Religious practices around the world dictate our behaviour and our decisions. For millennia, these same religious practices have dictated our eating habits. This dissertation presents some of the reasons why dietary practices in the West and the East are so different from each other and where the attitude towards meat on both sides comes from. In the last few decades religious practices from all over the world started to spread around the globe to the places where they have not existed before. Because of that, the original religious practices of these areas, including dietary habits, began to change and reshape. Due to the growing interplay of Abrahamic religious traditions with Hindu and Buddhist traditions, I decided to compare the five major world religions. The paper includes descriptions of dietary laws in each of the five religions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism –, comparisons between them, and a presentation of their impact on the modern social perception of rejecting meat-eating. I studied quotations from sacred texts and included various academic publications on the topic of religious dietary laws and dietary practices.
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