Avoiding meat is a practice thousands of years old – it already appears in Pythagorean philosophy and in ancient Indian religious traditions – but the word “vegetarian,” as we use it today, is much younger.
The term was popularized only in 1847, with the founding of the Vegetarian Society in England, the first organization officially dedicated to this diet under that exact name.
In effect, people were eating “vegetarian” long before the word existed for it – a good example of how a habit can exist for a very long time before it ever gets an official label.
Recipes built around a specific diet, then, aren’t a modern invention – only their name is relatively recent.
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