Hungry Beautiful Animals

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"This timely exploration of the profound impact of our dietary choices on both individual and collective flourishing is essential reading for anyone who eats."—Bryant Terry, James Beard award-winning author of Vegetable Kingdom

“This is a book of sacred truths, the kind of thing you read and your soul forever registers."—Kathy Freston, New York Times best-selling author of The Lean

A heartfelt, humane, and even hilarious account of why rule-obsessed veganism fails and how a focus on flourishing can bring about an abundant future for all

Perhaps you’ve looked at factory farming or climate change and thought, I should become a vegan. And like most people who think that, very probably you haven’t. Why? Well, in our world, roast turkey emanates gratitude, steak confers virility, and chicken soup represents a mother’s love. Against that, simply swapping meat for plants won’t work.  
 
In Hungry Beautiful Animals, philosopher Matthew C. Halteman shows us how—despite all the forces arrayed against going vegan—we can create an abundant life for everyone without using animals for food. It might seem that moral rectitude or environmental judgement should do the trick, but they can’t. Going vegan must be about flourishing, for all life. Shame and blame don’t lead to flourishing. We must do it with joy instead. 
 
Hungry Beautiful Animals is more than philosophy: it’s a book of action, of forgiveness, of love. Funny and wise, this book frees us joyfully to want what we already know we need. Matthew C. Halteman is professor of philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and fellow in the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, UK. He is the author of Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation and coeditor of Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments About the Ethics of Eating. He lives in Grand Rapids.“This is a book of sacred truths, the kind of thing you read and your soul forever registers what’s so.  There is poetry herein, and common sense, for sure; there is thorough academic exploration so that every word feels solid. But what is most enriching, the thing that will stay with you, is that Matt’s words feel like a gateway into our Better.  One gets the sense that the time is now, and we can rise to it.  And Matt is that seasoned, trustworthy guide to deliver us there.”—Kathy Freston, New York Times best-selling author of The Lean“Only Matt Halteman could have penned Hungry Beautiful Animals. Drawing from personal experiences and philosophical insights, this timely exploration of the profound impact of our dietary choices on both individual and collective flourishing is essential reading for anyone who eats. Halteman offers a fresh perspective on going vegan, one that doesn’t require you to give up your favorite foods or compromise your cultural traditions. Instead, Hungry Beautiful Animals invites us to embrace the beauty and abundance that vegan living can provide, not as a sacrifice but as a joyful celebration of life on this planet.”—Bryant Terry, James Beard Award–winning author of Vegetable Kingdom“Vegan advocacy is vitally important and urgently needed. It is also thorny terrain, which is why it needs eloquent, informed ambassadors, preferably with a sense of humor. Halteman delivers magnificently on all fronts. I utterly recommend this book!”—Jonathan Balcombe, author of What a Fish Knows“Welcome to Halteman’s affirming vision for all of us hungry beautiful animals. Settle into time with an author who believes in our ability to transform moral burdens into gifts of consciousness and lives of abundance. Park feelings of shame, guilt, or blame at the door—they aren’t needed here. Instead, in this readable, entertaining, evocative, and joyful book, Halteman offers us vulnerable, questing, caring animals a compass for our compassion and recipes for our individual and collective flourishing.”—Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat“Halteman is a brilliant, incisive thinker and gifted storyteller who writes gorgeous, sharp, vivid prose—page for page and sentence for sentence, not despite but amid sometimes grisly, subtle, and often hilarious observations about being human, his work is a total joy to read. But all of this is second to Halteman’s honesty—a rhetorical transparency and open-handedness so complete that his vulnerability in Hungry Beautiful Animals is nothing short of incandescent. His willingness to bare the most human of his shortcomings and failures, be they intellectual, spiritual, or personal—without guile, without defensiveness, and without advocating for any brittle or extreme ethical ground—is both inspiring and urgently important. Hungry Beautiful Animals is as much a gritty, get-real book about food ethics as it is a rigorous, unpredictable spiritual memoir and a gentle unfolding of increasingly difficult questions about what it means to be a person engaged in the process of examining their life.”—Bonnie Nadzam, research fellow, Harvard Animal Law and Policy Program"Hungry Beautiful Animals is the work of a seasoned philosopher and masterful storyteller. It is a deeply honest and intimate but also ebullient book. Halteman doesn’t try to argue the reader into anything, but instead uses indirection, humor, and story to make “going vegan” a salient (and joyful!) option for everyone. By the end, no gap remains between the feeling that one ought to do this and the feeling that one wants to."—Andrew Chignell, Princeton University

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