Rynn Berry

Life and career

Berry was born on January 31, 1945, in Honolulu, Hawaii, and grew up in Coconut Grove, Florida, where his mother and maternal siblings lived. He studied literature, archeology, and classics at the University of Pennsylvania (Ancient Studies) and at Columbia University.

He became vegetarian as a teenager and vegan in August 15, 1966, and celebrated that life decision every year. He became a rawfooder in 1994. He taught comparative literature at Baruch College in Manhattan (a school within the City University of New York), and later culinary history at New School for Social Research in New York City.

For his first book, The Vegetarians (later re-titled The New Vegetarians), was published in 1979.

His next book, Famous Vegetarians and Their Favorite Recipes: Lives and Lore from Buddha to the Beatles, is a collection of biographical sketches of famous people who were vegetarians at some point in their lives. Each chapter also contains an illustration of each of the famous vegetarians profiled, followed by some of their favorite recipes. For the Leonardo da Vinci chapter, he translated for the first time into English recipes from De Honesta Voluptate by Bartolomeo Platina. The first edition of the book was published in 1989 by Panjandrum Books. In 1995, Pythagorean Publishers released a revised edition with three additional chapters covering Mahavira (reputed founder of Jainism), Plato and Socrates, and Swami Prabhupada.

A review published in Vegetarian Times, considered Famous Vegetarians "scholarship at the end of a fork – and for writing it, he deserves an 'A'." In Religious Vegetarianism: From Hesiod to the Dalai Lama, Kerry S. Walters and Lisa Portmess say that Berry's book is "a twentieth-century parallel" to Howard Williams's classic The Ethics of Diet. In his book The Vegetarian Revolution, Giorgio Cerquetti recommended "everybody to read Rynn Berry's excellent book."

Famous Vegetarians has been translated into Italian (in 1996 and in 2000), Chinese (in 1991 and in 2010), Taiwanese, and Polish.

In 1998 he published his third book, Food for the Gods: Vegetarianism & the World's Religions, which consists of a collection of essays on world religions, accompanied by recipes and interviews with vegetarian representatives. Publishers Weekly stated, "Despite his best efforts, Berry can't convince various religious experts...to link a vegetarian diet directly with spiritual attainment. The most he gets them to say, in some remarkably frank and disarming interviews, is that following a vegetarian lifestyle is generally a matter of personal choice, albeit one that they felt aided their spiritual growth for ethical reasons." Like his previous book, Food for the Gods was translated into Chinese.

In 2004, Berry published his fourth book, Hitler: Neither Vegetarian Nor Animal Lover, which has an introduction by Martin Rowe, co-founder of Lantern Books, and founding editor of Satya magazine, that, according to Richard H. Schwartz (author of Judaism and Vegetarianism), "make it by itself almost worth the price of the book."

Rynn Berry also wrote the entry on the history of vegetarianism in America for the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink (2004), edited by Andrew Smith, and he was commissioned to write seven entries for The Oxford Companion to Food and Drink in America (2007)

His book The Vegan Guide to New York City (now in its 20th edition) was the "first and only exclusively vegetarian guidebook on the planet".

He was also a playwright who contributed a number of short plays about 'famous vegetarians in history' - Dr. John Harvey Kellogg: (Dr. John "Cornflakes" Kellogg, MD); Leo Tolstoy: (Tea with the Tolstoys); Hypatia of Alexandria: (Hypatia's Heresy); Leonardo da Vinci: (The Mona Lisa's Smile); Pythagoras: (Pythagoras & Theano), et al. - one-act plays which were performed publicly in several different venues in different US states, as well in Brazil.

Fruits of Tantalus: A History of Vegan Rawfoodism and the Origins of Cooking was his forthcoming book, a clear work in culinary history.

Over the years Berry also contributed many articles and interviews for vegetarian-themed magazines.

Berry was on the advisory boards of the American Vegetarian Association and of Earth Save, the historical advisor to the North American Vegetarian Society, honored as a member of the American Vegan Society Speakers Bureau, instructor at Victoria Moran's Main Street Academy, and a recognized expert on the history of vegetarianism. He was a frequent international lecturer. George Guimarães, president of the Brazilian animal rights organization VEDDAS and founding member of the Brazilian Vegan Society (Sociedade Vegana) said that Rynn visited Brazil at least two times a year, and that he contributed much to the animal rights movement in Brazil, where he frequently lectured both in English (with a translator) and in Portuguese.

Berry was a consistent vegan and primarily raw foodist after 1994, and he made a great show of his all-raw diet at vegetarian gatherings, though he evidently deviated from this path constantly (yet remaining fully vegan) while touring New York City's vegetarian restaurants and sampling their vegan-friendly fare for each annual update of his book, Vegan Guide to New York City.

Death and legacy

He was found collapsed and unconscious in jogging clothes in Prospect Park in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn, New York, on December 31, 2013 but not identified until January 7, 2014. "The only clues in his pockets were keys and an asthma inhaler. (Winter runners with asthma are at high risk of cardiac arrest because extremely cold air constricts the lungs' passages, which strains breathing, which strains the heart.)" He never regained consciousness and died at 12:30pm on January 9, 2014.

Berry was locally and internationally well known in the vegan community. Martin Rowe, author and co-founder of Lantern Books, commented on Berry's death:

"Rynn's impact was literally incalculable, given how many met him, bought his books, or talked with him at the Union Square green market over the many years. He was the epitome of the kind of unheralded grassroots activist without which any movement for change cannot grow, and he was a witty and erudite figure: the Dr. Johnson of the vegetarian movement. He would be missed greatly, even by those who never met him, but his work will live on."

Chef Fran Costigan (author of Vegan Chocolate: Unapologetically Luscious and Decadent Dairy-Free Desserts) wrote that Berry was "a gentle soul whose life touched so many."

His life was celebrated publicly and outdoors on March 30, 2014, for about thirty minutes, at the annual Veggie Pride Parade in New York City. On July 5, 2014, he was honored at the annual NAVS Vegetarian Summerfest in Johnstown, PA, in a plenary led by vegan activist and author Victoria Moran. In previous years, Berry had been on the staff of Vegetarian Summerfest as a scholar and speaker on veganism and world religions.

Berry had planned to publish three more books in 2014, but he died in January. Colleagues are hoping to publish all three of them posthumously.