Verified by 
Cognition
The Broad Reach of Vegan Vision Extending Well Beyond Food
Matthew Halteman opens the door to expansive and deep thinking.
Updated November 13, 2024 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Key points
- The book Hungry Beautiful Animals is more than philosophy, it’s about action, forgiveness, and love.
- A vegan vision goes way beyond our meal plans and works very well for collective well-being.
Just about everyone has to decide what and who to eat. For some people it's pretty easy but for others who delve deeply into what this choice entails it becomes more complicated because our meal plans reach into many areas of life. That's among the many reasons we might read Dr. Matthew C. Halteman's book, Hungry Beautiful Animals: The Joyful Case for Going Vegan. It reminded me of similar books, the main message of which is that going vegan goes way beyond our meal plans and demands this or that when we decide we're hungry.1 It isn't a radical decision that centers only on animal well-being but also is a very important set of choices that has many different ramifications for how we decide to live our lives and these decisions influence the collective well-being of other members of countless species and their homes.
Hungry Beautiful Animals is a humane and humourous take. It asks: "Why does rule-obsessed veganism fail?" "How can a focus on flourishing can bring about an abundant future for all." Here's what he had to say about his deeply thoughtful and wide-ranging Hungry Beautiful Animals.
Marc Bekoff: Why did you write Hungry Beautiful Animals?
Matthew Halteman: I wrote Hungry Beautiful Animals to share the story of how vegan living has been a joy aggregator for me and my community, and to inspire others to seek its potential for creating personal and communal abundance in their lives too. Going vegan has healed and harmonized aspects of my inner life even as it has supercharged my solidarity with others. That’s a beautiful feeling. I hope reading my story can help others feel it.
My inner life has always been complicated, with plenty of tension and even conflict across my physical, social, emotional, intellectual, and moral aspects. These inner relationships are especially fraught with our foodways, as physical cravings, social expectations, and emotional attachments battle against evolving intellectual and moral commitments increasingly critical of culinary comforts.
As the evidence mounts that we can’t survive a food system so punishing of humans, animals, and the planet, the inner turmoil we feel in our complicity intensifies. It’s unsettling when your gut wants a burger, your heart wants to nuzzle a cow, and your head bobbles about between defending old habits and propping up dwindling self-respect. No wonder vegan living is often seen as a lamentable obligation to prevent suffering that forces us into scarcity.
Going vegan is a joyful opportunity to promote flourishing that liberates us to live in abundance. We stand inwardly to save ourselves physical inflammation, cognitive dissonance, emotional incoherence, and moral hypocrisy, and outwardly to save monstrous amounts of land, water, grain, pharmaceuticals, pandemic risk, worker injustice, and animal suffering, freeing up vast energies to pursue more abundant lives for all. That’s a story to tell with enthusiasm given the existential challenges we face, inside and out.
MB: How does your book relate to your background and general areas of interest?
MH: As a philosopher, I see eating as a feast for philosophical reflection and practice. Because food is so intimately woven into identity—shaping how we celebrate, mourn, worship, live into ethnicity, gender, and class, and even build bodies—it’s very difficult to reflect on foodways. Eating food we love with people we trust is who we are, so close that we usually can’t see it and so precious that reflection is unwelcome when rare opportunities arise.
What a fascinating chance to live the examined life! Here we have an under-theorized but universally practiced activity that, upon inspection, reveals rich opportunities to test unquestioned assumptions, realize hidden connections between ourselves and others our choices affect, and practice the resulting wisdom at every meal.2
MB: Who do you hope to reach with this book?
MH: There’s something for everyone. Concerned family and friends are baffled by their vegan loved ones. Conflicted carnivores hoping to overcome cognitive dissonance and eat greener. Veg-curious folks are put off by vegan stereotypes of scarcity and rigidity. Activists and entrepreneurs hoping winsomely to promote a new vegan normal. Proud meat-eaters who suspect the v-word is a non-starter but are courageous enough to look under the hood. Aspiring vegans and vegetarians exhausted by shame and hungry for joy. This is for anyone interested in more compassionate, mindful living.3
.jpg?itok=-sPOPWrq "Basic Books/with permission.")
MB: What are some of the major topics you consider?
MH: The pivot from scarcity to abundance. It’s tempting to reduce going vegan to an obligation to prevent suffering through rigid abstention from terrible things. We fixate on animals’ abjection, the shame of participation. But lamenting suffering harbors a deeper desire to celebrate flourishing. When we experience ourselves and others as wondrous creatures striving to thrive, our awe unveils the dignity and beauty of all beings. Burdensome obligations to fellow creatures become joyful opportunities for solidarity with them. As the book frames this shift, “If you want to free yourself fervently to love justice, train your imagination on the beauty and joy of flourishing lives so you can see with clarity what oppression steals away.”
Vegan abundance is both individual and collective. Going vegan heals and harmonizes our inner lives even as it concentrates our power to affect food system changes that benefit workers, health systems, animals, biodiversity, and climate stability, among many others.
Going vegan is for everyone, so it’s different for everyone. One-size-fits-all veganism—an identity conferred through rigid rule-following—is not conducive to individual or collective transformation. Going vegan, by contrast, is an open-ended aspirational journey lived out through an evolving set of practices tailored to our unique circumstances, gifts, and shortcomings. The goal is progress, not perfection. Progress is context-relative.
MB: How does your book differ from others that are concerned with some of the same general topics?
MH: This is a big tent vision of going vegan because the movement has such a dazzling array of compelling voices. My story—there’s storytelling throughout—has been shaped by progressive eco-feminists (Carol Adams), conservative political advisors (Matthew Scully), alt-protein advocates (Bruce Friedrich), narrative strategists (A. Breeze Harper), food justice activists (Bryant Terry), pastor-scholars (Michelle Loyd-Paige), philosophers (Syl Ko), cognitive ethologists (Jonathan Balcombe), novelists (Jonathan Safran Foer), and dozens more. The bigger the tent, the richer the dissent, the more inspiring the ferment.
MB: Are you hopeful that as people learn more about going vegan they will consider changing their eating habits and or lifestyle?
MH: I am very hopeful! Especially if we can shift the cultural perception of this change from a grim gauntlet of perfectionistic scarcity (veganism) toward a communal journey of compassionate abundance that unfolds in whatever small, mindful steps our circumstances allow (going vegan).
References
In conversation with Matthew C. Halteman, Ph.D., a professor of philosophy at Calvin University and a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. His work is driven by deep commitments to human flourishing, animal freedom, food systems transformation, and communal cooperation to realize as much truth, beauty, and goodness as we collectively can! As an author, teacher, and advocate, Matt explores how the choices we make around food can shape a more compassionate, sustainable, and joyful world. He also is the author of Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation, and co-editor of Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments about the Ethics of Eating.
1) An Exploration of the Mindset of a Compassionate Vegan Ethic; Vegan Entanglements: The Far-Reaching Webs of Speciesism; The Vegan Evolution: Transforming Diets and Agriculture; The Broad Relevance of Vegan Ethics in Everyday Life; Reforming Food Production to Help Humans, Animals, and Earth.
2) More personally, this book speaks to my need for multiple aspects of inner experience to align before I could change. I had seen videos and heard arguments. But to imagine the beauty of going vegan vividly enough to desire it, I required three catalysts working in concert—an emotional awakening gifted by my dog, an intellectual provocation from a philosopher friend, and the social comfort of my wife’s plant-based culinary wizardry.
3)) It may seem ambitious to invite all these audiences together. But inclusivity is the point. Everyone is welcome at the feast! There are no barriers to entry like complex philosophical theories or controversial new ideas to embrace. The truth is that, since kindergarten, most of us have had all the beliefs, feelings, and values we need to desire a vegan world. What we lack is the experience to woo our inner vegans-in-waiting past the fear of being different into the joy of discovering that going vegan makes us more fully who we’ve always wanted to be.
