Vance Lehmkuhl on Veg History in Philadelphia

On this episode of The Glen Merzer Show, Glen sits down with longtime vegan advocate and historian Vance Lehmkuhl for a fascinating look into the roots of veganism and vegetarian activism in Philadelphia. As the current director of the American Vegan Center, Vance brings 25 years of experience in the vegan movement—and a rich knowledge of its history that will surprise even seasoned plant-based advocates.

“I went vegan at the end of 2000,” Vance shares, recalling his personal awakening and how it led him to explore a deeper connection between ethics, food, and justice.

The conversation traces the birth of organized vegan thought in the U.S., spotlighting radical reformers like Benjamin Lay, Anthony Benezet, and the Grimke sisters, who championed both abolitionist ideals and compassionate living. It turns out, Philadelphia has long been a hotbed for both social justice and plant-based advocacy.

From Sylvester Graham’s health crusade to the founding of the American Vegan Society by Jay and Freya Dinshaw, Vance walks us through a historical timeline where the fight for animal rights mirrored the fight against human oppression.

“The Bible Christians did exactly that,” he says, noting how their early vegetarian values were deeply tied to moral conviction and religious philosophy.

Vance also describes the Veg History Walking Tour, a cornerstone of the American Vegan Center’s outreach, which weaves together past and present as visitors explore the city’s legacy. And no conversation about Philly veganism would be complete without a nod to its deliciously modern twist on tradition:

“The vegan food scene is just amazing,” he says with a smile, highlighting vegan cheesesteaks, community events, and the momentum driving plant-based culture forward.

Whether you’re passionate about history, plant-based food, or social change, this episode reminds us that veganism is not a trend—it’s a tradition rooted in justice, compassion, and transformation. Don’t miss this walk through time with one of the movement’s most insightful voices.

🎧 Watch or listen to the full conversation here: Vance Lehmkuhl on Veg History in Philadelphia

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DISCLAIMER: Please understand that the transcript below was provided by a transcription service. It is undoubtedly full of the errors that invariably take place in voice transcriptions. To understand the interview more completely and accurately, please watch it here: Vance Lehmkuhl on Veg History in Philadelphia

Here's the transcript: RMEP Podcast (00:02.47)

Welcome to The Glenn Merzer Show. can find us across all your favorite podcast platforms. You could find us on YouTube. please, if you're watching on YouTube, please subscribe. It doesn't cost you anything. You just click the red subscribe button and I make a million dollars for everyone who subscribes. So it will help me out a lot. So please subscribe. And my guest today is a fellow I've heard of for a while, but I've just met

a moment ago. His name is Vance Lemkul. He is in Philadelphia and he is going to tell us about the American Vegan Center, which is a brick and mortar building there in Philadelphia that you could visit. Vance, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Glenn. Much appreciated.

So let's just talk for a minute or two and then you're going to give a presentation. How long have you been a vegan?

That's right around 25 years now. 25 years. I went vegan at the end of 2000 after vowing to go vegan in 1998, but giving myself three years to complete the transition because I didn't want to be able to say that I hadn't had enough opportunity to have cheese. And then I was tapering off and I realized, oh, I haven't had cheese in about a month. And then I was like, cheese?

Why would I need cheese? Because I was, know, I was, when I was looking at it originally, I was in that addicted state. So anyway, yeah, I did not like mark the exact date, but I know it was right near the end of 2000. So I was close to 25 years. And before that you had been a vegetarian for how long? Yeah, well, as of that point, I had been a vegetarian for 15 years. And I should say I was a proud

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vegetarian, think I was doing everything that I could to fight injustice and all this stuff and went to the NAVS Summerfest, which at the time was called Vegetarian Summerfest, which I probably wouldn't have gone to had it been called Vegan Summerfest at that time because I knew that vegans were all people with no sense of humor and no sense of perspective and, you know, angry and all this stuff.

And I spent this weekend like surrounded by vegans and eating vegan food and I was like, okay Now I had a space to actually admit to myself when I went vegetarian what I really had meant to do is go vegan So and when you met all those vegans, they weren't all angry humoral humorless people No, they weren't but they also they exposed me to information like Karen Davis spoke about how male chicks are, know automatically ground up as part of the

Egg laying industry and George Eisman talked about, you know, how dairy requires mothers to be impregnated and then have their children stolen. And I was like, I don't think I can, that doesn't sound like something that I want to support. So I want to say this, all this, I had no idea at the time that this had anything to do with the American Vegan Society. I only learned much later that the entire North American Vegetarian Association had been created.

by Jay and Freya and Brian and Sharon in 1975 when Brian and Sharon were working for AVS, Brian Graf and Sharon Graf were working for AVS. They created this whole so-called vegetarian organization in order to host the World Vegetarian Congress. And then AVS went on from there to continually do the Summerfest. I do, you know, very, in a very real sense, my enlightenment, if you will.

to the American Vegan Society. So that's why I'm happy to be working for them now. All right. So you've got a slideshow presentation for us. And why don't we start that? OK, great. And for those who are listening to the podcast rather than viewing it on YouTube, see what you can do to help them realize what they're missing visually. Sure. OK, so here we go. Where did this go? There it is. All right. So.

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At the American Vegan Center, have vegan snack foods, we have vegan books, magazines, merchandise, t-shirts, hats, things like that. But we also have a veg history program, and I do a veg history walking tour. I call it Veg History simply because it comprises both vegetarian and vegan. And when you're talking about history,

further back you go, the harder it is to say definitely that a given person fits into the category that we now call vegetarian or fits into the category we now call vegan. Of course, vegan, the word we've only had since 1944 and the word vegetarian we've only had since 1842. So there's plenty of people throughout history that were what I call striving for the vegan ideal. And so this tries to

encompass all of them. The Philadelphia concept is that Philadelphia is actually where the entire U.S. vegetarian movement started. a lot of it, a lot of the characters that I talk about were working and living in Old City, Philadelphia, the historic district, which is obviously the main tourist district and which is where the American Vegan Center is. So we walk around there and look at things and visually you

If you were looking at this slide, you would see me standing next to an unidentified object holding a cartoon of Carolyn Earl White. I have cartoons that I've drawn, caricatures of these historical figures in a little notebook that I take on the tour. And what you'll be missing if you're not getting the visual is those cartoons per different person who comes up. So.

And I'm going to guess, Vance, excuse me, I'm going to guess that this slim volume, this delightful volume that you wrote called Revolutionary Peace, can be purchased at the American Vegan Center. And if you're there, perhaps you even sign the copies? Certainly, yes. If you want to come to the American Vegan Center and get a signed copy, I will happily do that for you there. If you're not anywhere near Philadelphia or not planning to be in Philadelphia anytime soon.

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You can just go to the American Vegan Society homepage. As we're recording this, there is a link on the homepage. I don't know if it's going to be still there for a lot longer, but if you go to the book section, you can find the book there and you can order it through the website. So yeah, you said I was just going to mention if you want to see these cartoons that you're missing, they are included in the book too. All right. All right. So I'm going to just...

hit really the highlights. This is a 90-minute tour that I'm just going to try to give you an idea about in like 10 minutes. So I'm just going to be ticking off very, very basic points. And hopefully then, Glenn, if you have questions afterward or you feel like something merited more discussion, you can bring that up. And there's plenty more to say about all these people. I'm going to start with, there's basically 12...

historical individuals who get entire chapters in the book. And then there's an appendix with people who were not, who didn't really do their main vegan friendly or vegan ideal work in Philadelphia, but they did have some kind of tangential relationship to Philadelphia. And the first one is actually one of those. This is Conrad Beisel.

who lived briefly in Philadelphia before heading out to Lancaster County where he founded the vegetarian cloister called Ephrata. And they had a choir which he took over and made rules for the singers of what he expected of them. one section talks about foods. He doesn't want them to eat and they're all animal foods. I mean, all the animal foods are part of this list. He has a couple.

stray things. But you know, singers, if you're drinking a big glass of milk, you don't want to drink a glass of milk and go sing right after. Every singer knows that. But you know, meat, cheese, honey, everything, just was, he gave specific reasons why he didn't want them doing that, even though he introduces this section saying, and now I come to the foods which we with great injustice take from the animals. So.

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I have my suspicions that we know he was vegetarian. I have my suspicions that he was actually vegan. I mean, there are several other little hints. One is that Ephrata Lore says that when they first built the monastery and the entire little community out there, they had to break up the land and they refused to use horses, to hitch horses to the plow to break up the land.

So the elders of the community actually hitched themselves to the plow to break up the land. And there's a painting as you walk into the visitor center at Efford today, you can visit this historic site and you walk right in the visitor center. There's a huge painting depicting this scene of the elders hitched to the plow, which we don't know if it is actually factually true, but it is something that they told each other about themselves, which really indicates

something interesting. we're going to keep moving now. Benjamin Franklin is the first person we talk about on the Veg History Tour, and he's certainly a prominent individual. He does get a whole chapter. He was a on again, off again vegetarian. For him, vegetarianism was something just like electricity or diplomacy or something that he would like study along with other things and try to get a hold on and try to

you know, understand. So he would experiment on himself by being vegetarian. He was definitely, however, the first person to try to introduce tofu into the American colonies. He did that by sending soybean seeds over from London, where we believe that he had tofu likely at some diplomatic function, where a Chinese I remember correctly that-

Franklin held up a kite in a storm and it got hit by lightning and turned into tofu. Is that correct? We actually have a shirt. We actually have a shirt. I don't know if I showed you this. Did I show you this? No, you're not referring to this shirt. We actually have a shirt. Some of the shirts are more comical than others. Some of them are just simple icons, but we have a shirt that depicts a cartoon of Ben Franklin flying a kite that's actually a block of tofu.

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And the question on the shirt is did Ben Franklin invent tofu, which is a parody of Philadelphia, help Philadelphia tour guides used to be before this group was formed to certify and to credit them as knowing what they're talking about because tour guides would constantly just take the tiniest little historical detail and whip it up into this fantastical, huge, amazing story that was 90 % made up because

the more fascinating the story, the bigger tips they would get. And so there was a crackdown on that and tour guides now have to prove that they know what they're talking about. So the shirt was kind of a parody of that whole phenomenon or an homage, I guess, to it. either way, Benjamin- we have a drawing here of Benjamin Franklin smiling and holding what I guess is a block of tofu. Did you do these drawings?

Yeah, all of the caricature content of it are my original drawings and the background. You're very talented. I just grabbed photos and things and posterized them to make a certain style. yeah, so he didn't literally... me you saw a photograph of Benjamin Franklin holding tofu. I'm not going to believe that. not. No, this was one that I created out of my head. Like I say, on the tour, he didn't literally walk around holding...

a block of tofu on a plate in Independence Hall courtyard. But he did send soybean seeds from London to Philadelphia to John Bartram, the preeminent botanist, along with instructions on how to grow the soy and turn it into tofu. And also from somewhere else, he got a recipe for cooking tofu and said, we should get this going in the colonies. And we know Bartram got the package and we know that he opened it, but

That's where the trail ends. And that's where we're going to leave Benjamin Franklin and move on. But wait a minute. Do we know if Benjamin Franklin preferred firm or soft tofu? We did not. I did not have that I never asked that to anyone before, so it was my first chance. I would conjecture that what he had was a firmer kind of tofu because he said in the letter, he called it a kind of Chinese cheese called daofu. So it was probably more

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I mean, there are soft cheeses too, but I would imagine that it was a firmer kind of tofu. Anyway, so our next great pioneer is Benjamin Lay, who was certainly one of the most important people in American history, but was largely forgotten until this biography by Marcus Redeker came out in 2017. He was a little person. He was what?

people at the time called a dwarf. was also what people at the time called a hunchback. And he was also what people at the time called a royal pain in the ass. And that's because he was constantly going on about the abolition of slavery once he came to Philadelphia. And you know, he was legitimately an ornery person. He'd spend his life with people literally looking down on him and kind of developed a stubborn streak. So he was stubborn about slavery.

He created these whole stunts to try to wake up his fellow Quakers. He was appalled when he came to Philadelphia and joined Philadelphia meeting. He the rich Quakers running Philadelphia meeting were slave owners, were slave keepers, enslavers. And he then devoted pretty much the rest of his life to trying to make them see that there's a fundamental inconsistency between having a religion where you say is based in peace and nonviolence, but the people running it are

engaged in this fundamentally violent institution. So Benjamin Lay also, after coming to Philadelphia, he became vegetarian. He was not what we could call vegan today because he did keep bees, but he was the most, I call him the most, the veganist guy around at the time. He wouldn't eat meat. He wouldn't wear wool or leather. He may have drunk milk.

There were some reports in the original biography that he did, but Marcus Redeker wrote a subsequent book where he indicated that he didn't necessarily believe those sources. But either way, was, like I say, the veganist guy around, but not necessarily fitting the modern definition of a vegan. But he wouldn't even travel by horse and carriage. He would say, I can walk. Why should the horses work for me?

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And then the last 25 years of his life, he spent living in a cave outside of Abington, Pennsylvania, growing his own food, keeping bees and eating their honey, and also growing flax and making his own clothes. So he was really an amazing individual. Was that because he was just so tired of people?

No, he wasn't quite a hermit. He lived in the cave, but he did still come into town and go. He would still regularly go to meeting. He was disowned by Philadelphia and then he was disowned by Abington. But even if you're disowned, you can go to the Quaker meeting, not as a member of the community, but you can attend and he would do that. And he sometimes even hosted

dinners at his cave. There was one that he had where he had Ben Franklin and the governor of Pennsylvania to his cave for a vegetarian dinner. So it was really just trying to be live off the grid and be self-sufficient. And that's a theme that will come up later, but we got to move on because there's so much to say about all these people. I'm just going to give you one example of one of his stunts. This is his most famous stunt in 1738.

Philadelphia yearly meeting was held in Burlington, New Jersey. Benjamin Lay walked from Abington to Burlington, which I think is about a little over 50 mile walk. Am I right? No, it may only be 30 miles. Anyway, it's a significant walk and he's wearing this heavy cloak the whole way. He comes into the meeting, sits and waits for his turn and then stands up and throws off the cloak.

and he's got a military uniform on, which is, of course, extremely offensive to be standing in the middle of a Quaker meeting in a military uniform. He pulls out a sword, starts waving around this lethal weapon in the middle of a Quaker meeting, holds up this large book that some reports say was a Bible, other reports say, no, I don't think it was a Bible, and makes this whole proclamation about how the institution of slavery is going to...

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result in great bloodshed. And there are differing reports about, from different people who heard him about exactly what word he used, but it was something indicating that. And then to illustrate his point, he still holding the book over his head, stabs the sword into the book and then blood spurts out the other side of the book, which was pokeberry juice that he had put in a bladder. So likely an animal.

bladder that was tied off. So this was not, you know, a vegan stunt in and of itself. And then had the book hollowed out to fit that in there just so that he could have this amazing theatrical moment where people are sitting there and blood comes out of this book. And supposedly he arranged himself so that the Pope Berry Jews like fell on and stained some of the people he knew were actual enslavers to make the point that they were.

getting blood on them. that's one. I mean, there's, recommend that book, The Fearless Benjamin Lay by Marcus Rettaker. There's plenty of different stunts in there. We've got to keep moving here. This is the real danger zone for me as somebody trying to speak briefly because when I started talking about Anthony Benazze, I can hardly stop. He was just an amazing, amazing person who was inspired by Benjamin Lay. He was a fellow Quaker and he saw

a lot of these stunts. And he was one of the people who woke up as a result of Benjamin Lay's activism and became a fervent abolitionist himself. He was part of a younger generation of Quakers that also included John Wolman, John Churchman, and Joshua Evans. And all of them worked within the Quaker community to get to fulfill Benjamin Lay's

goal of getting slavery eradicated within the Society of Friends. And they did finally achieve that in 1776. But that was after Benjamin Lay had already died. But they took an important step in 1758 that he was told about. And he recognized that that was going to be one step leading to another. And he said, great, now I can finally die in peace. And a few months later, he did.

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But Benazay, you know, kind of unique among these four guys, he did not just confine his activism to the Quaker community, but he lived right in the middle of Philadelphia at the time with a lot of the founding fathers. He would lobby them. is especially, he was a friend of Benjamin Franklin and he and Benjamin Lay are credited today by historians for really being responsible.

after basically a lifetime of lobbying Benjamin Franklin for Benjamin Franklin at the end of his life, stopping holding slaves, instead becoming an abolitionist and actually becoming president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, which Benazay had co-founded. But Benazay, like Benjamin Lay, was a vegetarian who saw his vegetarianism and his abolitionism as part of one

basic approach to life, just fighting the injustice toward the underdog. And so he would say things like somebody would ask him if he wanted to eat this meal of poultry. And he said, what would you have me eat my neighbors? He also had a spelling book for young children where he, you know, they had phrases that they had to write out to learn to spell. One of which was that fish feel pain. It was part of a

Larger line saying birds and fish feel pain just as we do. So be careful not to hurt them when you're playing. But just saying fish feel pain, even today, that's controversial. Even though today we have dozens of, you know, peer-reviewed scientific studies, know, proving that fact. At the time, obviously, there was no science proving that fish feel pain. But even today, even though there is science,

Many people walking around like to believe that fish are this unique kind of animal that doesn't feel pain when that's not true. So that was pretty radical. Even in that same book later on, in a passage for older children, he has a whole poem where he's conversing with this child about murdering a housefly, which the child is saying, it doesn't matter, it was worth nothing. And he makes the point that

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you know, God could say the same thing about you and your life that is worthless, but for some reason God let you live and here you are saying that the things that God makes are worthless. So he really gets a very salient point in there. And those are just a few examples of Benazé's work. He did all kinds of other things that we can't go into now, but he was constantly working to fight injustice and working to uplift the underdog.

And he also was somebody who assiduously avoided attaching his name to things and getting the glory of the things that did. for example, the epistle of 1754, which was when Philadelphia Quakers made the first statement as a whole body that Quakers really should not own slaves. We now know that Benazay was the one who proposed that

that whole epistle and wrote the first draft, but he wouldn't take credit for it. So for a long time, people did think it was John Wolman. We now know that Benazé was doing that. He was not interested at all in glory or having his name or his face even go down through history. I have kind of reconstructed my version of what I think he looked like, which in a process that takes too long to go into here, but there is.

If you get the book, you can see a picture of what I think Benazhe looked like. We got to move on now to the actual establishment of vegetarian activism in Philadelphia. So far, the people we've talked about have been activists and they've been vegetarians, but they weren't vegetarian activists. They weren't devoting their main activism to trying to talk to people about...

not eating meat, whereas these people, the Bible Christians, did exactly that. They were created in 1809 just outside of Manchester in England, and they swelled to the point that they decided in 1817 to send a contingent over to America. They arrived in Philadelphia and started, you know, spreading the good news that you don't need to eat animals.

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And their specialty was citing Bible verses to show their, you know, to prove their concept that God doesn't want us to eat animals, especially Genesis 1.29. This was a favorite. They would actually put this on a banner when they would have a banquet. That's the verse where Jehovah is telling Adam, here's what I want you to eat when paradise is first created. So in that paradisical state, it's very clear

if you want to take the Bible at its word, that we were meant to be vegan because what God says to eat has, there's no mention of eating animals. So they would constantly cite that. They actually did believe that Jesus was a vegetarian, which a lot of people laugh at and say, well, of course they did. And that was, again, like the fish fuel painting, there wasn't as much, let's call it anthropological evidence.

at the time. But now if you've read, for example, Keith Aker's or seen Christspiracy, you know that it is more likely that Jesus was a vegetarian than that he wasn't. But we got to move on to their years of struggle. We do have, yeah, we have two more little illustrations of them. The Bible Christians in their early years being hissed in the streets called heretics and infidels.

But the thing with Philadelphians is that they like somebody who doesn't give up and the bio Christians just would not give up. Even though William Metcalf, who was a school teacher by profession, they had a yellow fever epidemic that killed some of the students and then the rest were like, I'm not going to go back to class where there's people with yellow fever. So that school failed. But meanwhile, William Metcalf's wife, Susanna,

opened up a new school north of the city where the yellow fever was not rampant. That school succeeded. Metcalf closed his failing school and joined his wife, basically took over that school because of course he was the man. So he took over that school. Bible Christians then kept on growing and a lot of Philadelphians were now kind of like, wouldn't be Philly without them.

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And they went on to found the American Vegetarian Society in 1850 with the aid of a man by name of Sylvester Graham. Now, they had started working with Sylvester Graham apparently around 1830 when he came to Philadelphia as a temperance lecturer on a six-month commission, which at the end of six months he resigned that commission after lecturing all over Philadelphia about temperance.

He resigned his commission but kept on lecturing now, but the main focus of his lectures was now about not eating meat. And he developed this entire regimen called Gramism and collected these lectures in a book called The Science of Human Life, which became really a phenomenon that spread the concept of Gramism all throughout the young country. And it actually became like a real

movement or you might call but Grammism was a thing that everybody knew about and many people called themselves Grammites and they actually built Grammite boarding houses in Philadelphia, New York and a couple other places where people could live together and socialize with like-minded people, eat meatless food and drink water. And that was a big thing. So in 1850, he and William Metcalf and a few other

vegetarians actually joined together and created the American Vegetarian Society. So also just talking about the 1830s, the Grimke sisters are a very important couple who came to Philadelphia from South Carolina. They were born into a slaveholding family. Sarah, the older sister, was the first to come to Philadelphia and join the Quakers after she was inspired by the work of

Anthony Benazae and John Woolman. She became a Gramite. probably, Angelina and Sarah may have known Sylvester Graham. They were in town at the same time, but they were supposed to be, you know, as Quakers, they were supposed to keep a low profile and not draw attention to themselves, but they both had this fierce hatred of injustice that made them have to speak out. Sarah wrote these essays in letter form called Letters.

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on the equality of women, where she made the case for women's rights. This is in 1837, 11 years before Seneca falls. But it's in the second of those letters that she says, ask no special favors for my sex. I only ask that our brethren take their feet off our necks so we can stand up and do the work that God put us here to do. And that was later quoted by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and people.

Think of it as an RBG quote, but she did cite Sarah Grimke when she said it. Her sister Angelina, her younger sister then came out to Philadelphia and joined her. When I say then, that was wrong because Angelina was already there when Letters on Women's Equality came out. She was also a Gramite. She wound up marrying Theodore Weld, who is the head of the American Anti-Slavery Society, who is also a Gramite. And they did great work together.

They were involved in the creation of Pennsylvania Hall, which was the first and last abolitionist headquarters, which wound up getting burned to the ground by a Philadelphia mob who objected to how abolitionists were constantly coming into towns and stirring up trouble. they actually, Angelina was actually speaking as part of the opening ceremonies when they started throwing bricks through the windows.

and she dropped her prepared remarks and said, you see, you tell me we don't need abolition in the North. Well, these are Northerners right here doing this. So that proves the importance of the work we're doing. They left Philadelphia after that and continued to work on abolitionist causes, but mostly remotely, mostly through letters and other activity. They did remain fervent grandwives through the end of their lives.

Somebody else who was in Philadelphia in the 1830s is Bronson Alcott, the father of Louisa May Alcott. She was actually born in Philadelphia in what was then a separate town called Germantown. And Bronson Alcott was kind of radical school teacher working at Germantown Academy. He wound up moving into Philadelphia.

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largely because of the Loganian Library, which had this huge repository of books and Bronson had basically educated himself by reading books. He went to the Loganian Library, read about philosophers like Pythagoras, Seneca, Ovid, Plutarch, Heraclitus, Hesiod, all of them vegetarians. And I maintain that it was that experience that radicalized him and made him turn vegetarian. He was not vegetarian at the time. He lived in Germantown.

or as far as we know when he was going to the Loganian Library, but very within that same year he went vegetarian and trended vegan. There was this place through a series of steps that wound up named after him Alcott House over outside of London by somebody who was a admirer of him who named his place Alcott House.

was actually a vegan community that was responsible for coining the term vegetarian. Bronson visited the place and was so inspired by the vegan community, he decided to start a vegan commune called Fruitlands. But being Bronson Alcott, he was not good at that. have him, as I say, the picture of him that you're missing if you're hearing just the audio has imposed outside of the Loganian Library.

posing as the thinker, because as I say, he was really great at thinking about things, but not always great at doing them. our next luminary is Carolyn Earl White. And in this picture, you can perhaps infer that the structure that I was standing next to in that initial picture was this one in the cartoon, which is a horse drinking fountain.

that Carol and Earl White was instrumental in getting installed in Philadelphia and a couple of other cities back in the 19th century when, you know, they had horses for everything and she wanted to help the horses. She did an amazing number of different things to try to help animals. She was vegetarian. She did co-found the Pennsylvania SBCA when she was ineligible to be on the board of that organization because of being a woman.

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She founded the Women's Branch of the Pennsylvania SPCA, which is an organization still around today and the organization that started the first animal shelters. She also founded the American Anti-Vibisection Society. She just did an amazing amount of stuff. But we got to move on now to Henry Club. Henry Club, when an Alcott House staffer came back to the U.S. with Bronson Alcott.

to start the Fruitlands commune, there was a vacancy. Henry Club stepped in and filled that vacancy at Alcon House. And he spent a couple of years as a teenager, really immersed in this vegan community. He became a Bible Christian, came to Philadelphia and met the Philadelphia Bible Christians, then went to Kansas to start Octagon City, a vegetarian city. That did not work out. To make a long story short, he...

served in the Civil War, in the Union Army of the Civil War, even though he was a pacifist, and he felt that he could split the difference by serving as a quartermaster, which is a job that requires you to go back and forth to the front lines, but refusing to ever carry a weapon. So he did wind up getting shot, and that's a whole story in and of itself. But after the war, he, and after a stint in Michigan,

At a newspaper, he came back to Philadelphia and was invited to become the new pastor of the Bible Christian Church in Philadelphia, which he did and then started a new national organization since the American Vegetarian Society had died out in the Civil War. club started the Vegetarian Society of America, which kind of put vegetarianism back on the front burner of American culture at the end of the 19th century.

In the 20th century, we look at a couple people. One is Mildred Norman, who was the first woman to walk the entire Appalachian Trail in one season. She got to the end and there was a press that wanted to talk to her and she wished that she had a cause, you know, now that people were paying attention to what she said, that she actually could say something useful. And she decided to make that her life's work, that she would walk long distances for press attention.

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And then when they were paying attention, she would talk about the need to take peace seriously on an institutional level and just kept making that point throughout the 1950s. She started her first walk across the U.S. in the beginning of 1953, got to New York and had a press conference there talking about peace and then started back across the country, kept walking back and forth. She stopped counting the miles.

once she hit 25,000, but she changed her name legally to Peace Pilgrim and had a shirt that she wore that said Peace Pilgrim and carried with her a phone. She didn't carry a phone. Why did I have a phone? That's crazy. That should say comb. I was thinking of what she would need. she should have her phone. Maybe it was an i-comb. I was typing fast.

No, it was just a comb. It was important to her to have something to be able to comb her hair. And a map to find her way and a pen in case she needed a pen. She didn't carry any money or any food. She would accept handouts of food, but she would not ask for food. She would sleep wherever she could, a lot of times under overpasses. So she was just an amazing person and obviously a vegetarian.

And our next individual is Jay Dinshaw, the founder of the American Vegan Society who was raised vegetarian. He went to Philadelphia's Cross Brothers Slaughterhouse in 1957 with his brother who was also vegetarian. They were trying to answer this question, is vegetarianism enough or do we need to adopt this new thing that we're hearing now coming from out of England called vegan?

So they saw dairy cows being killed in that slaughterhouse. Jay stepped out at the end of the tour and stepped out on the sidewalk and said, I'm going to go vegan and work to close all the slaughterhouses and founded the American Vegan Society, which of course is the organization behind both the Summerfest and the American Vegan Center. I want to point out that he really brought the concept of a himsa

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which a lot of people, a lot of vegans anyway, now are aware of, brought that back kind of into the discourse around veganism. It obviously is a Sanskrit word that comes from Jainism, which is a religion that a lot of people have never even heard of, even though it's one of the oldest, most important religions in the world. And really, Jay made that kind of the foundation. was the name of the American Vegan Society.

magazine for the first 40 years. And he really got this concept, which is to do the least harm and the most good with everything you do. And a lot of people had heard a hymns who had heard the word, had heard it called non-harming. And they were like, okay. Well, so that means just sitting back in an easy chair, not going out and doing anything. And Jay was like, no, the correct translation for this word is dynamic.

So he said, you got to go out and intentionally do things that are non-harming and do things that are doing good. Freya Dinsha does not get a separate chapter. She's in Jay's chapter in the book, but I want to mention her here as she is our current president at the American Vegan Society. She is going to be retiring in May, but she has just done an amazing amount of work. She won't call herself a founder.

or a co-founder of AVS because she only arrived in the United States a few months after the point that Jay had filed the official papers in 1960. but realistically she is, she was responsible for creating the first vegan cookbook in the United States, The Vegan Kitchen in 1975 at that World Vegetarian Congress that I mentioned she was responsible for the food to feed.

three meals a day to 1,500 people and feed them vegan food. And she took the recipes that she had created for that and made recipe cards that would fit in this little recipe card holder that they sold to college dining halls, which may be a coincidence that a lot of the movement toward plant-based options have happened in different college dining halls.

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It could be just coincidence or it could be a residual effect of that. But Freya's done great work. And also I want to be sure to mention Alfonso Austin. My tour does end with kind of looking at how Philadelphia got this amazing vegan scene, which if you haven't been to Philadelphia, you wouldn't necessarily know, but people do come into the American Vegan Center from out of town and say, I can't believe the vegan scene here. It's the vegan food scene. It's just...

There is amazing for a city of this size and I'm from New York or I'm from LA or whatever. They'll say this. And there were a lot of hardworking people that did make that happen. One of the key pioneers was Alfonso Austin, who started Basic Four Vegetarian Snack Bar in the Redding Terminal Market. He was the first black owned business in the Redding Terminal. And she called it Basic Four because she did believe in, you know, healthful nutrition.

But the basic four food groups that we had at the time were essentially nonsense from the SDA, where they told us that we had to be sure to include all these food groups at every meal. And two of the food groups were meat and dairy. So she created her own vegetarian food groups, opened this vegetarian stand in 1981, and slowly over the course of 30 years shifted to become a vegan.

stand and one of the key moments was in 1999 when she took her vegetarian cheesesteak, the Philly steak, changed the cheese to vegan. So in my research and I do a good amount of research on vegan cheesesteaks because we run the best vegan cheesesteak in Philly contest at the American Vegan Center, this is the earliest I have found of an example of a vegan cheesesteak as a regular menu item.

at any Philadelphia venue in 1999 at Basic Four. So that's basically, I'm just trying to hit the high points. I probably already went over the time. It's hard for me to stop talking about these things, but again, one of the reasons for the book is that when I do the tour, I try desperately to keep it to 90 minutes, even though when I first created the tour, I wanted to have enough stuff.

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to justify going out walking. And I did acquire that amount of stuff by doing research, but then I couldn't stop researching. So now I have all of these facts and amazing stories about all these different people in my head while I'm giving the tour. And I'm constantly having to truncate things to make sure I fit in in 90 minutes. So the book gives me the opportunity to go into some of the details that I can't on the tour. So it is.

kind of a book version of the tour, but with more stuff in it that I often have to leave out. And that's my little presentation. if you have any, you're like, watch this and you have your own questions that you don't hear Glenn ask, you can reach me at vance at americanvegan.org. All right. All right. Well, thank you for that presentation. When you do it as a walking tour, how far do you walk? The total distance is about 1.3 miles. We go from the American Vegan Center, which is

at 17 North 2nd Street, right across from Christ Church. We walk out basically to the far side of Washington Square, which is like a sixth and Walnut. It starts at sixth and Walnut and then come back. So it's about 1.3 miles. And I originally pitched it as an hour tour and then for a couple of years called a 76 minute tour.

But then I couldn't even stick to 76 minutes. And I just did one yesterday that I was really struggling to stick to 90 minutes now that I'm calling it 90 minutes. So I keep on stating the time and then trying to force myself to stick to that. But I don't want to make it too long for people. there is a lot of great stuff that people generally tell me, wow, this is an amazing amount of history that I never heard of.

It is a lot of history in Philadelphia and I hadn't realized that Philadelphia was really the heart of the vegetarian vegan movement. Yeah, Philadelphia was where it officially started. Philadelphia was really where everything important was happening. There were some things happening in New England throughout the 19th century. And then at the end of the 19th century, Henry Club, seeing that

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Chicago and the Midwest, especially Battle Creek, Michigan, where John Harvey Kellogg was, were really starting to take over doing the whole American vegetarian thing. He kind of orchestrated this event at the 1893 Columbian Exposition to hand off the reins of U.S. vegetarianism from Philadelphia to Chicago and made sure that they could get as many international vegetarians to Chicago.

for that event as possible so they could kind of let Chicago take over, which it did. And Chicago was kind of the hub for the first couple of decades of the 20th century. Well, Henry Club, as you point out in the book, actually served in the Civil War as a pacifist, which is like going to a frat party as a teetotaler. Yeah.

Tell us the story. He was actually shot, but he was saved by two things, love and money, right? Yeah. So in my, in my tour, there's a whole rule of three kind of a comedy thing that I do, where I talk about, the fact that he, I say that, you know, the bullet struck an inch from his heart, but it was deflected. And then I immediately say, here's where I want to let you know that he created this.

vegetarian almanac in 1855. And I described the almanac and this is a true fact, but obviously the implication is this is going to turn out to be what was in his pocket. say, that wasn't what was in his pocket. And then people are out right. Well, it was in his pocket. said, you know that he became a Bible Christian. So a Bible also would have been a great punchline. And then by that point, people are pretty much tired of the whole bait and switch.

And then I revealed that it was a great big wad of cash since he had just been to pick up six months of back pay that the Union Army owed him, which he had in a little pouch in his vest pocket, along with love letters from his wife. And so, as you say, love and money were the two things that potentially saved his life in that circumstance. Yeah. I wonder if you could still use cash when it has a bullet hole in it.

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I don't know exactly what the state of the cash was after that. Now, a fascinating thing from your book and from your presentation that I had never thought about is that back in the 19th century and I guess late in the 18th century, the abolitionist movement kind of overlapped with our movement, the vegetarian or vegan movement, because people who were outraged at the treatment of human beings or the mistreatment of human beings

became similarly outraged at the mistreatment of animals. Yeah, there were certainly many, many abolitionists who were not vegetarian, but in terms of the two demographics, there was a very remarkable amount of overlap. I mean, to the point that, for example, Bronson Alcott, when they started Fruitlands, it was also an abolitionist in addition to vegan economy. They wouldn't wear wool or leather or cotton because at that point,

cotton you could only get through the slave trade. And when Henry Club went to try to start this vegetarian city, was because Kansas was about to enter the union and whether it would be a free state or a slave state would be decided by a vote of Kansas residents. So they got all these vegetarians to sign up to go move to Kansas so they could vote in the referendum with it being very obvious that they were going to vote in favor of abolition because

there were so many abolitionists vegetarians. yeah, with again, with Benjamin Lay and Anthony Benazay, they literally did see it as just two expressions of one central problem. yeah, and I think that people who want to argue for, you know, for human rights today and for against oppression and so forth should be looking at, you know, where

where they draw the line at that and why. Why it's okay to oppress some kinds of beings and not others. Because for the people who actually started the entire abolitionist movement, they saw them as intertwined. So it might be worth looking up some of those people. I will say, in addition to my book, Benjamin Lay,

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wrote a book called All Slave Keepers Who Keep the Innocent in Bondage Apostates, which is this completely rambling book that's just amazing. He was not an accomplished writer. He did not have any formal education, but he had a lot of passion. And there's a lot of passion in that book and some interesting perspectives. But also Anthony Benazze became kind of famous for writing books.

about slavery and specifically about Africa and focusing on what was happening in Africa that white people tried to just keep blinders, blinkers on, or blinders, I guess, and not acknowledge that, you know, they would just tell each other, yeah, we're doing them a favor by bringing them over here into civilization because they're living over in that dark, savage, uncivilized continent. And Benazé would take excerpts from travel narratives

that were put out by the people running these ships that were kidnapping people and picking up prisoners of war from wars that they had been instrumental in starting. And those people would sometimes make comments that would be revealing about the fact that it was not dark, it was not savage, it was not uncivilized, and that that was just a myth that white people were telling each other. So they did a lot of great work.

in Benjamin Lay and Anthony Benazze and putting these things into written form. And I encourage people, if they have any interest, to look those up and read them because they have been very influential. Well, it was probably just a small percentage of abolitionists who were vegetarians. I'm guessing that almost all vegetarians were abolitionists. Yeah, I don't know of any vegetarian non-abolitionists.

I don't know the exact percentage. I think that it was a remarkably large percentage compared to other demographics. But in terms of just looking at it with raw numbers, think the majority of abolitionists were probably still, did not make that particular intellectual leap. Now you mentioned that the current president of the American Vegan Society, Freya Dinshaw, is stepping down. Yeah.

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In May, I think you said, do we know who's going to try to fill her shoes in that post? Yeah, the plan is her daughter, Anne Dinshaw, who has been essentially running the American Vegan Society along with her mother for the past 25 years and will now become CEO, which Anne likes to use the term creating effective organization or something.

This is she's, you know, her father's daughter, Jay, to promote a HMSA made it into an acronym and then wrote this whole essay on the six pillars of a HMSA with each word for a H I S and a so and is kind of carrying on that tradition, but she will be CEO. Yeah. OK. And.

The story of Sylvester Graham, the people who followed him were called Grahamites. Yes. That essentially an early synonym for vegetarian. Well, yeah, at that time, first of all, gramite was primarily an American phenomenon. The word vegetarian, as I said, was coined in England in 1842, and it took some time for it to get adopted.

in America. so throughout, Grammism really started catching a hold in the late 1830s. And then throughout the 1840s, it became the word that people used who wanted to, to express that they were vegetarian. Although there were certainly people who were like, no, I'm not going to name myself after Sylvester Graham. He's this blowhard that constantly thinks that, you know, he knows everything and

Sylvester Graham did have an interesting personality, but there was a little resistance there, whereas other people would just dive in completely. But then when the word vegetarian came into prominence in America, there were a lot of people that were like, oh, okay, great, vegetarian, that's what I am. So they got on board with that. So Sylvester Graham and Grammism kind of helped lay the groundwork for a

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a blossoming of the concept of vegetarian in the United States. Graham died relatively young, right? He did. He died at age 57, almost 58. But yeah, it was a huge, huge punch in the face to the young American vegetarian society. When Graham died, I think,

I believe it was on September 11th. If it wasn't September, it may have been September 10th, but in 1851, after the American Vegetarian Society had only been around for a year, and since Graham had always talked about, know, he'd focused on the healthful aspect of this diet, there were a lot of people who were like, oh, let's see, he was a charlatan. This whole thing is just bunk. But in fact, Graham had...

a lot of congenital problems. had always been a very sickly child and had apparently developed this whole outer layer of bravado and bluster around the fact that he really was, had some problems with sickness. But either way, yeah, it did not make him live forever. And as a final insult to Sylvester Graham, after he spent all his time promoting

what was essentially a straight edge lifestyle or a straight edge diet anyway. But he didn't use that term, did he? No, they didn't have that term yet. But he was like, you know, no meat, no alcohol, no caffeine, no nicotine, no sugar, no white flour. You know, you had to use whole wheat flour and all these things. But the fact that he obviously, you know, identified sugar as something that

there was absolutely no need for and you should avoid, which it wasn't like this was a big surprise to anybody, but he was adamant about it. The final indignity for Sylvester Graham was 50 years, almost 50 years after, sorry, 40 years after his death, Nabisco introduced their version of what had been available during Sylvester Graham's life, even though he did not personally invent or market it, which was the Graham Cracker.

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which was made with whole wheat flour, graham flour, coarsely ground whole wheat flour. But the ones that he had like endorsed or had anything known about were all like savory crackers. Nabisco said, why don't we take this whole wheat thing, just add a ton of sugar into it and make it something that everybody will like. And so they did that. And now Sylvester Graham asked to...

go down through history with his name, the only real thing that people remember his name for being this sugary kind of dessert item that has this little tiny patina of health to it because it is still made with graham flour, with whole wheat, course the ground whole wheat flour, but it's, you know, really is kind of a dessert item. So that's an irony. That's more irony for Sylvester Graham.

I once worked as a paralegal in a law firm in Manhattan. And I don't remember if the law firm was representing Nabisco or Kraft, but those two companies were suing each other over who had the rights to the crispy, chewy chocolate chip cookie. It was a degree of corporate insanity as I would read the briefs about who

came up with the crispy chewy chocolate chip cookie. So you're talking specifically about a crispy chewy rather than crispy chewy. They would say, or they would say we would we've visited in Pennsylvania, some Amish who had a traditional crispy chewy chocolate chip cookie. You know, they were trying to prove that they hadn't stolen it, stolen it one from the other. OK. Yeah. Well, I'll you a big

Give you one thing that I think is in the book, but is not on the tour. This is another just humorous thing that John Harvey Kellogg, who does not loom large in the tour, because he'd spent very little time ever in Philadelphia, but he had his own little things where he kind of took on some of the aspects of Sylvester Graham and that he was kind of a blowhard and constantly taking responsibility for things. And there was a...

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a guy named James Kelly of Jackson that introduced this new kind of cereal called granula. And John Harvey Kellogg a year later introduced his own new cereal called granula. And it was only after James Caleb Jackson said, hey, granula, that's my thing. You can't call that granula. And John Harvey Kellogg said, I'm sorry. Did I say granula? I meant granola. And so now we...

That's come down to us because his version won out. now Kellogg lived longer, right? Yeah, Kellogg. lot. A lot of these vegetarians lived well into their 70s, well past well at or past the normal lifespan of that time. Mr. Graham really is the the big embarrassment. mean, I'm hoping he was embarrassed by all the stuff that he had bloviated about. But yeah, he's really

his dish. I Anthony Benazay, William Metcalf, Henry Club lived, I think, to 89 or 90. So there were a lot of long lived vegetarians, too. Now, tell us about the vegan food scene in Philadelphia and what is a vegan cheesesteak made out of? Well, that's yeah, that's exactly the thing with.

your regular cheesesteak. mean, Philadelphia cheesesteak culture, they're very, you know, they're very protective of the integrity of what is called a cheesesteak. Now, if you get a traditional cheesesteak, does that come with an angioplasty or are you that separate? I think there may be some places now that are introducing that as an add on, but I don't think that it comes built into any of the orders.

Yeah, but I mean, your traditional cheesesteak is going to be beef. It can either be sliced or chopped, and then there are people, partisans on either side of that. Or if you want to use a different meat, then you have to modify it by calling it, for example, a chicken cheesesteak. Whereas the cheese has to be either Cheez Whiz or American cheese or provolone cheese. Those are the...

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You know, those are the cheeses that are allowed. You come and order Swiss cheese like John Kerry did, and people are going to point and laugh at you. So they're very regimented about that. And so that means that a cheese steak, a regular cheese steak is something that you're really locked in to what you can make it out of. Whereas if you say, well, I'm not going to use any animal meat, any meat that comes from animals, I'm not going to use any dairy that comes from cows. You now have...

the world basically in front of you. there are many different vegan cheesesteaks in Philadelphia using different constituents. Probably most of them use seitan as the meat and most of them likely use a nut-based cheese sauce, but there's a lot of variations there, especially with the cheese, it may be soy, it may be coconut, it may be, I mean, there's...

different kinds of things. People also use TVP for the meat and you mix and match them. So there's a wide variety of cheese steaks, vegan cheese steaks in Philadelphia. And we do a, like I said, the best vegan cheese steak in Philly contest and have a city-wide vote. And then we have an event with blind taste testing for our celebrity judges who then evaluate the three finalists and pick a winner.

So yeah, we take vegan cheesesteak seriously. All right. I used to love seitan. I used to have seitan all the time, but I don't let myself have it now. OK. because I ever really had a problem with it, but so many people have a problem with gluten. Yeah. And seitan is just pure gluten, right? Yeah, it is gluten. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. So I just worry that if I eat

big chunks of gluten, maybe I would develop a problem. I kind of cut it out. Also, it sounds a little too close to Satan. That's a problem. Yeah. Well, that's that is a problem. I'm waiting for those symptoms to show up from. OK. You've been having it and no problem. Yeah. So I bet I'm very familiar with the the whole gluten free push. And, know, we do have gluten free vegan foods.

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at the American Vegan Center in addition to non-gluten-free. But you don't serve warm food, do you? No, I should say we are not zoned to be able to serve food. We do cooking demos, are a separate, like self-contained event, which can involve sampling for the attendees of the food that has been cooked. Right there, we have a kitchenette.

to do the cooking demos and we cook food for those and people can eat those samples. But in terms of people coming in buying things, everything is either refrigerated or shelf stable and then it's prepackaged elsewhere and they have to take it out. So that's because of the zoning of that portion of Old City that we are not, we cannot try to be a restaurant that does disappoint some people who come in saying, man, I vegan, American vegans, they must have

you know, a whole restaurant in there and we don't have a restaurant, but we do have food. So. All right. So you say that the vegan restaurant scene is thriving in Philadelphia. So tell us about that. What kinds of restaurants are these? Yeah. Well, I say, you know, Alfonso had a big influence, I think, on Philadelphia's dining clientele over the 30 years that she was in the writing tool market, just getting people used to this concept. She was really one of the first

alt meat creator. She would make her own seitan back in the early 80s when you couldn't just go to a seitan supplier and she would make it into recognizable forms like corned beef and bologna and cheese steaks and things like that because she wanted people to eat healthier but she wanted them to actually eat the food rather than like making this health food that people wouldn't eat. So I think she got a lot of people used to this concept that if there was

something you liked that was based in animal dried foods. You could have a version of that same thing that had no animal products. Also, George Tang was a major pioneer in Chinatown starting Harmony Vegetarian Restaurant, which was a vegan Chinese restaurant where they actually trained people who went on to start their own vegan restaurants in Chinatown. And we had a huge boom

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of that around the first years of the 21st century. Also, Horizons was a major player, Horizons Cafe out in the suburbs became popular enough that they decided to move into Philadelphia. And this was an upscale, excuse me, an upscale vegan restaurant, which at the time, 2006, lot of commentators were like, how are you going to get people to pay these prices when they're just getting

you know, nothing, they're not getting steak and they're not getting cheese and blah, blah. But people did actually want an upscale vegan restaurant. And at Horizons, they trained people who then also...