Passage 2

   The Ancient Greek philosopherPythagoras is best known today for his mathematical theorem, which haunts thedreams of many geometry students, but for centuries he was also celebrated asthe father of vegetarianism. A meatless diet was referred to as a "Pythagoreandiet" for years, up until the modern vegetarian movement began in themid-1800s.

While Pythagoras was an early proponent of a meatless diet,humans have been vegetarians since well before recorded history. Mostanthropologists agree that early humans would have eaten a predominantly plant-baseddiet; after all, plants can´t run away. Additionally, our digestive systems resemblethose of herbivores closer than carnivorous animals. Prehistoric man ate meat,of course, but plants formed the basis of his diet.

    Pythagoras and his many followers practiced vegetarianismfor several reasons, mainly due to religious and ethical objections. Pythagorasbelieved all living beings had souls. Animals were no exception, so meat andfish were banished from his table. Strangely enough, he also banished avegetable that has a place of honor on most vegetarian menus today, thehumble bean. His followers were forbidden to eat or even touch beans;because he thought beans and humans were created from the same material. Favabeans were especially bad, as they have hollow steams that could allow thesouls of the dead to travel up from the soil into the growing beans.

    While the edict against beans was lifted notlong after Pythagoras' death, his followers continued to eat a meatless diet.His principles influenced generations of academics and religious thinkers, andit was a group of these like-minded individuals who founded the VegetarianSociety in English in the mid-1800s. The virtues of temperance, abstinence andself-control were all tied to vegetarian ideals, while lust, drunkenness andgeneral hooliganism all resulted from a diet too rich in meat products. Notableearly vegetarians included Leo Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, Mahatma Gandhi andAmerican Bronson Alcott, a Transcendentalist teacher, reformer and the father of“Little Women" author Louisa May Alcott.

It wasn't until the 1960s thatvegetarianism moved into mainstream American life and the movement's growthpicked up speed in the 1970s when a young graduate student named Francis MooreLappe wrote a book called Diet for a Small Planet. In it, she advocated ameatless diet not for ethical or moral reasons, but because plant-based foodshave much less impact on the environment than meat does. Today, manyvegetarians refuse meat because of animal rights issues, or concerns overanimal treatment, a principle first espoused in Peter Singer's 1975 work AnimalLiberation.