World Vegan Day

History

The Vegan Society dates its founding to November 1944, when Donald Watson called a meeting with five other non-dairy vegetarians, among them Elsie Shrigley, to discuss non-dairy vegetarian diets and lifestyles. The Society describes those six as the first to actively found a new movement, and says they did it despite opposition — the opposition in question coming largely from the vegetarian establishment of the day, which did not see the need for a separate word.

The word was Watson's. By the Society's account he coined vegan from a suggestion by two early members, George A. Henderson and his wife Fay K. Henderson, that the organization be called Allvega and its magazine Allvegan. What the Society did not have was a definition of what the word meant: it was 1949, five years in, before Leslie J Cross pointed out that the society lacked one, and winter 1988 before the definition it still uses was in circulation. Forty-four years to define its own founding term is an unusually candid thing for an organization to publish about itself.

The institutional machinery arrived in between. The society was first registered as a charity in August 1964, and became a limited company in December 1979, with its assets transferred to a new charity at the same time. The Vegan Trademark — the sunflower mark that now appears on packaging — was founded in 1990.

The anniversary came last. Louise Wallis, whom the Society calls its former president, created World Vegan Day in 1994 to mark the fiftieth anniversary, and the first one was held on November 1, 1994. It was later extended to World Vegan Week and then to World Vegan Month, which is the form the Society runs today across the whole of November.

One detail the Society's own pages do not settle: they call Wallis "our former President" without saying which office she held in 1994. Accounts elsewhere describe her as the Society's chair at the time. That is not what the source says, so this page does not say it either.

How to observe

Treat it as a month, not a day. The Society extended the single day first to a week and then to World Vegan Month, and posts each year's activities on its own get-involved pages rather than leaving the date to look after itself.

Look for the sunflower instead of reading the ingredient list. The Vegan Trademark has existed since 1990 and is the Society's own certification mark, which makes it faster and more reliable than parsing a label — particularly for non-food products, where the question is manufacturing rather than ingredients.

Read the Society's definition of veganism before arguing about the word. It took the organization from 1944 to winter 1988 to settle on the wording, which is a useful corrective to the confidence with which the term gets thrown around in both directions.

For the first-person version, the Society's archive holds a transcript of a 2002 interview with Donald Watson and his 2005 obituary, both linked from its history page. Watson lived from 1910 to 2005, long enough to be asked directly where the word came from.