Hungry Beautiful Animals: The Joyous Case For Going Vegan

by Matthew C. Halteman

Basic Books, 2024

However ethically imperative it justifiably seems to animal rights advocates and casual vegans alike, the ending of animal exploitation through the building of a vegan world has abundant resistance to overcome before coming into being. Even in the easiest of cases where personal resistance is not adamant but pliable, there is usually ample moral as well as practical inertia to defeat. In Hungry Beautiful Animals: The Joyous Case For Going Vegan, Matthew Halteman offers a motivating voice and a helping hand to make the personal transition just a little easier.

Halteman is an academic philosopher, but no philosophy book could be described as joyous, and this is no book of philosophy.  The subtitular joyous is accurate: this is not simply a modestly hopeful book but, remarkably, a happy one. According to the author’s personal experience, ubiquitous in Hungry Beautiful Animals, presenting the horrible facts “couldn’t render the tragedy of our food system viscerally enough to move [him] from uncomfortable if tolerable cognitive dissonance to that guts-deep bodily repulsion that propels one involuntarily away from what is vile.” Great as they are, Peter Singer’s writings are not exactly inspirational and, what’s more, most people can’t just hand Animal Liberation off to their unsuspecting friend curious about this vegan thing.

Hungry Beautiful Animals doesn’t look away from the cruelties, whose mention remains necessary, but Halteman focuses on a positive and encouraging vision of practical, fulfilling vegan living. He rejects the strict, exclusive notion of veganism as an identity and advances the treatment of it as an inclusive activity we can all be striving for, failures and all. The former, karmic notion of veganism, he argues, only serves to magnify obstacles and deter. It’s better to be a vegan who will eat cheese at the family gathering in order to be spared the social anxiety of facing your combative uncle’s derision, than not to be vegan at all.

Following his comparatively swift condemnation of our food system, Halteman makes the joyous case, based on what he calls kindergarten ethics. “Going vegan,” he says, “is a natural extension of the standard moral imagination into a host of invigorating opportunities to benefit ourselves, other animals, and the earthly home we share.” Barring their inability to speak for themselves, the other animals are our equals, and there is simply “a lack of fairness” in supposing that “our trivial interest in the pleasure of eating their bodies could outweigh their most basic interests in living and enjoying their lives.” It cannot be put straighter than that.

Abundance, thriving, inner-ecologies: Halteman’s language is unfailingly positive, inclusive and inspirational. The tone struck throughout is that of a motivational speaker, albeit an honest and uncynical one. His mottos, meaningful and inspiring as they are, by the end acquire the character of a mantra: abundance, thriving, inner-ecologies. Even his practical advice comes in the form of “spiritual exercises”. But fret not, there is no faux-spirituality or pseudoscience here. Only an unfortunate framing of what are impressively specific and useful mental crutches for any and all limping towards veganism.

Most of us know, if we are not one ourselves, some vegans-in-waiting, to use Halteman’s term. That is, people who have shown interest in, or even struggled with, going vegan. Hungry Beautiful Animals goes a long way toward making vegan living seem not only morally undeniable but exciting. It would make a fantastic gift for that receptive friend who has been thinking about it and perhaps isn’t averse to the bookstore’s self-help section. A book can’t change the world, but maybe this one will help in sparing some lives, allowing them to be hungry beautiful animals for a little while longer.

Nikolas Mavreas is a reader living in Athens, Greece.