Hungry, Beautiful Animals with Matthew Halteman

Jasmin Singer: Were you just pointing to where Grand Rapids is on your palm of your hand?

Matthew Halteman: Of course I was. It's the Mitten State, right? And here I am on the West Coast.

Jasmin Singer: Okay. Okay. You know what? I was sort of like, I wasn't going to read your palm this quickly into the interview, but your lifeline looks strong. Looks like you've had some relationship, you know, issues in the past, but they're behind you. Wow. This is an interesting beginning. Well, okay. I just want to say congratulations about your new book.

We are so excited that you're talking to us. And as we mentioned, the day that we're recording this is World Vegan Day. So that's gotta be kismet. Happy World Vegan Day, Matt.

Matthew Halteman: Absolutely. Thank you. You too.

Jasmin Singer: Hey, can I call you Matt?

Matthew Halteman: Absolutely. Everybody calls me Matt. Really, the only person ever to call me Matthew is my mom when she's mad.

And now that I'm 50, you know, she's not mad at me very often anymore. So, Matt. Matt.

Jasmin Singer: Okay, Matt. Cool. I have a friend whose name is Kimberly, and I recently found out she absolutely hates when people call her Kim. And I was like, well, that's gotta be hard to go through life as a Kimberly, not wanting to be called Kim.

So anyway.

Matthew Halteman: That's totally a thing. My wife is a Susan and do not call her Sue, you know, just, you don't want to do that. And occasionally it happens. And yeah, so I appreciate your, your asking. Matt's perfect.

Jasmin Singer: Those people identify with one versus the other. Vicki's the same. It's Vicki. She is not Victoria.

She's Vicki. Not call her Victoria. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I feel like we are done. I think that this was a very informative interview. No, I'm kidding. So tell us about your new book, Matt. I'm so excited that it exists in the world now, and I have really high hopes for how it can help change the world for animals.

So tell us a little bit about it.

Matthew Halteman: Yeah. So the book is called Hungry Beautiful Animals, The Joyful Case for Going Vegan. It'll be out there in the world on November 12th. And, gosh, I guess it came out of a desire. I'm a philosophy professor, so a lot of the writing I do is for fellow eggheads, and you know, sometimes it doesn't feel that great to write something and then realize that, oh, like, it took me two years to do this, and eight to twenty people, including sympathy reads from my mom and sister, right, is about as far as this article's gonna go, and so for a long time, I've wanted to write something.

For everybody, right? Something that could communicate the stuff that I've been working on for 20 years. And, I mean, the impetus behind it was a desire to communicate just what an incredible joy aggregator going vegan is, you know? Like for a long time I think I was laboring under this feeling like it's all about the bad news.

It's about suffering. It's about shame. It's about blame. It's about obligations. And a little ways into my journey I just, you know, transitioned from the suffering piece to the flourishing piece, realizing that, yeah, of course we object to suffering, but that's because we love flourishing. That's because we want the world to be well and beautiful.

And what this book is an attempt to do is to sort of flip the script a little bit from always talking about, you know, The Bad News, to talking about the ways that going vegan can actually put us on the road to truth, beauty, and goodness across the board, right? Our physical health, and our emotional coherence, and our social justice peace, and our intellectual integrity, and our moral vision, right?

I mean, across all these different parts of who we are. Going vegan just knits those all together in a way that really makes for a beautiful inner life. And I have to say, I listened to the Britty Mann episode recently, and I heard a little reference to internal family systems therapy, and this book is heavily influenced, right, by that frame of reference, where the goal is really to see we are really complex people, right?

And when it comes to thinking about how we want to structure our lives, we can't just think about, a single unified self. We've got to think about the fact that we're physical organisms and social beings, and we have emotional lives, and we have intellectual commitments. We have moral points of view.

And they don't always perfectly align, right? And this is a book where I hope I can, give people a window into that complexity, and then kind of, through storytelling, and through a little bit of philosophical insight that I've picked up over the years, really help people get that those inner parts of who they are aligned around the beauty of a vegan vision of the world and accompanying set of practices, so that then, instead of compassion fatigue and instead of constantly feeling under the burden of suffering and obligation, they can just overflow into a world devoted to getting the word out, so that larger audiences can experience this abundance.

Jasmin Singer: So you were talking about going vegan, and I want to go back to just that turn of phrase, because you talk about going vegan as perhaps a better way to think about it and talk about it than being vegan. So tell us why.

Matthew Halteman: Again, I'm a philosophy professor, and we spend an awful lot of time hammering out arguments, right?

Figuring out the necessary and sufficient conditions for something's being, you know, whatever. And on account of that, we end up thinking about and defending a lot of isms that can really feel rigid and exclusionary. And I guess for a long time, veganism felt to me almost like a worldview, right?

It's like a set of premises that you accept, you sort of buy into the arguments. And then the idea is you either live that out perfectly, or you're not a vegan, right? And it seems to me that with most of the deepest commitments of our lives, It's not a toggle switch like that at all, right? It's like we have this aspiration, this beautiful vision of the world we'd like to see and the person we'd like to be.

And then we find these daily practices, knowing in advance that we'll never be perfect, to try to sort of incrementally move in the direction of that aspirational vision. So we have no illusions, for instance, when we set out to try to be a good partner, or a good parent, or a good Buddhist, or a good follower of Jesus.

Nobody thinks that when they're aiming for that, they suddenly just become that, and then their first mistake sort of disqualifies them from that. But with veganism, it often felt like that was the way it worked. It's like a perfectionism or bust. And so I started thinking about, well, what word might we use or what phrase could we use to, to talk about this in a more explicitly aspirational way, where there's no bill of goods you have to buy all at once.

There's this vision of what the world could be like if we all started moving in this direction. And then we do kind of an internal assessment. This is the internal family systems piece again, we get to know ourselves in a really deep way. And we figure out, okay, so what are the things that we love doing?

Let's prioritize those. Let's find exercises to move as far as we can toward the limit of those things we're really good at. Let's look at the things we're not so good at. Maybe we put those on the back burner, right? Or we forgive ourselves for not being as good as those. But we embrace the vegan vision, and we find concrete practices to try to move us there.

After doing this talents and gifts assessment to make sure that we're constantly getting that positive feedback of successes in the areas we're really good at. And I thought, you know, if the movement embraced this idea that you can be on the way, you can be going vegan and oops, you know, stroop waffles fell into your cart or gosh, some Haribo sugary, gummy cola bottles, you know, somehow found their way after Halloween, you know, you freeganized them from your kid's bag or whatever. I don't want to live in a world where you have to stop aspiring to being vegan when you make mistakes, or when you go to the hospital and there's a medicine you feel put upon to take, or for your child to take.

I don't want to live in a world where we have to toggle, right, where it's perfectionism or bust. So going vegan is a way to try to help people embrace the vision wholeheartedly, while knowing that at the level of practice, it's going to be experimental, it's going to be catch as catch can, there's going to be backsliding, there's going to be plenty of mistakes.

Does that answer, uh?

Jasmin Singer: Absolutely. Yeah. I think that the idea of, you know, embracing imperfection is something that resonates with a lot of people who are on their vegan path. And I think that it takes their defenses down immediately, you know, uh, kind of gives them permission to not have to let perfect be the enemy of the good.

And so I, I appreciate that messaging. And another thing that I appreciate and I'm curious about is the fact that your book seems to be focused primarily on non vegans, like not preaching to the choir. And so how are you going to do it? How are you going to get non vegans to read the book?

Matthew Halteman: Yeah. Well, most of my time, you know, talking about these things is with people who are not only non vegan, but would rather skydive without a parachute then move in this general direction. So I'm a philosophy professor. I teach a lot of students at the intro level. These issues, of course, animal issues, are, I think, just an incredible topic, philosophically, right? Because food cuts to the core of who we are, and yet most of us haven't thought about it at all.

And because it's like the glasses on our nose, physically, the proximity is so close that intellectually, like, we can't see what's this close to us. And I think food is like that. So it's a perfect topic to bring into a philosophy classroom, to help people get curious about those things that are really, ordinarily, without philosophy, too close to really be able to be critical of or, or curious about. And so, most of the work that I've done, you know, in thinking through these issues, have been with people who are somewhere between, like, just never heard of what vegan is, or completely hostile to vegan, to curious about this, but certainly not maybe know anybody from their home or anything like that.

And so when I wrote a book for everyone, I really wanted to write a book that my students could read and feel excited about, right? A book that they could give to their families for Christmas after having a class of mine. And, they go home with these really counterintuitive ideas, right? And then they can say, well, you know, here's the story.

Uh, and so. You know, how successful I'll be with that, I'm not sure. I mean, my editor was smart enough to keep the V word out of the main title of the book, but it still snuck in to the subtitle, so we'll see whether the world at large is interested, but I guess I think, you know, the vegan choir is already incredibly strong, like, we probably don't need another argument.

In fact, that was one of the things that really motivated me to write this book, is that I feel like the case for the obligation to go vegan is so well made by so many people. You know, you pick your ethical theory. You want Deontology or Kantianism, you got Tom Regan. You want consequentialism, you got Peter Singer.

You want care theory, feminist veganism, you got Carol J. Adams. You want Black veganism, you got Aph and Syl Ko, right? You've got, Amie Breeze Harper, Sistah Vegan. I mean, I've never seen a field with so much sort of settled opinion on how important it is to be moving in this direction. It's quite surprising, right?

Because in professional philosophy, I mean, we don't agree about anything. You know, there's big, huge arguments, tens of thousands of pages about, you know, Jasmin, is this a water bottle, or is this particles arranged water bottle wise? We’ve got philosophers disagreeing over that kind of stuff.

But when it comes to the moral defensibility of the food system, everybody's like, nah, nope, right? And that level of agreement is shocking. So I feel like we've done the obligation piece, but there's not many arguments out there that are sort of aesthetic argument. Like, look at, this is actually what we want.

Like, we have this idea that it's this burdensome obligation that somehow we have to find a way to live with it. But I mean, we want healthy bodies. We want our moral convictions to align with how we actually act. We want our intellectual commitments to be consistent with the best science. You know, these are things that we want.

They're not obligations, they're opportunities. And so what I hope is, if members of the general public, maybe they'll need help from the vegan choir to get one in their stocking or whatever for Christmas or for Hanukkah or for whatever season you're giving in. But my hope is that it's written in an invitational enough way that people will see themselves in it.

Even when they're not even vaguely interested in veganism. Maybe that's a vain hope, but I guess we'll see on November 12th and following.

Jasmin Singer: Well, and this will be airing after that. Congratulations. All the all the non vegans read it already. So you are working from the premise, I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, that vegan activism has to date been pretty much exclusively focused on the negatives and that, that needs to shift to a positive vision.

Is that right? Or do I have your premise wrong?

Matthew Halteman: Well, I'm not sure. I mean, I actually feel pretty grateful for the history of vegan advocacy. I mean, I, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. And I think that the giants have done an incredibly good job on many things. And that there is a lot of positivity out there when you're in vegan communities, when you're talking about advocacy strategy, when you're with like minded people that the dour, you know, judgmental vegan is actually something I don't encounter very often. Maybe I've been lucky, but I, I just... so I actually think there is a lot of positivity in the movement, but for whatever reason, our public story does seem to be saturated with ways of communicating the message that aren't always in keeping with what I call the best interests of plural minds.

So, I was recently at the Reducitarian Summit event, which was absolutely fantastic. And I know I see some of you in the flock, were also there. So really beautiful event. And I gave a talk called Persuading Plural Minds, Advocacy for the Entire Inner Family. And what I was trying to, to argue there, which is where I think that the movement can do a better job, not because we've messed it up or everybody's wrong or anything like that, but just because new ideas generate new opportunities, right? And, so the new opportunity I think we can take advantage of is some of the new things we know about how our brains work, about our inner multiplicity. And I think sometimes, and I'm as guilty of this as anyone else in the movement, we do one of two things. We either sort of go full bore into the intellectual case, right?

Where without knowing who our interlocutors are, without really delving into their background, we bring the best five arguments, we sort of, you know, really hit them hard. And these arguments are very compelling. And it's hard for somebody who, you know, hasn't thought a lot about these issues to return fire, because the cases are so well made.

So what happens to a person who's not just an intellect, but also a physical organism, and a social being, and an emotional creature, and an intellectual person, and a moral person? Well, what's gonna happen is that intellectual bullying, it's going to make them feel emotionally ashamed. It's going to make them feel social anxiety because, Oh my gosh, this sounds right, but how am I going to do this with my family and friends?

And so that intellectual strategy kind of shuts down our system in a way that makes it really, really hard either to return fire, or to really take these things on board. And so people end up with identity protective cognition, right? The walls go up, they start looking for excuses, and you know, it's over before it started.

Another approach we often see out there, right, is show the people horrors, right? Show the videos that no reasonable, compassionate person could possibly countenance with a clean conscience. And what does this do? Well, it floods us with shame. It floods us with anger. But nobody likes to feel angry and ashamed, and so their intellectual commitments come racing to the rescue.

Well, wait a minute, uh, you know, God says this, or science says this about human superiority, alright? And so what happens is that inner system, if we don't bring a more holistic and positive way of framing the issues, our systems get swamped, and we can't really respond in ways that feel unified and galvanizing, across that whole inner family.

And so, I would say, I love what the movement has given us so far, and a lot of what I'm doing in the book is straight up, Well, I don't want to say theft because they're all in the footnotes, right? But I'm borrowing from my heroes in here. So I don't have any aspersions to cast on the movement. I just think there's some new things that A lot of us are discovering, right, about the social science and psychology, you know, of the human experience that can help us to be more sophisticated in the way we reach out to those who aren't just minds or empaths, right, but in this more complex matrix of existential experience that we all have.

Jasmin Singer: Okay, you started to talk about this, but just to follow up on one of the points that you were just making, tell us about the value of disgust as, like, disgust as in disgusting, not, not like we've discussed this, but disgust as a motivating force and how it should be deployed.

Matthew Halteman: Oh, wow. Thank you for asking me this.

Cause this is, you know, when you write a book, we all have the parts that we're really geeked out about the parts that are new and fun. And, this one I'm really excited about. So in chapter one of the book, I try to make a case for the idea that disgust, right? Feeling disgusted about the way our system currently works is a better way to approach how we look at these things and especially how we feel about things than like moral outrage or moral umbrage, right?

And moral umbrage is just a fancy way of saying, right? We're like, you know, this is just, you know, and, and, you know, get into that moral judgment mode of finding people to shame and blame. And I think moral umbrage often puts us in this place, right? When we feel moral umbrage or outrage, we're usually not in the mood to have a convivial conversation with our, right, we're furious and we're ready to fight.

But disgust is a completely different sort of thing, right? I mean, and imagine with me for a minute, the example I use in the book is, you know how when, like, you had takeout? And, maybe a couple days have gone by and then you remember that it's in there and you're like, oh good, I don't have to have one minute ramen again because I got this really good takeout and it's waiting for me in the fridge. And you go into the fridge and you, you know, you take it out and you open it, and it's just like this waft of the black stench of death, right? I mean, like this food has turned into something else and you recoil from it, right? And, and that recoiling, it's completely involuntary, right?

There's nothing reflective about disgust. It's like, get me out of here because I know this could kill me, right? And so it's a very, very visceral response. And what I try to do in chapter one, is really take advantage of that response and say, look, let's set the moral issues aside and let's just look at what this system is like.

And I think, you know, it's just manifestly repulsive across the board, in ways that I think can sort of motivate us to say, Uh, let's try something more beautiful. Which is, I think, a very different way to start down this path than, I hate all these farmers, who, by the way, tried to make a system 60 years ago to feed hungry and suffering people, right?

Nobody set out to like create this living hellscape, right? I mean, we thought that this was going to be a way to solve hunger problems. And I should admit though, for the sake of full disclosure, I'm biased on this. I come from agriculture on both sides. I had, you know, one of my grandfathers is a chicken farmer.

Another of my grandfathers was a herbicide chemist who, you know, played a role in bringing animals off of pasture and into cages, but he thought that he was doing this to make the world a better place. And so part of the reason I feel so driven to be in this conversation is because I think what I'm doing now is consistent with what he wanted to do then. It's just that we've learned a bit since the 1940s, right? And so, but when we're feeling that moral shame and blame, farmers are our enemies, not potential allies to pivot toward new ways of thinking, right? But if we all just get disgusted and sort of say, gosh, what would a more beautiful system look like?

That feels like a more liberating. way to sort of start on this path. And then we can pivot. We can pivot away from trying to find someone to shame and blame, or even feeling shame and blame ourselves to finding something more beautiful, right? The opposite of disgusting is alluring. Right? So what does an alluring food system look like?

You know, what would a food system look like if our deepest desires for truth and beauty and goodness, you know, what if those were the desires that shaped the food system we live in? So I hope that that's a more empowering and less sort of obligation and judgment focused way to start the conversation.

Jasmin Singer: Well, you say we're called to, as you just said, truth, beauty, and goodness. Are these, in your opinion, the touchstones of animal activism?

Matthew Halteman: So yes and no. Um, yes, I think for me, the tradition that I'm coming out of, you know, some weird amalgamation of Christian vision, Hellenistic philosophy, and Stoicism.

I've been heavily influenced by Jain philosophy and epistemology. It's, it's a real mishmash, right? But in a lot of these ancient cultures, truth, beauty, and goodness represented the deepest desires of the human heart, right? We don't want to live in a fool's paradise. We want to know what's really going on.

We want to be in touch with reality. We don't want to spend our time in degrading circumstances with people who don't have our best interests in mind. We want to live a beautiful life, connected to things we deeply desire. And we don't want to be unwell, constantly trying to transcend limits that we'd be better off respecting.

We want to live a good life, right? We want to recognize that we're finite and that there are limits on what we can achieve and to be satisfied with the small roles that we have to play. So for me, philosophically, those ideas really resonate. And I hope at a more general level, people generally want truth in their life and beauty in their life and goodness in their life. But I'm very leery of saying, this is the one theory of change or, the whole movement should pivot to my completely contingent melange of things I like, right? Like, I, I hope that people can learn through my story and resonate with my story and, and if it works for them, grab it.

But one of the ideas that I'm sort of most committed to in this book is that going vegan looks different for everyone. And I think it benefits our movement tremendously to have a huge tent, right? So a lot of times people say, Oh, you know, it's too bad we have animosity under here.

And I guess I feel like, thank goodness, there's some conflict, right? Cause when I started in this movement 20 years ago, I mean, we were getting together with anyone who had any interest at all in food, right? I mean, you look under that tent, there are huge disagreements, you know, with, there are some agrarians under there.

There's, you know, there are some, now the vegan tent is so huge that we have like mortal combat going on between EA approaches, right? And feminist vegan approaches and really interesting ferment going on in the back and forth. And I guess I think, you know Thank the heavens that there's something for everyone under here.

So I guess, you know, I hope truth, beauty, and goodness are sort of broad enough and appealing enough that those things that happen to, you know, float my canoe, will be interesting to other people and hopefully inspiring to other people. But I'm really not looking for a corner on the advocacy market because I want this to be a world where eventually the word vegan isn't important anymore because it's everybody's intuition that we all ought to be doing this, right?

So nobody comes into a room, you know, and says, I'm, uh, I'm anti horse and buggy. You know, I, I'm a pro automobile person, right? That, that's no longer on the table because I'm not saying I love that automobiles, you know, They have some problems too, but I'm just saying nobody's talking about horse and buggies anymore.

And I hope that someday nobody will be talking about vegan anymore because it'll just be so aligned with the way we do our business that we won't need to mention it. And if that's the goal, we're going to have to find, I mean, I love the Detroit based activist. Adrienne Marie Brown, I just absolutely love her work.

Emergent Strategy is a book that I think that every activist should read. But she talks about the messy beauty, the messy chaotic beauty of transformation. And she says, until our movement, and she's actually not coming from the vegan angle. She's talking about other things, but I'm applying it to the vegan angle.

I don't want to put vegan words in her mouth. This is about general advocacy strategy, but applying what she said to advocacy strategy to the vegan movement. I just love it. She says, Until we're comfortable with the idea that many, many feet are going to be traveling many, many paths, traversing many dead ends, coming into conflict with one another, we're never going to see the world that we're hoping to see.

We just have to get comfortable with messy conflict when it comes to theories of change. And so, yes, I hope truth, beauty, and goodness resonate broadly, but no, you know, I don't think this is the one and only way that we're going to get the business done. I think we need a lot of conflict under here to really reach everybody.

Jasmin Singer: Well, and speaking of reaching everybody, one way that I think you're doing that, or that your book will certainly be doing, is through the way you've divided it into three sections. One is devoted to illumination, one is devoted to imagination, and one is devoted to motivation. Can you elucidate on that a bit?

Matthew Halteman: Sure. Yeah. Thank you. Wow. You're giving me awesome opportunities to talk about the book. I

Jasmin Singer: mean, I think the book is very much on the nose of what Our Hen House listeners are interested in because, you know, right. We're already vegan, but the people who listen to Our Hen House are people who want to change the world for animals.

And so we're all going out into our own communities. And this gives a framework for that, that, you know, I'm sure will have things we've heard about and thought about before, but you're also framing things in new ways for us. And so I want to know more. So you're here. I might as well pick your brain until it's like, you know,

Matthew Halteman: Thrilled to have textured questions, you know, about the content.

That's just such a gift. So thank you.

Jasmin Singer: Thank you.

Matthew Halteman: Um, three sections. I thought, you know, I think about my own journey. I think about kind of three different movements here, right? So first, there's just sort of becoming aware of these things that were just kind of either lost in the shuffle or they just never came to your reflective attention.

And so the first part of the book is about illumination, right? Because I'm not trying to preach to the choir. So I want this book to be in the hands of people who have never thought about these things before. Maybe they've got a loud and proud vegan grandson who is like You know, here, here Nana, you know, like this is what's going on.

So I want to take Nana or whoever along this ride. And illumination is about just becoming aware of a couple of different things. So first that there's this huge system that is militating in all these disgusting ways against not just your flourishing and my flourishing, but like everybody's flourishing.

Every single creature on the planet and the planet itself is suffering under the weight of this food system. So the first chapter in the illumination section is about just kind of getting that clear, right? But then there's this kind of curious question, right? So Gosh, how on earth did we end up with a food system that's this disgusting, right?

When it comes to like, helping us be well, right? I mean, food is the way that we build our very lives. So you'd think that once we realize, gosh, this is really bad, we'd be sort of running, screaming for the exit, right? We'd all be ready to be vegan activists immediately. But there's a second really important step, and that's becoming aware or illuminating how deeply entrenched animal products are in the fabric of most of our identities, right?

So the reason that we're not running streaming for the exit is because steak confers virility and chicken soup is your mom tousling your hair when you're sick, and turkey emanates, dead turkey emanates gratitude, right? And then your uncle's Swiss steak is like the thing that brings your whole huge family of skeptics together.

It's like the closest thing to religion in your family. So when animal products are not just sort of things we stuff in our pie holes, but basically, like, the stuff, the fabric of our identities, right? It's our religious identity. It's, it's the way we perform gender sometimes. It's the way our ethnicities come out in special ways.

We think of our physical health as depending on animal products. Socially, it's, when you think about your inner family, every last one of those parts, is gonna be probably dyed in the wool of having animal products as a really important way of expressing all those parts of yourself.

So we've got this terribly disgusting thing, and then we've got this, you know, oh my gosh, but I can't give that up because that's who I am. And so then, the third step is once we sort of realize, well, of course it's hard, right, to go vegan, because it feels like we have to deconstruct and rebuild our very selves in order even to take the first step.

And so then the third chapter of the Illumination section is all about reminding ourselves that, look, we have everything we need. This is kindergarten ethics, right? Everything we need to know to deeply desire a vegan world, we learned in kindergarten, right? These are the most basic things ever. It's like respect, caring, You want to know things rather than just say shit, right? Like stuff that we've been taught since we were knee high to a grasshopper. So that's the illumination section. The imagination section then is you, you guys know how this goes. Sometimes being more sophisticated that something would be cool is not the same as really wanting to do it.

You feel me, right? It's like. You see that and you're like, running a marathon, maybe, or whatever it is, but it's one thing to sort of see, yeah, you know, like, maybe I should do this, and another thing to be really excited about doing it. So the imagination section is all about, like, putting that wind in our sails and showing us how, Holy cow, not only does this make sense, not only is this who we thought we already were, not only are these our deepest desires based on our kindergarten ethics, but there's all these reasons deeply to desire the self and the world that moving in this direction will give us.

And so these are the mountaintop experiences, right? How going vegan transforms our human communities into more just and joyful places. How our creaturely consciousness expands to transition, not just from preventing the suffering of animals, but from really having an investment in creating spaces of flourishing for them and how the earth, and especially environmental justice in the way that we live here, is the condition of possibility for all creaturely flourishing.

We really can't be vegans without also being interested in environmental justice because we all need that matrix of air to breathe and food to eat and people to love us, and competition, and, and, we need that matrix of material worldhood, right, in order to do any of this.

Okay, so everybody's on the mountaintop, looking down, everybody's excited, but, then there's the real world. So, you know, you know how this feels. You read that book. You get really excited about that book, and then it's like Tuesday, and you're like, shit, right? It's like, when you try to get out there and put it into practice, you get these really high expectations, and then you flop, right?

You step on your own feet and fall face forward, right, into the turf. And so, the third part of the book, which is all about motivation is okay, how do we bring these crazy, delightful aspirations of a vegan world down to earth in the tiny little patches that we occupy and have influence over?

So that third section is a way to help people not take the weight of the world on their shoulders, but instead to just focus on simple little wishes. Tiny little goals, right? Some repetitive daily practices that'll help you get some incremental victories and embolden you to see that, okay, not only can I do this, but I can do this really well and I can inspire other people in my community to do this really well.

So those three parts, right? Illumination. Why is this such a mess? Imagination. Holy cow. Look at this amazing world we could move toward. And then motivation. Gosh, how do we do this on a daily basis given that we are finite and deeply prone to error. Right.

Jasmin Singer: I love the framework of that, I love the way you put it all together and it just also kind of makes me wonder why people aren't going vegan.

Most of us have gone through kindergarten. For some of us, it was a very, very, very long time ago. But what do you think are the biggest obstacles in the way of people embracing veganism?

Matthew Halteman: Yeah. Wow. So I think, I mean, and this is part of the fun, I think, is that for every obstacle, there's someone with a special set of talents and gifts to dig in and do that transformation.

I already mentioned loving the Britty episode, right? If you haven't listened to it, it's the Britty Mann episode and I forget the name of her organization cause I'm on the spot, but she does this incredible work, right? Of like helping restaurants to get a couple of extra... uh, Planted Society.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Monica. Um, it's this just amazingly simple idea, but just so beautiful. It's like you help local restaurants get a couple of really dialed in plant based options on the menu, right? Incredible. It's such a great idea. It's so easy. And as that starts to happen more and more, it's just going to be easier and easier for people to be out there trying something new, right?

So one big obstacle is You can't go out to dinner and get something you love, right? And so where do we celebrate? We celebrate at restaurants. We do our holiday stuff at restaurants. We go to the ball game and we get that, right? So it's just like one way to address that is to help these institutions offer people more, right?

So they get a window into how this could be different. I think, across the board, our institutions have a vested interest in protecting the status quo, right? And so we also have to have people who are working at the level of policy, right? Who are saying, okay, how do we incentivize research and development for new ways of feeding ourselves?

So if you're a policy person, dig in there. We also have religious traditions that God bless them, you know, they're doing some great things, but they also can be sticks in the mud. Right. And so if you're somebody who comes alongside people, as you know, in a religious tradition, look at what the sacred texts actually say about this stuff and you'll find deep resonance.

One of my favorite feminist vegan philosophers of all time, Lisa Kemmerer, if you don't know her work, check it out. She wrote this book called Animals and World Religions, came out with Oxford some time ago now. But she's just done some really cool work that shows how many of the world religions resonate deeply with a vegan vision of the world.

So if that's your bag, go to work inside those institutions to try to create windows into a vegan world there. I think the barriers that we have here can also be windows to open, and everybody's already entrenched, right, in those institutions. And so I think if we get this combination, where we say, okay, I'm an individual, I start with my breakfast table, but I'm also a citizen of the world.

So I want to find the place where I have influence and take that influence to these institutions that are preventing us from really getting to that tipping point where, veg is default. And I think another great organization that I want to mention, two great organizations, the Better Food Foundation, doing such cool work, right, around this idea that, hey, default veg.

You don't have to say no animal products. You just have to say we're going to make it veg first and people have to ask for the animal products if they want them. So they're going around getting institutions to commit to this and I think institutions are realizing Holy smokes. We have a lot of power here.

Maybe individuals don't want to go vegan all the time Maybe our government isn't ready to invest a ton in R& D for you know new ways to do this But colleges and universities can default veg and have a huge footprint Right? If everything the philosophy department ever serves is vegan, or if all those first year students who come out and do a service project in town get vegan sack lunches without the V word attached in big capital letters, well, gosh, right?

This is going to add up over time. I also love, I think New Roots Institute, I see the ED is here, Monica Chen. I love what New Roots Institute is doing. They're saying, look, every community has different leadership, different standards, different ways of thinking. So we're not going to come into your community and pretend to be the experts.

We're going to invite you to learn some of the cutting edge tools that we have at our disposal, and then you're going to go, and you're going to be the voice of authority in your communities, right? So there's this beautiful respect for the fact that vegan advocacy is going to look really, really different in different communities.

And so I think the more that we can do both of these things at once. As individuals, commit to all these beautiful things that moving in this direction are going to get from us, but then also look for the places in the world where you have influence, and take on responsibilities in those places because those institutions will only ever be transformed from within, right?

They are never going, nobody, no CEO is going to pick up a tract at a Taylor Swift concert and be like, Oh, maybe we'll do it like this from here on out. What's going to happen is some vice president of that company who was trained at New Roots Institute is going to decide, all right, this year's project is this animal friendly thing.

And then the 20, 000 people who work for that global company are going to get a chance to see a window into a vegan world. So I think that, you know, thinking about our power along these two different axes, right? There's the power that we have to work with our inner family to be going vegan in our own lives.

Then there's the power to be a part of this huge social and cultural collective effort to reshape and transform our institutions. And we're all a part of those. So we all have leverage and power in those places.

Jasmin Singer: So leverage and power is something that I think that the climate movement is having more and more of.

And you mentioned environmentalism a few minutes ago. How does going vegan relate to climate activism in your approach?

Matthew Halteman: Yeah, so I'll be honest and say, the climate piece wasn't the primary mover for me. Really, the animal thing, as Andrew Linzey puts it, the director of the Oxford Center for Animal Ethics.

I mean, it's the animal thing that really got me going. But there's a really clear connection between the animal thing and the environmental thing. And this is really chapter six of Hungry Beautiful Animals. I start the chapter by saying like, I'm not a very outdoorsy person, so you can see from the wall of books behind me that I'm happier indoors, right?

With a book on my lap. You're not going to find me climbing K2, so I've always kind of been like, straddling the culture side of the culture nature distinction, you know, much happier in an IMAX theater than out there in the Galapagos Islands. And so it never really resonated as much with me.

I've seen it as a point of leverage. But I guess I've always kind of felt a little bit guilty about that. Like, I'm out here with the environmental message, but really it's the animal thing, right? I'm kind of smuggling, using this point of leverage in order to get people interested.

But that really changed for me when I realized In writing chapter six. And this is really one of those things I learned from writing the book. You know, if you ever write a book, you'll realize you had no idea what you thought, right? You were faking it. And then in the process of writing the book, you sort of discover these things that are a big surprise.

This was probably the biggest surprise of the book to me, that if you really committed to something beyond preventing suffering, Like if you want to do more than get animals out of the worst possible scenarios, if you really want to take a bite out of, this is the worst mixed metaphor ever stated, right?

Take a bite out of opening a window into, right, uh, animal flourishing, you gotta have environmental justice. As one of your main foci, because the absence of suffering is not the same as flourishing, right? Flourishing means all those capabilities to be well can kind of get traction in the world.

And the thing about getting traction in the world of really doing well in the world, there has to be a world, right? That supports flourishing. Because for organisms like us, we need air to breathe, and water to drink, and food to eat, and social relationships to buoy us up, and cultures of our own, not just human cultures. There's all sorts of great books these days that show us there's orca culture, and there's, I mean, there's cultures galore that we're just now starting to see. And for me, that was my backdoor into environmentalism, because I'm an animal person. To really make that pivot from just preventing suffering to promoting flourishing, I had to become an environmentalist, right?

Because if I want these animals really to have opportunities to thrive, then I can't just have the earth going to hell in a handbasket, right? I mean, there has to be that special matrix of soil and air and water and earth and competition and inspiration. And we're not doing a very good job of preserving those open spaces for flourishing to take place.

Our own, right? Or anyone else's. So that really brought me in for the first time to the environmental stuff in an existential way. I mean, I always knew in this kind of theoretical way that obviously this stuff is important, but you know how it is like, once you find a way to leverage your loves into that new space, it's just a different relationship.

Right. And I love the idea. of making the world a rich, beautiful, alluring place for other creatures. and now I realize, gosh, without a climate movement that means dead serious business, I can't promote flourishing to the extent that I really want to.

Jasmin Singer: Yeah, I love the word flourishing and using it in this context.

One of the ways that... I'm also, you know, an animal person, I guess that's pretty obvious, and I also have been involved for 20 years... my show that I have on the PBS station is Environmental Connections and it's a secret vegan show, you know, like the way to get people in, in my opinion, is just grab them with something they're passionate about.

And then, when they're not looking, suddenly you're talking about cultivated meat or some suddenly you're talking about, You know, any number of the interlocking issues. I remember when my first book came out, talking about personal narrative as a way to create change.

And I'm very passionate about that. I think that it's something that the animal protection movement has not even begun to latch onto in a way that I think we can, using personal stories as a way to move the message. It's something just like the arts that really gets people's defenses down. And so with that, I guess I have one final question for you, even though I would really like to ask you about 300 more questions.

And to be honest, there are about 300 more questions on my question sheet, but I am aware of the time.

Matthew Halteman: I'll be happy to come back.

Jasmin Singer: Yeah, we would love that. We would really love that. There's so many different angles and things that I'd love to chat with you about, but I want to know a little bit more about you and your story because love of a dog was what brought so many of us here.

So what's your story? How are you this little Zoom box on my computer right now?

Matthew Halteman: Yeah. So I, you know, Don't hate me. I'm going back to the inner family. You know, Richard,

Jasmin Singer: you know what? I love it. I'm here for it. It's like one of my favorite subjects.

Matthew Halteman: Richard Schwartz, is an American psychologist who has this approach to, therapeutics called internal family systems therapy.

And that metaphor has really taken over the way I think about my story, because I guess I used to think of my story in terms of like monolithic narratives, right? And monolithic narratives have a way of kind of hemming us in, right? I don't know if you've ever had one of these experiences where like, something goes a little differently than you thought it would.

And you're like, this isn't me. This can't be me. Right? And often those monolithic stories make it really hard to breathe and grow and move in directions that are really going to be expansive. If we pull on those threads, have a willingness to move in those directions. So my story, you know, in going vegan.

It's a bunch of different internal threads that just happen to get woven together at once. So you mentioned my dog Gus, right? I, I had this bulldog. And public service announcement, I never would have had a bulldog if I had animal consciousness, right? This was something that I learned after Gus came into our lives and I actually focus in chapter one about how devastating selective breeding is, to bulldogs and other quote unquote, purebred, uh, dogs.

But yeah, coming to know Gus was a big part of it. And I, my partner is a dog lover, grew up with dogs. I grew up with cats. They were pretty aloof, right? Love cats. You know, if Bruce Friedrich listens to this, sorry, Bruce, you know, I'm not, I'm not defaming cats here. but, you know, dogs just have, um, There's something sparkling about canine personhood that just grabbed me by the neck and, you know, I'm a philosopher.

I study personhood. I study agency and motivation. I've had a look at the list of necessary and sufficient conditions for someone's being a person. And all of a sudden I was just like, holy shit, like, this is absolutely a person, right? Like, there's just absolutely, there's no serious person who's studied these issues.

I shouldn't, that's too hyperbolic. Maybe there are serious people who could. I was not among the people, right, who could know what I knew about personhood.

Jasmin Singer: I love hyperbole more than anything in the world.

Matthew Halteman: Philosophers aren't supposed to love it, but I do. So, so Gus was a big part of it, just having those lights go on.

But there were two other threads. The intellectual thread was this philosopher, Nathan Nobis, who really kind of, at a lunch at the American Philosophical Association one day, I was eating this big, gnarly, French dip sandwich with like a nasty vein hanging out, like beef falling in my lap, and he said, aren't you a pacifist?

And, and if you know Nathan Nobis, he's a pretty straight shooter, right? And he's like, I, think, you know, knowing what I know about you, that if you ever taught a course in this stuff, you'd probably see things differently. And so, you know, them's fighting words. Philosophers, we don't have prestige.

We don't have fame. We don't have money. We've got personal authenticity and that's it, right? So if somebody's like, You're not living it out, bro. Like that kind of hurts us. Like, you know, all right, fine. You know, I'm going to teach a course on this stuff. And my not so secret hope was to find, you know, 10 knockdown drag out reasons to shut his bunny kissing mouth so that I could continue stuffing mine with fennel rubbed pork loin.

And then I was just horrified to discover there's no arguments from the other direction. Like, I'm sending emails to ag schools. I'm like, I know, I know that there's an economic case and a pragmatic case, but like, has anyone made the moral case? And so intellectually, I just felt overwhelmed by the caliber of evidence.

And then socially, you know, my partner, is always been someone, her hospitality, her incredible cooking. We both cook, but I don't know if any of you have this where, like, one of the partners is just so much faster and so much better. Like, I like to think I can cook, but Susan is just someone who can, like, take a lime and rice and it's like two Michelin stars.

It's insane. I don't know how she does it. But she was like, I was begging, you know, can we do like you know, happy meat? Like, let's just buy it for 15. 99 a pound and eat less of it. And she was like, no, you know, I think a vegan experiment would be fun. I was like, I don't think it'll be fun. But she basically said, I think it'd be awesome to try to figure out how to veganize all this stuff.

So while you're teaching this class, let's just do a vegan experiment. You'd rather err on the side of being too conservative. You know, you don't want to find out after three weeks, especially if you're standing up in front of students, telling them to be the change they want to see in the world and blah, blah, blah.

So let's just do this vegan experiment. And so, that combination of things, right, like, Gus opening the emotional window, Nathan opening the intellectual window, Susan showing me the possibility for social engagement. It was really beautiful and delicious. And when those three parts of my inner family were like, okay, we can do this.

I just found my life's mission. And so, initially, I'm not gonna lie, it was more scarcity based, you know, I love to wallop people in the face with the arguments and shame people to death if they were meat bullies, you know, I love nothing more than like, I call them Keith Bacons, right, like guys who love to make a bacon joke, even though you've heard it a thousand times before, I used to love to bully Keith Bacons and be the guy in the room with the philosophy PhD, ready to mix it up.

And, you know, after a while, that just felt sad. I had a lot of compassion fatigue. I had a lot of people scattering like roaches from a tactical flashlight whenever I walked into a room, right? It just wasn't, it wasn't beautiful. And then I had this big transition, and the reason I want to get to this is because, you know, you've mentioned stories being so incredibly transformative. I had this situation where, you know, I grew up in a family. We washed our cars together every week. Right. So when I was 16, I got like a bucket with turtle wax and a shammy and the whole nine yards. And we wash our cars. And then I hate it when a bird takes a dump on a car.

Like, this is like an immediate rage inducing experience for me. And I also hate geese. Trust me, this will all come back to make sense. I hate geese because when I was little, I tried to offer a piece of bread. I was at Northside Park, on like a trip with one of my elementary school classes. I tried to offer a gander who was protecting his mate's clutch of eggs some bread.

And this gander comes running at me, I fall backwards, right, my tough skins get all full of goose shit, and I'm screaming like, Goose attack! Right, and I never lived this down, it's to this day like the epitome of shame, I remember exactly how I felt in that moment. So I hate geese, I hate shit on cars, one day I'm coming out of the dentist, getting my freshly washed, hand me down Volvo, the nicest car I've ever had, And on the way out of the parking lot, and a forklift, like, drops a bunch of, I don't know, stuff, they were doing sewer work, so these huge concrete things, like, fell and made this huge clatter, and these geese from a retention pond flew like almost into the side of my car. And initially I didn't know what was happening. I was just completely shocked by this. And of course, you know, there's this voluminous evacuation of shit, like all over the front window and I come to the proverbial screeching halt, right? And when I finally realized what had happened, I Braced for the rage, right?

Because this is like my two big nemeses coming together at once. And instead of having this like rage response, I just started laughing. I just start uproariously laughing. And the thought that I had is so juvenile that I say in the book that I feel like the goose assaulted six year old came back like for a redemption moment.

Speaking of the inner family. And the thought was, you know, these guys don't give a shit about me or my car, right? They're like flying on the force of feathered flapping wings into the fucking sky, right? And they're just these completely amazing, totally independent, all they need from me is to step back and let them be who they are. And that is the moment, like that story is what pivoted me from scarcity veganism to abundance going vegan. I just I stopped wanting to prevent suffering. I mean, of course I want to still prevent suffering, but that was no longer the seat, that was no longer the wellspring of my vegan commitment.

The wellspring of my vegan commitment shifted to the abundance of the promotion of flourishing. And a lot of times that's about stepping back and making room. rather than intervening and controlling and taking charge. And that has changed, that changed things forever for me. And I think that's really the beginning of the book because that was when I moved from wanting to spend the rest of my life making increasingly more intellectually ironclad arguments that this is what people should do to prevent suffering, to wanting to live the kind of life where people could see this dazzling abundance that awaits us and everyone else if we can just take a few steps to align our lives with the people that we've wanted to be since kindergarten.

It can be that simple.

Jasmin Singer: Love that so much. It really can be that simple, and The book is called Hungry Beautiful Animals by Matthew C. Halteman. And Matt, I can't thank you enough for everything that you're doing and for putting this book out there and for messaging things in a really cool way that I think a lot of people, vegan and non, will get behind.

How can people find you online and support your efforts?

Matthew Halteman: Oh, thank you so much. So generous. We have a website, HungryBeautifulAnimals.com, so if you can remember the title of the book, you can find us there. Also again, my name is Matthew C. Halteman, so I have a personal website as well, but yeah, HungryBeautifulAnimals.com is the place to sort of see what's going on with what we're doing. And, November 12 is Drop Day, so if you're interested in being, I can hardly say these words out loud, but I guess I need to now that I have a publicist hype team. If you want to be on our hype team, that is the people who sort of help us get the word out to woo the world. I'd be especially interested because I have some special information for people who want to help us in those ways. And my publicist is awesome and has actually made a bunch of really cool assets that you can use on Instagram and Facebook and all these other places.

So I have a lot of wonderful help and yeah, November 12th is the day. So if you'd like to be a part of the team, hungrybeautifulanimals.com, you can email me as well.

Jasmin Singer: Amazing. Matt, thank you so much for joining us today on Our Hen House.

Matthew Halteman: Thank you so much for having me. Sheer joy to be here. And thanks so much to everyone for taking your precious time and listening to what I have to say.

I appreciate it so much.