Hungry Beautiful Animals
The Joyful Case for Going Vegan
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A new approach to going vegan "as a joyful celebration of life on this planet" (Bryant Terry) that is a gateway into a better life for us all
“Start here, start now. Here’s a book worth sharing and talking about. Better is possible.”—Seth Godin, author of The Song of Significance
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Halteman (Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation), a philosophy professor at Calvin University, serves up a muddled treatise on the righteousness of veganism. Attempting to break through readers' indifference to livestock's plight, Halteman provides a lengthy comparison of farm animals to his English bulldog, but his point that both are selectively bred in ways that compromise their quality of life is buried underneath tangential anecdotes about, for instance, his aversion to cleaning up his dog's poop. Halteman includes surprisingly little evidence on veganism's health benefits or the meat industry's cruelty and environmental costs, instead relying largely on personal stories to make his points. For example, he strains to complicate the "human/animal binary" by recounting how he stopped craving meat after driving by a rib joint while listening to Elie Wiesel speak about Nazi crematoria on the radio, an experience that led Halteman to view meat as a "body taken by violence from a potentially flourishing creature." "Spiritual exercises" aimed at acclimating readers to a vegan diet are just common sense, as when Halteman suggests that the "spiritual exercise of taking on responsibilities" might look like helping with Thanksgiving cooking if one wants vegan options. Filled with nebulous calls to harmonize "our deepest inner desires with the greatest needs and most hopeful prospects of the world outside," this lands with a thud.
