Episode 460, original air date December 15, 2021, on Unity Online Radio. Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app. Please note that the 475 Main Street Vegan Episodes are archived by date behind the newer episodes of the Victoria Moran Podcast. We hope you’ll enjoy both.
Shad Groverland, a vegan, heads up Unity Worldwide Ministries, the contemporary legacy of the spiritual tradition founded in the 1890s by ethical vegetarians. Among its ministries is the network that presents this program. 
Born and raised in Unity, Rev. Shad is deeply steeped in its history, traditions and principles, including the Vegan lifestyle encouraged by its founders.
Our conversation takes a surprising and somewhat controversial turn. Unity’s founders, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, were devout vegetarians, and apparently even vegans or nearly so forty years before that term was coined. However, in his late 80s, and following the deaths of both Myrtle and his mother, who had done the cooking for the family, Charles remarried and returned to eating eggs and dairy and, eventually, fish. He wrote that he did this to toughen himself psychically to go out into the world and do his work among “rougher” souls. I think he was just alone in his vegan ethics. He was old and depended on others for his food. In my opinion, they didn’t understand his needs and it just became too hard to go the distance.
I find all this fascinating because I have good friend who is 90 and in an assisted living center. They assured her before she moved in that she would not have problems being vegan there, but they either lied or simply didn’t understand. She settled for vegetarianism and eventually, like Charles Fillmore, started eating a little fish. It isn’t what she wants to be doing; it’s a human response to difficult circumstances. To me, the answer is to create a vegan default, to grow our numbers until hospitals, nursing homes, prisons, and coffee service after church acknowledge that, regardless of what people do in private, in public and/or publically funded situations, we take the route of kindness and sustainability.
We’re joined in this conversation by Rev. Carol Saunders. She’d come on the call to make a quite comment, but stayed for the duration, adding a great deal.
Where to find Rev. Shad Groverland:
Website: https://www.unityworldwideministries.org
Instagram: @unityworldwideministries
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/unityworldwideministries
UnityWorldWideMinistries on Youtube
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