ABSTRACT
Up until the 1940s any increase in Western meat consumption was seen very much in terms of eating more red meat, but after the war patterns of consumption started to shift as more poultry was consumed. Up to 1945 the small firm had a much stronger position within the retailing section of the industry. At various times, dating back at least to the ancient Greeks, there have been Western philosophers and thinkers who have advocated a non-meat diet, but the numbers who have been persuaded to follow such a course has always been too few to offer a serious alternative to the diet of the majority. For the most part vegetarianism continued to have a rather ascetic middle-class image throughout the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, Mahatma Gandhi joined the London society but George Bernard Shaw was a member of the original Manchester one.
