{"id":11500,"date":"2012-12-18T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-12-18T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2012\/12\/18\/meet-william-cowherd-england-s-18th-century-vegetarian-evangelist\/"},"modified":"2012-12-18T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-12-18T12:00:00","slug":"meet-william-cowherd-england-s-18th-century-vegetarian-evangelist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2012\/12\/18\/meet-william-cowherd-england-s-18th-century-vegetarian-evangelist\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet William Cowherd, England’s 18th Century Vegetarian Evangelist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source<\/a><\/p>\n

ENGLAND, December 16, 2012 (BBC): The Beefsteak chapel hardly sounds like a place where vegetarians would be welcome, but more than 200 years ago, this tiny chapel in Salford was the British birthplace of the meat-free diet.<\/p>\n

In an even greater twist, the cleric who preached the moral virtues of vegetarianism was the Reverend William Cowherd. His Beefsteak Chapel was the country’s first vegetarian church.<\/p>\n

Cowherd, born almost 250 years ago on Sunday 16 December, demanded his congregation eat a meat-free diet. At this time the poor would eat the cheapest meat. This meant a diet featuring a great deal of offal – sometimes stomach or intestines. Cowherd believed that God inhabited every animal and as such it was a sin to eat meat. His followers – aptly named Cowherdites – went on to form the Vegetarian Society.<\/p>\n

The health effects of a meat-free diet were unknown and many feared they would be catastrophic. A fellow minister of Cowherd, Robert Hindmarsh, blamed deaths among Cowherd’s followers on their meat-free diet.<\/p>\n

Much of Cowherd’s novel social outlook appears to have been influenced by 18th Century Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg.<\/p>\n

Abstinence from meat became part of the church’s creed. Cowherd told his congregation it was a sin to eat meat and it could make them behave aggressively.<\/p>\n

The Vegetarian Society quotes him saying: “If God had meant us to eat meat, then it would have come to us in edible form as is the ripened fruit.”<\/p>\n

In a city like Manchester, with people removed from daily, rural reminders of animals being slaughtered for food, intellectuals for the first time began to debate the ethics of eating animals.<\/p>\n

After Cowherd’s death in 1816, Joseph Brotherton became the Beefsteak Chapel’s minister and continued his mission. Along with other Cowherdites, Brotherton helped form the Vegetarian Society in 1847.<\/p>\n

There were more vegetarian restaurants in Victorian Manchester than there are today.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source ENGLAND, December 16, 2012 (BBC): The Beefsteak chapel hardly sounds like a place where vegetarians would be welcome, but,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11500\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}