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Vegetarian and vegan symbolism

set of symbols

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 13, 2026
Entity authorityQ39086756 ↗
Source-derived summary

Multiple symbols have been developed to represent lacto-vegetarianism and veganism. Several are used on food packaging, including voluntary labels such as The Vegan Society trademark or the V-Label (with support of the European Vegetarian Union) as well as the vegetarian and non-vegetarian marks mandated by the Indian government. Symbols may also be used by members of the vegetarian and vegan communities to represent their identities, and in the course of animal rights activism.

Vegetarian symbols

Indian vegetarian mark

Packaged food and toothpaste products sold in India are required to be labelled with a mark in order to be distinguished between lacto-vegetarian and non-vegetarian. The symbol is in effect following the Food Safety and Standards (Packaging and Labelling) Act of 2006, and received a mandatory status after the framing of the respective regulations (Food Safety and Standards (Packaging and Labelling) Regulation) in 2011. According to the law, vegetarian food should be identified by a green symbol and non-vegetarian food with a brown symbol. They are defined as:

Vegetarian food must have a symbol of a green color-filled circle inside a square with a green outline prominently displayed on the package, contrasting against the background on the principal display panel, in close proximity to name or brand name of the food.

Non-vegetarian food (any food which contains whole or part of any animal including birds, marine animals, eggs, or products of any animal origin as an ingredient, excluding honey, milk or milk products), must have a symbol of a brown color-filled circle inside a square with a brown outline prominently displayed on the package, contrasting against the background on the principal display panel, in close proximity to the name or brand name of the food.

In 2021, FSSAI (Food Safety and Standards Authority of India) adopted a new symbol for non-vegetarian food items due to concerns that the combination of the old symbols were difficult for people with colour blindness to distinguish. The new symbol is that of a brown color-filled triangle inside a square with a brown outline.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Vegetarian and vegan symbolism” is set of symbols. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Vegetarian, vegan and symbolism, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2006, 2011, 2021—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Vegetarian, vegan and symbolism is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “set of symbols” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q39086756. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2006, 2011 and 2021.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Vegetarian and vegan symbolism” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.