Background

Vegetarian diets eschew foods that entail the killing of animals. While anthropological studies have not discovered any fully vegetarian natural societies (DeVries 1952; Farb and Armelagos 1980), adherents of various religions and spiritual practices have adopted vegetarian eating styles for many centuries, going as far back as Pythagoras in Europe (Barkas 1975), and even further in other cultures such as India (Swoboda 1992).