UK. He is the author of Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation and co-editor of Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments about the Ethics of Eating.
His new book, Hungry Beautiful Animals: The Joyful Case for Going Vegan, is a heartfelt, humane, and humorous exploration of how going vegan can bring abundance into our lives.
Halteman applied the “Page 99 Test” to Hungry Beautiful Animals and reported the following:
Page 99:Visit Matthew C. Halteman's website.[Or parrying writer’s block] with a furious elliptical run to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin.’” Or bracing for a workday that might otherwise elicit one-finger salutes to all comers by lingering in a hug from a loved one. Ah, the calming effects of oxytocin!Page 99 of Hungry Beautiful Animals is as serendipitous a harbinger of what to expect from the book as I imagine any single page could be.
Managing our inner ecologies can be mighty difficult too. Like when your heart blissfully ignores both your gut and your head as a toxic relationship sends you careening toward implosion. Or when a month of poorly managed work travel transports you predictably from Lonely Valley throughout Booze Gulch onto the floor of the dingiest room at the Motel Dicey Choices. Or when your gut wants a burger, your heart wants to nuzzle a cow, and your head bobbles about between defending old habits and exploring new ones as your friends look on befuddled.
To fully express our capabilities for well-being—to “flourish,” as Aristotle would say—we need relative harmony across the provinces of our territory. When we are unwell, chances are that two or more of the provinces are at war. If we want to bring peace among them, it pays to know each of them intimately—their points of strength, their weaknesses, their insecurities, which ones naturally collaborate well and which ones are temperamentally at odds. Perhaps most importantly, we must know who to approach first to start building the requisite alliances.
Here’s where the genius of Bryant’s advice to “start with the visceral” really comes home. It’s hard to imagine the beauty of a vegan world while your stomach churns at the thought of endless turnip porridge and your heart sinks into dread of the social death sentence sure to follow. Disgust and anxiety are imagination killers. If you want to open a window from our inner ecology into the beauty of a vegan world, go first and with gusto for [the gut, preferably with a superabundance of delicious food and comforting company.]
The first five lines offer an accurate sampling of authorial voice: we read a quippy and self-deprecating yet authoritative Gen-Xer wielding the edginess of a rude gesture and the camp of a Journey anthem to balance the glow of a sudden flood of love.
The book’s essence peers out from the first full paragraph: an opportunity to envision and enact transformational changes of our eating habits in ways that embrace and celebrate the complexity of human desire in its oft-conflicted physical, social, emotional, intellectual, and moral aspects. We see that we don’t need to judge ourselves for struggling to unify our “inner ecology”—that we can fail, learn from our foibles, even laugh about them, and then aspire to go again (always imperfectly) in the direction of the beautiful vegan world that has captured our imagination.
A window into the book’s method opens in the second paragraph: to draw on philosophical traditions, East and West, ancient and contemporary, to help us align our desires with our best interests. Achieving the flourishing lives and the gorgeous world we all desire is a matter of knowing ourselves intimately enough to meet all the inner parts of ourselves where they are and invite them into joy: to make peace outside, we must first make peace inside.
The final paragraph anchors page 99 like Bryant Terry’s inspiration to “start with the visceral, move to the cerebral, and end at the political” anchors Hungry Beautiful Animals. To get our inner families into accord, we must put feelings before facts and assure the gut and the heart that delicious food and abiding fellowship are possible in a vegan world. Then and only then can we pivot with joy to the headwork of figuring out our unique contributions to this world-transforming work and the politics of being the change we wish to see.
As a bonus, this deference to Bryant Terry’s work at the foot of the page previews the grounding energy of Black vegan work throughout the book, which draws inspiration from Terry’s Vegan Soul Kitchen, A. Breeze Harper’s Sistah Vegan, Aph Ko and Syl Ko’s Aphro-ism, and Christopher Carter’s The Spirit of Soul Food in those pivotal moments where everything is at stake.
--Marshal Zeringue
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