You can now download, for free, a complete podcast series that will take you through the full backstory, all the way from the wandering ascetics of the iron age to the vegan campaigns of the present. The final episode, which includes an interview with a life vegan born in 1951, was released on September 13th.
BBC-trained broadcaster Ian McDonald has taken a four-year sabbatical from paid employment to record interviews with world-leading experts, pore over esoteric research in the British Library, and travel to the places where the story unfolded – including the length and breadth of India – to bring the story to listeners.
The result is a series that’s profoundly different to most other vegan podcasts.
Longstanding animal activist Kim Stallwood wrote in The Vegan magazine:
“I particularly like the production quality of each 30-minute episode, and the use of actors to bring the people and the story to life.”
Listeners have praised the way Ian brings bygone times to life. Canadian vegan physician Tushar Mehta said that Ian:
“creates a brilliant synthesis; a flowing narrative that is a balanced and accurate representation of Eastern and Western philosophy and culture.”
The series is also broadcast on London’s leading radio art station, Resonance 104.4FM. Comedian Robin Ince picked it out in his radio review column Big Issue as one of the gems of the station:
I haven’t caught up with the 15-part documentary on vegetarianism by Ian McDonald but when I finish this column I’ll be finding out about “the beginnings of western mock meats in the kitchens of John Harvey Kellogg”
The series covers not just the famous figures like Buddha, Pythagoras, and Shelley, but forgotten religions and fascinating byways. Learn about the lost order of the Elect of the Manichaeans, who followed a vegan diet, lasted a thousand years and stretched from the Mediterranean to the East China Sea. Discover the radical vegetarians who sided with the French revolution. And visit the relics of an orgiastic vegetarian cult in early America. Ian has taken listeners to the home of Rousseau, the place where the Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment, to the Fruitlands vegan settlement that inspired “Little Women”, and a Chinese temple where the community marked the full moon with a vegan meal.
The series divides the story into 15 episodes, with a combined running time of 9 hours 52 minutes.
As the series reaches its conclusion, Ian says:
“Understanding how people have been making the case for animals for millennia makes me realise I’m part of a movement that’s not just global, but has been handing on the baton since the iron age.”
“This is the biggest story I’ve ever done” said Ian. “Ours.”