

Pythagoras was best known to English speakers through Ovid's Metamorphoses, where he argues for a strictly meat-free life, so people who shunned meat were called Pythagoreans.

Fruitlands, an 1840s Massachusetts commune that ate no animal foods, was co-founded by the father of which novelist?

Louisa May Alcott later wrote up her father Bronson's experiment in Transcendental Wild Oats; the commune also refused animal labour and drank only water.

Which cereal pioneer developed early meat substitutes such as Protose for patients at his Battle Creek Sanitarium?

J. H. Kellogg began making meat replacements from nuts, grains and soy around 1877, and the peanut-based Protose became his most popular product.

Which meat substitute, launched in Britain and grown from a fermented fungus, is named after a Leicestershire village?

Quorn is mostly not vegan: in most products the dried fungus is bound with egg white, and only the vegan range swaps in potato protein.

Which meatless roast did Oregon's Turtle Island Foods introduce in 1995 as a vegan centrepiece for Thanksgiving dinner?

Tofurky, a roast built on seitan and soy, was developed by founder Seth Tibbott with a Portland natural-foods company called The Higher Taste.

Which British bakery chain launched a vegan sausage roll that quickly became one of its five best-selling products?

Greggs saw the meat-free roll contribute to a 50% rise in profits, and it rewarded staff with a £7 million special bonus after the launch.

Which Formula One world champion was named PETA's Person of the Year in 2018 for his vegan activism?

Lewis Hamilton told the BBC in 2017 that he had given up animal products, pointing to the pollution that comes from raising so many cows.

Which tennis champion adopted a vegan diet after an autoimmune diagnosis forced her out of the 2011 US Open?

Venus Williams has Sjögren's syndrome, which causes fatigue and joint pain; she also cut back on sugar and later climbed back into the world's top five.

Which English football club, chaired by Ecotricity founder Dale Vince, became the world's first vegan club in 2015?

Forest Green Rovers first took red meat off the players' menu and stopped selling meat at the ground, and the pitch is treated with organic fertiliser.

Which actor, a vegan since the age of three, narrated the 2005 animal-rights documentary Earthlings?

Joaquin Phoenix and his siblings saw fish being stunned against the side of a boat, and the whole family gave up animal products; he asks for film costumes without real leather.

Which Oscar-winning actress went vegan after reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, then produced a film of it?

Natalie Portman made the change in 2009 and went on to narrate the documentary as well, an examination of factory farming in the United States.

Which Hollywood director, a vegan with a frog species named after him, executive-produced The Game Changers?

James Cameron, the director of Titanic and Avatar, went vegan after watching the documentary Forks Over Knives; the frog Pristimantis jamescameroni honours his environmental advocacy.

Which former US president adopted a vegan diet after having two stents fitted in 2010, on the advice of Dr Dean Ornish?

Bill Clinton had already come through quadruple bypass surgery in 2004; he has since relaxed the regime and is no longer strictly plant-based.

Which British designer, once creative director of Chloé, uses no leather or fur in her own fashion label?

Stella McCartney has never eaten meat, and with PETA she petitioned the Ministry of Defence to stop using bear fur for its guards' hats.

Which Australian philosopher wrote Animal Liberation, the 1975 book that popularised the term 'speciesism'?

Peter Singer's book is widely treated as the founding philosophical statement of the animal liberation movement; he describes himself as a flexible vegan.

Which tech billionaire was revealed in 2013 as the anonymous backer of the world's first lab-grown hamburger?

Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, paid for the research; the single patty cost about 250,000 euros and was cooked and tasted on live television in London.

Which term did psychologist Melanie Joy coin in 2001 and popularise in a book about why people love dogs but wear cows?

Carnism is her name for a form of speciesism that, she argues, underpins the killing of animals for meat.

Which African country's cuisine is rich in vegan dishes because its Orthodox Church bars animal products on fast days?

Ethiopia's Orthodox Tewahedo Church sets fasts on every Wednesday and Friday and through Lent, so cooks built a large repertoire of lentil and vegetable dishes.

Shojin ryori, the plant-based 'devotion cuisine' of Japan, is traditionally cooked and served in what kind of place?

Buddhist temples, notably in Kyoto, offer the meals to visitors, and the centuries-old tradition is seldom met outside temples, religious festivals and funerals.

In Egypt, where falafel is known as ta'amiya, the vegan fritter is most often made from which legume?

Fava beans are the Egyptian choice: the dish most likely originated there, and cooks in the Levant typically make it with a different legume.

Which sulphurous South Asian seasoning do vegan cooks add to tofu to give it the smell of egg?

Kala namak, or black salt, is fired in a kiln so that sulphur compounds form in it; the same eggy note defines the spice blend chaat masala.

Which US city, home to many Seventh-day Adventists, did author Dan Buettner label a 'Blue Zone' of long life?

Loma Linda's residents have one of the highest rates of longevity in the country, which Buettner credits to Adventist health and diet practices.

Which three-Michelin-star Manhattan restaurant did chef Daniel Humm reopen in 2021 with a fully plant-based menu?

Eleven Madison Park kept its three stars as a vegan restaurant, then announced in 2025 that fish and meat would return as optional substitutions.

In which 2010 film does a vegan bassist lose his superpowers after drinking half and half?

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World sends in the Vegan Police to strip Todd Ingram of his powers, which lets the hero land the final blow.

Ruminant livestock such as cattle account for about a third of human-caused emissions of which greenhouse gas?

Methane forms as microbes ferment food in the rumen, and it traps heat more than twenty times as effectively as carbon dioxide.

Which food giant, then the owner of Hellmann's, sued the egg-free brand Just Mayo and dropped the case six weeks later?

Unilever backed down after more than 100,000 people signed a petition asking it to stop bullying sustainable food companies.

Vegan diets contain almost none of which nutrient, which cats must get from food because they cannot make it?

Taurine occurs naturally in meat, and a cat that goes short of it can suffer heart disease and go blind, which is why it is added to commercial cat food.