Matthew Halteman on Hungry Beautiful Animals: Philosophy, Food, and Flourishing

What if veganism wasn’t about sacrifice—but about abundance?

In this thoughtful episode of The Glen Merzer Show, philosopher and author Matthew Halteman joins Glen to discuss his powerful book, Hungry Beautiful Animals, and the deeply personal journey that led him to veganism—one that started with his beloved bulldog, Gus.

Rather than preach perfection, Halteman encourages a shift in mindset: “Going vegan is an abundance aggregator.” He reframes veganism not as a moral burden, but as an invitation to flourish—for our health, the animals, and the planet.

Drawing on his family's rich legacy in philosophy and vegan advocacy, Halteman offers practical tools for navigating ethical food choices without falling into judgment or guilt. “Pivot away from superiority toward humility,” he urges, highlighting how meaningful change happens through connection, not confrontation.

The conversation dives into the ethical failure of CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations)—a system nearly everyone agrees is wrong—and tackles the misleading promises of regenerative meat and lab-grown alternatives. “Lab meat is a fantasy,” Halteman says, making the case that plant-based eating is already the most practical, affordable, and healthful solution.

Whether you're vegan, veg-curious, or simply craving more meaning in your meals, this episode offers a compelling blend of food ethics, emotional insight, and hopeful vision.

🎧 Tune in now to rethink what it means to eat with compassion—and to discover how veganism can truly create a life of more.

📌 Watch the episode here: Matthew Halteman, Author of Hungry Beautiful Animals

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DISCLAIMER: Please understand that the transcript below was provided by a transcription service. It is undoubtedly full of the errors that invariably take place in voice transcriptions. To understand the interview more completely and accurately, please watch it here:  Matthew Halteman, Author of Hungry Beautiful Animals

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Welcome to The Glenn Merzer Show. can find us across all your favorite podcast platforms. You could find us on YouTube. And please remember to subscribe. And you could find us at RealMenEatPlants.com. Matthew Halteman is author of Hungry Beautiful Animals, The Joyful Case for Going Vegan. And this is a beautiful book.

He is professor of philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And he is a fellow at the Oxford Center for Animal Ethics in the UK. Matthew, welcome to the show. It's wonderful to be here, Glenn. Thanks so much for inviting me. Well, I've got to say to you first, my hat is off to you. You see, I'm not wearing it as a writer because

Part of the joy of reading this book, Hungry Beautiful Animals. Do you have a copy to hold up? do. Here it is. Yes. And people can find out more at hungrybeautifulanimals.com if they're interested. of the joy of reading the book is that every sentence is better than the one before. Wow. So well. So part of the forward drive is, is he actually going to top that in the next paragraph?

That's very kind of you. just admired the writing so much throughout the book. You tell the story in the book of what made you go vegan and it was your bulldog Gus. People often become vegans either for the environmental reason in the climate or for health or for the animals. Which argument did Gus make?

Yeah. man. Well, Gus made them all. I mean, he's a pretty compelling individual. as anyone who reads the book will, will quickly see, but the main argument that he made was just, you know, confronting me for the first time with the obvious truth that he was a unique, irreplaceable individual and a canine person. You know, as a philosophy professor, I study agency. I study motivation. I study will.

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You know, I study the various characteristics we usually associate with personhood, and with, know, being in the world, as a conscious being rather than just sort of a part of the furniture of the world. And this was the first time in my life, I just was gobsmacked to realize Gus is a person. Now I'm not crazy. You know, he's not a human person. He's a canine person, but there was just absolutely no debate about this.

And that really took my breath away when I, right, made the connection between Gus's being a person and then sort of did the rest of the intellectual and emotional math and realized, yeah, and so are all those other hundreds of billions, right? that I've never really taken under intellectual or emotional care, before. And so Gus was played an enormous role.

in my transition here. And he was not without collaborators. mean, I'm sure it would have taken me longer if my wife, Susan, wasn't an absolutely brilliant, home chef and my fellow philosopher, Nathan Nobis hadn't been a very dropped a very compelling gauntlet, at one conference when I was eating a French dip sandwich and he hazarded the comment, giving me a side long glance. Aren't you a pacifist?

Which Glenn, I have to say that those are fighting words, right? Because I knew that I had some extra reading to do when that lunch came to an end. But I'd be lying, you know, if I didn't admit that Gus, Gus is really the guy who threw the levers that ultimately made this happen first and foremost. Now is that gentleman who said to you, aren't you a pacifist? Is he a vegan himself?

He is. And in fact, he's a very well regarded vegan philosopher named Nathan Nobis, Professor Nathan Nobis, and anybody who's interested in reading some terrific work, especially he writes papers and shorter form stuff. He's got a couple of books as well. And he's also committed to open sourcing so you can get almost everything he's got on his website. He's also a tick tocker, but highly recommend.

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Professor Nathan Nobus from Morehouse College as a great way in to these issues if you haven't thought much about him yet. But he was a student of the great Mylon Engel from Northern Illinois University, who's I consider Mylon my vegan grandfather. And I'm not his only grandchild, to say the least. He's done Why do you consider him your vegan grandfather? Well, I just always think about right.

the lines of influence among philosophers, right? That if Nathan had never had a class with Mylon, I think it would have taken me a lot longer to get to these issues and to start thinking about them with seriousness. And Mylon is just a person who is really compelling when it comes to giving students early opportunities to confront these issues and really think them through.

Did Nathan become a vegan because of the influence of myelin? I think so. I, I, I'm, know, as you know, Glenn, our inner lives are very complicated and it usually takes more than one hit, right? I mean, we're physical beings, we're social and emotional and intellectual and moral beings. And so usually some things have to come together in our inner lives more than just having sort of one efficient cause.

But as I recall our conversations, I think Nathan would say, yeah, I mean, he took this philosophy class while in a master's program at Northern Illinois. He found the Mylands testimony on this compelling. He found the arguments compelling. And as I recall, that's where the traction really picked up for him. So it gives me hope as a philosophy professor that occasionally the things we do in the classroom can actually spill out into the world.

You know, you have something in common with the great Dr. Michael Clapper, who was also moved to veganism because he was having dinner at a steakhouse with a fellow who said, aren't you a pacifist? some words to that effect. And in his case, the other guy was like Michael eating a steak at the time. But his point was, at least I'm not a hypocrite. Right. Yeah, well.

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Nathan was having a salad or something. So there was definitely a hypocrite in the room, but it wasn't Nathan. So what drew you to philosophy in the first place? Yeah. So a couple of things. I mean, I've always been a curious person and I just love thinking about complex things, but I've also always been

An anxious person, Glenn. And as a younger person, I was always looking for tools, right? To keep my anxiety at bay. You know, growing up in the eighties and nineties, we didn't know as much about neurodiversity as we know now. We, wasn't a common thing for someone with an anxious temperament to be in therapy or anything. So I was always kind of, you know, trying to find ways to manage and cope with this feeling of, you know,

Curious anxiety and what's gonna happen next and how am I gonna handle it? And when I got to college I took a class with the amazing professor Bruce Benson on the of all people the German hermeneutic philosopher Hans Geyer Gottem and it was one of those experiences where you know, it feels like if you've ever read a book or had an incredible sort of pivotal moment with the teacher where

The scales fall from your eyes and you're like, this is what I've been looking for all along, but I've never had the words right to, to, to describe right. What this is like. And that class really served. I mean, I fell in love with this idea of philosophy as the love of wisdom, as the lived pursuit of wisdom in our everyday affairs. and, it, it took me much longer to get around to thinking about.

the philosophy of food as something that was of particular interest to me. But the initial bug, you know, that bit me hard was this idea that, well, gosh, we can live a life that is not only more authentic, right? Than the lives we might have otherwise lived, but also we can be so much less anxious because the examined life is a life that draws us

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naturally and organically into a relationship to truth and beauty and goodness. And this was just incredibly attractive to me. The idea of right, less anxiety, more authenticity, and then proximity to truth and beauty and goodness. And, yeah, let's just say as a high school athlete and a football player, a truth, beauty and goodness were pretty far from my radar, right? Initially.

and so in college kind of realizing, wow. Philosophy, philosophical inquiry is this incredible multi-tool forgetting these things. I've always wanted. just didn't realize right that it had that sort of power. and, and then, you know, as somebody who loves to win an argument, you know, I'm not going to lie. It was also kind of fun to see, Ooh, there's people who are really, really good, right. At this mental jujitsu.

And it's awfully handy to have those tools in your kit. If you want to make a point and be taken seriously. So I think it was a combination of idealism and pragmatism. Philosophy really offered a sort of a beautiful fusion of idealism and sort of practicality. You know, it gave you a vision to strive for, but it also gave you incredibly helpful tools for living well on the ground. Now, when you spoke to your family,

who might have suggested, I don't know, perhaps that you go into law or medicine or engineering. And you said, no, I think I'm going for philosophy. I'm to be a philosopher. Was that met with a lot of enthusiasm? Well, you know, it was. But that's only because I come from a long line of, you know, professors and higher education. My dad is a historian of economic thought and sort of a philosopher.

in his own right and a lot of my aunts and uncles are theologians and so it was kind of the family business in some ways. runs in the family. does and Glenn would you believe this? My sister Megan, who's the provost of St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana is also a philosophy professor, also a vegan advocate and worked

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on the very same two figures with the same dissertation committee at Notre Dame as a graduate student. And we actually lived across the hall from one another, philosopher siblings, right in the same PhD program. So yeah, that made for a lot of very interesting family holidays, two philosophers in the mix and, an intellectual historian. And my mom is a spiritual director. So very lively group, when it comes to the intellectual piece.

But I can speak a little bit to the fear, Glenn, that being a philosopher is going to be met with skepticism. when I met my, person- And skepticism is a philosophy in itself. Yes, it is. I guess in this case, I just mean dread, right? When you find out that someone that you know is a philosopher, it's easy for people to scatter like roaches from a tactical flashlight. We're not the world's most popular people at parties.

But when I met the person who is now my father-in-law after dating his daughter for a while, I was very concerned because, you he was a very successful person in the finance world. And I thought to myself, goodness, he is not going to be very excited that his daughter has taken up with a philosophy major. This is going to be really awkward. And I had worked luckily for a law firm that focused on securities law. And so I thought, okay, I'm going to lean into my

law and securities background and not into philosophy. I'm going to try to sort of avoid right. The philosophy piece. And one of the first things he said to me was, well, I was excited to hear that you're a philosopher because most of my young vice presidents have philosophical training and I like to hire these people right out of, and I thought, my gosh, I had heard, you know, my mentors had told me that philosophy is actually a really useful background to have for getting hired.

But that was one of the first times I saw the practical power of a philosophy degree from somebody who I would have assumed would not be super excited about it. So I've been pretty lucky. I have not had a lot of skepticism around my decision to go into philosophy. And I think that's because the people that I've been tangent to have had good experiences with philosophers for the most part.

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That isn't the universal experience, as I'm sure you know, given that you asked the question. You know what I'd like to do now, Matt, is I'd like to read a passage from your book. And my goodness, having trouble finding it here. Hold on.

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Stick with me, folks. I will find it. We'll get there.

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Okay.

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We'd be vastly better off individually and collectively if going vegan became the new normal. Going vegan has many personal and global benefits and is key to ameliorating catastrophic environmental and ethical problems, including climate change, diet related diseases, global pandemics, antibiotic resistance, worker injustice and animal cruelty. But even if we find the courage to expand our imaginative horizons,

far enough to envision going vegan as an exciting prospect, yet another problem lies in wait, our faltering wills. wait a minute. No, I moved to the wrong paragraph there on the page. But going vegan is unpopular, even infamous. People are generally much more familiar with the downsides than the upsides, both because going vegan is often framed negatively.

and sometimes judgmentally as a reaction to bad news and because a skeptical world is just waiting to pounce on any perceived inconsistency as confirmation that going vegan is so much holier than thou, hooey.

So that is really a couple of important paragraphs that set up the whole book, because one of the main points of the whole book is how to reframe veganism to make it appealing as a way of having a life that involves flourishing rather than deprivation. So talk about that a little bit. Yeah.

You know, I think everybody's journey is different, but at least my journey into what I now think of as going vegan. one of the main things I do in the book is try to draw a distinction between identity focused veganism. That's largely about right obligation to prevent suffering. And then you follow these various rules for the purpose of doing that to going vegan. This idea of having your imagination captured by this.

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beautiful way that things could be if we transformed our food system and our attitudes and actions toward animals. And going vegan is less about being the perfect vegan as it is about drinking, right? Inspiration from this vision of a more beautiful world and then finding practices that sort of push us slowly but surely, always imperfectly in the direction of this aspiration.

So I'm really trying to pivot in hungry, beautiful animals, Glenn, from veganism that obligates us to prevent suffering to going vegan that inspires us to strive for and create as much creaturely flourishing as we can. And I think that pivot from obligation to opportunity is psychologically a very, very important one.

If you want going vegan to be something that becomes widely accessible, right? Because we need to start seeing vegan living in the way that we see virtually all other human aspirations. And Glenn, one of the things I think is kind of funny, right? About the way we think of going vegan as a culture. I can't think of any other human aspiration where perfectionism is the goal.

and you sort of lose your, your card if you fail to be perfect. mean, imagine how weird it would be if we snuck around behind Buddhists, observed them getting angry and then we're like, guess you're not a Buddhist after all. Right. I mean, you just got angry. The Buddha says you shouldn't do that. Guess, you know, guess you're not a Buddhist, no Buddhism for you. Or if you're following right. A Jewish person or a Christian around and you know,

You happen to know what their various mores are and you try to catch them in a gotcha moment. This is not the way we think about virtually any other human aspiration, right? With, other human aspirations, we have the grace to see our imaginations have been captured by a beautiful vision of the world. Now we look inside our imperfect little selves. We, we do a SWOT analysis, right? We look at the strengths and the weaknesses and the opportunities and the threats.

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And then we try to find daily practices, the repetitive practice of which will push us in the general direction of this world that we aspire to live in. Why is it that going vegan is the one and only thing that having one last remaining leather belt in the farthest reaches of your closet somehow disqualifies you, right? Or if you're at home and your grandma is making fish tacos,

And you decide for the purpose of not making a big issue with your octogenarian grandparents who probably aren't going to go vegan tomorrow, right? To eat that taco. Suddenly your identity, who vanishes into thin air, right? On account of this one concession you decide to make. I don't think that's a very smart or sustainable way to think about what we're doing.

when we're going vegan. And so the whole point of Hungry Beautiful Animals is to say, imagine how much easier it would be for the world to go vegan if going vegan felt like taking that second bite of tiramisu or lingering on the beach as the sun sets for an additional hour or playing one more round of knockout with your best buddy on the basketball court on a nice

you know, cool summer afternoon, like when desire is on the job, we don't need willpower, right? Because it's so alluring to move farther in the direction of what you want that yet there's no debate about this. Whereas when obligation rather than opportunity is the narrative, well, then it's sort of like getting up off the couch to clean the bathroom.

Who wants to do that? Right? I mean, we know we have to, but it's just a completely different frame of reference and one that is not very imagination capturing at the end of the day. So what I hope that hungry, beautiful animals can do. I'm so glad Glenn that you, that you picked up on the aesthetic, you know, of, the writing. Part of the reason I try to write in a beautiful way is because beautiful things have a way of transporting us.

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Beautiful things have a way of sweeping us into their charm. Right. And a big part of what I'm trying to do here is say, look at how beautiful the world could be. If we decided individually and collectively that this is what we want. Not this is what we have to do. Not this is what we feel guilty. If we don't do not, this is what we feel ashamed for failing to do. But if we could get right healthier bodies.

quicker rebounds in our athletics, longer use of life-saving antibiotics, vastly more fresh water to use, vastly more arable land to rewild, vastly better jobs for people in agriculture. What if we started to see those things for what they are as things we all deeply desire and moved incrementally rather than perfectionistically?

toward that beautiful goal. That seems to me like a vision of vegan living that everybody could lean into whether or not they want to get the word vegan tattooed across their forehead, right? And, and, never eat another animal product for the rest of their life. So that that's kind of the vision. And, and I really appreciate, you know, that you enjoyed the writing because that was the whole point.

Right. Was we've got so many books in the movement that do a great job with the bullet points, right. Of why you should do this, of why it's important, of why you're obligated, of what the arguments are. But we have fewer books that create a wave of desire to be swept away, right. Toward, toward the beauty of this thing, this world that is very much within our reach. if we lean in, to this beautiful vision.

Well, this idea of associating veganism with flourishing, with flourishing health, flourishing planet, flourishing relationships is a captivating idea. But let me narrow it down to the food itself. I say this as someone who was Chef AJ's co-author on her latest book, which is called Sweet Indulgence, which is a book full of delicious desserts.

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And AJ's point, which I agree with, is that people aren't going to dessert dessert, so you might as well have healthy desserts. And our desserts are made with dates rather than with white refined sugar and so forth. So they're healthy desserts. Having said that, here's my question and my challenge.

If we take this attitude that we want to invite people to veganism through food by emphasizing its deliciousness and we're appealing to people on the standard American diet who are used to eating sugary treats and so forth. And we make

fatty and sugary foods that just happen to be vegan. And we try to invite people to our side of the nutritional divide with cupcakes and vegan fried foods and so forth. Are we sacrificing the health aspect of things?

And for me, I find now that I just crave having brown rice and black rice, baked sweet potatoes. I'm eating like a Buddhist. I just like these simple foods and they taste better to me than vegan cupcakes. So how do you feel about the health side of things and the evolution towards a

healthier vegan diet? Yeah, what a great question. I think the answer is complicated. One of the things that I really try to hammer home in the book is that there's no one size fits all to going vegan. And one of the things I love about going vegan is that there's so many different aspects, so many different inroads that you can travel. so nobody has to undergo

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radical personal change in order to find one of these roads, right? There are so many different roads in that finding the way that we can be most true to who we already are is often how I recommend, That people get onto this journey. And so for that reason, I think there should be as many different kinds of invitations onto this path, or onto these paths.

as there are people traveling them. And so for that reason, I'm disinclined to say, well, here's the healthiest way to be a vegan or here's the climate friendliest way to be a vegan or here's the most compassionate animal rights way to be a vegan. What I'm inclined to do instead is to say, look, going vegan, no matter how you do it is an abundance aggregator. If you go vegan,

for health reasons, you're going to experience physical abundance, but you're also going to have an expansion of consciousness that enables you to see things and understand things about members of other species that you were never open to before, right? You started doing this quote unquote for health. if you got into this right for animal rights reasons, and you started maybe as a diet Coke and potato chips, vegan,

Right? My guess is that you're probably at various events going to get adjacent to vegans who are doing this for health reasons or for right athletic training reasons. And you're going to be open to learning more about the ways in which abundance has been aggregated in their lives. And so rather than say in a way that I think divides people, well, here is the one true way to eat a vegan diet.

And surprise, surprise, it looks just like what I crave the most, right? Which I think oftentimes is how we human beings do things. We light onto something exciting. We want to share it with the world for authentic and laudable reasons. But then we forget that the world is a really diverse place and that different people are going to find different ways in. And one of my favorite advocacy strategists

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the philosopher and, and, and advocate, Adrian Marie Brown wrote this beautiful book called Emergent Strategy. And she talks there about the messy beauty of transformation. And her big idea is we're never going to live toward the world we want to see unless we're comfortable with many feet, walking many different paths simultaneously toward the end that we all want.

And so I think if people need a cupcake or ribs that taste virtually identical to what they remember from the old days or a burger that has too much salt in it, even though it's still 99 % better for the environment, according to the University of Michigan, I'm the last person in the world who's going to try to snatch that burger out of their hand and put a sweet potato in front of them. Even if

If we have intimacy and fellowship together, you better believe they're going to be a sweet potato in front of them. Eventually, if they're coming to my potlucks, you better believe that there's going to be some baklava, that blows their mind and it's nuts, right? And agave and, and, you know, different things from refined sugar. That's still delicious, but I guess rather than making it.

a clash of worldviews. I prefer to let meet people where they are on the path. And then in as gentle a way as I can, make the bounty of my particular version available, right in fellowship, but without any, explicit or hopefully even implicit, I want people to see that I'm offering what I have to show them out of joy.

rather than out of any need for them to travel the same path that I've traveled. Now, having said that, should we be loud and proud about the healing benefits of a whole food plant based diet that's low in sugar and that eliminates oils and that uses nuts where we used to use like refined vegetable oil? Absolutely, we should be loud and proud about that because in a situation where the standard American diet is causing

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people to have decades if they manage to live, they live on medication, right? In ways that are deeply troubling. of course I want to be as loud and proud as possible about what people can expect, what rewards people can expect by moving toward the whole food plant based right approach to these things. But I guess I would rather personally,

let them discover those things in fellowship with me, then have that be the banner that I'm carrying. But in hungry, beautiful animals, I'm really clear. If that's your banner to carry it. Absolutely carry it. Right. Because you might be the person that saves somebody from a form of life where diabetes has ravaged their freedom. And you might be the person who makes it possible for somebody who's been in a really difficult relationship with sugar.

to transform how they feel and how they look. That's not going to be me because I'm carrying a different banner, but I hope that we can all carry our banners with joy rather than judgment. If that makes sense. Of course, that makes sense. Now, let me ask you how you feel about the philosophy, if you will, of my friend, Dr. Silas Rao. I always turn to Silas.

when I start to sink into despair and I call him the avatar of optimism. Silas's view is this, that the world breaks down into two types of people, out vegans like you and me and closeted vegans like everybody else. Meaning that nobody wants to go around hurting animals. That there's a kind of instinct

in the human being towards the diet that we advocate. But for all kinds of complex reasons that you analyze in your book, social reasons, habit, taste perhaps, people have trouble coming out as vegans.

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Do you think Silas is right about that? That we're all sort of naturally vegans? Yeah, so it's an interesting question. And the V word is pretty heavily freighted these days with various political connotations, with various sort of ideological persuasions. so rather than sort of commit the whole world right to a position that I find attractive, what I try to do in Hungry Beautiful Animals is to say, well,

When we talk about going vegan, the ethics that get us there are, let's be honest, they're kindergarten ethics, right? They're very, very basic things that we've been learning since we're knee high to a grasshopper. Maybe we learned it in Sunday school. Maybe we learned it at public school. Maybe we learned it at, you know, on our sports team, wherever. But these are really basic ideas, right? That we should, in general,

Hey, if somebody's suffering, try to help them out and reduce the suffering. if there's a chance to make things better for people hop on that, right? if there's a chance to be fair and honest and compassionate and, know, treating others with respect and being the person you say you're going to be right. All these things we learn how to do for the first time in the chaos, right. Of the kindergarten, classroom. And I think.

going vegan and the vegan vision of the world follows very naturally, right? From, from those kindergarten ethics. And so the way I describe that in hungry, beautiful animals is to say not necessarily the people are, are, you know, out vegans or, or, or not. But I talk about this notion of being a vegan and waiting, right? That, that we're all in, we all have all the beliefs.

all the feelings, all the values that we need, not to want to perpetrate gratuitous harm and death on creatures, who it's possible for whom it's possible to flourish. I do believe that the vast majority of us, you know, are, in that space, but because we human beings tend not to be very good at teasing out, right. The implications.

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of our lofty views to the ways that we live on the ground. You know, I worry a little bit. And even when I use the term vegan and waiting, I wondered to myself, well, is this a little presumptuous? Is this the way we should talk about it? I guess in a book with the subtitle, the joyful case for going vegan, I ended up assuming that anyone who picked up this book would at least be right. Willing to it. Yeah, that's right. Open to it.

willing to consider that these beliefs and values and feelings that lead us to desire the beauty of a vegan world would be resonant with them. But I definitely think that the connections aren't clear enough to most people. So if you went up to an average person on the street who hadn't read, the first two chapters of a book that's trying to break the news gently,

And you said, well, you may not realize it, but you just, you know, you're a vegan, you're just not out yet. My suspicion is that that would not be right. That wouldn't go over well. No, that would probably not be a very helpful way, right. To think about it. But I think inside of, of, know, insider vegan conversations, it seems to me, it's very helpful to think of these ideas and to realize with compassion.

Right? That, OK, we probably have deep resonance with almost everyone we talk to. But because those connections haven't been made yet and because of that ideological and cultural, you know, and political baggage around the V word, you know, if we lead with that, we might not have right the the success that we want to have in conveying the joyful possibilities here.

But absolutely, absolutely Glenn. mean, I think every single person in my life is someone who, when they read EB White's Charlotte's web is on Wilbur and Charlotte's side, right? You know, and and I think that is the way we're wired, right? We're wired when we see somebody who can enjoy embodied flourishing our first impulse.

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Is, to try to create space for it. And that's why, right. When we see, you know, ducklings crossing the street, we break because there's this intuition we all have that here is embodied flourishing. And the last thing we want to do.

is to bring it to a halt, right? We want to lend a helping hand. Right. And yet some people will break for the ducklings and then keep driving to the restaurant where they're eating their duc a lorange. Yes. And that, think, Glenn, is where we have that hard work to do, right, of helping people to see the connections. And I think that there are ways to do that that are invitational and beautiful and that can woo people, right?

to allow those feelings to play a larger role in how they view the world and that there are approaches that are coming from a place of judgment and coming from a place of superiority. And in Hungry Beautiful Animals, what I'm trying to do is really pivot away from superiority toward humility, pivot away from obligation and judgment toward opportunity. And especially

pivoting away from the focus always being on suffering, shame and toward right. The focus being on flourishing. Cause as you say, if somebody is confronted with flourishing, they're there, they're at least most people I know their impulses to try to in some way help that along. sometimes when people are confronted with suffering, the shame and the blame make it very difficult to dig in.

Right. Even though they suspect they, probably should. I think our listeners can, can see why you became a philosopher because you bring a rigorous philosophical analysis to every question. I appreciate that. Oh gosh. I hope it's not too sometimes rigorous. Sometimes rigorous is a word for verbose or analytical. Yeah. You are an analytical fellow. Now, uh, Thoreau wrote.

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In Walden, I believe, how can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men? By which I think he meant that philosophy

in order to really achieve something needs to be adapted to the practical. Absolutely. And nothing could be more practical than eating. Yes. So did you find after training as a philosopher and getting degrees as a philosopher that when you brought the, and I'll use the word again, the rigor of philosophy to the question of food,

and diet, that it took it up a notch, that it made it more real and more important. Absolutely. In fact, I was so taken with what the philosophy of food had to offer that at the least practically opportune time in my career, a couple of years before I was going up for tenure, I almost

You know, did a one in 80 and started working on all this practical ethics stuff instead of the 19th and 20th century French and German philosophy I'd been hired to do. So I actually found this so fascinating, right? I mean, and when you think about it, when you're a philosopher and the live pursuit of wisdom in everyday affairs is your thing and you get particularly excited about opportunities to live the examined life in areas where

you've heretofore been asleep. I mean, I remember when I be first got interested in philosophy, what I found fascinating about it was how it could bring to our reflective consciousness, things that were fascinating, but that just were inaccessible without reflection. And so I think for instance, about how difficult it is to reflect on the fact that we use language, right? Because most of the time in our native tongue, languages as invisible.

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Right. As the glasses on our nose, we're completely unaware that we're using language. We're not thinking about the grammatical structure. We're not thinking about which word comes next. As Heidegger says, right, language is the house of being and we just live in this. And so it's near to impossible to step back from it and reflect upon it. similarly breathing.

Right. If you have to think about breathing, you're probably in trouble, right? Because breathing is something you're in a meditation class or perhaps, but, but yeah, but what drove you to the meditation class, right? The anxiety of being right. The, need to kind of slow down and realize, and you know, live in the present and get off that seesaw of regret about the past and anxiety about the future. mean, when we think about breathing,

there's usually a reason related to the catastrophe of being. And I think food was one of those things. It's so close to us that we almost never have the opportunity to reflect on it. And when we do have the opportunity to reflect on it, it's incredibly unwelcome, right? Because like your native tongue or you don't want to consider

that these powers are falling short, right? When it comes to breathing and your native leg, you want those to be so automatic that you can set it and forget it. And foods the same way, because it's how we worship and it's how we mourn and it's how we celebrate and it's how we perform gender and virility. And it's how we get together with our best friends and, and enjoy our lives. And so nobody wants to think about a massive overhaul, right?

of this activity that is at the very root of our comfort in community, right? Our safety. We literally build healthful bodies out of the food that we put into them and our approval, right? Because we eat food together with the people who have accepted us. And we all know, you know, those of us who have made changes to the way we eat.

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We all know the feeling, the looks on people's faces when they discover, right, that we're vegan or the, the territorial nature of discussions around the holidays, right? I mean, approval is so important to us. so changing the way we eat, you know, we're risking everything comfort, security, approval that for a philosopher, if you'll pardon the food metaphor was just a feast, right? To have this.

completely unexamined and for many people, unthinkable to examine, right? At the foundation of who we are that literally and figuratively is the way that we are who we are in the world. mean, you talk about a feast for philosophical attention and I just found it so fascinating that I, you know,

I wouldn't say I pivoted away from my training, you know, in 20th century French and German philosophy, but I started using that philosophy to bring life right to the way that I was thinking about food rather than writing papers, right. On those figures that I had been excited about in graduate school and in my early career, I started thinking, well, how can these tools of cultural interpretation and hermeneutics and

bringing things out of hiddenness into our reflective consciousness. How can those things that 19th and 20th century French and German philosophers were interested in doing shed light right on what we're doing here on the ground? Three, four, five, Glenn, if you're like me, six, seven, eight times a day, we love to eat. Right. And so, absolutely. mean, I was just flabbergasted, gape-jawed, by how amazing

the philosophy of food conversations were, and I have to add to, have to add philosophers don't agree about much. Right. So, mean, one of the things that I, that I often say to friends, you know, philosophers don't even agree whether middle sized dry goods exist. Like philosophers can't even agree whether there are tables and chairs or whether they're just particles arranged table and chair wise. Right. So we can't agree about anything.

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And yet when I started looking at the philosophical ethics of the modern industrial food complex, I have never seen a more settled literature in my professional career. was shocked. Everybody hates CAFOs. I could not find a soul. Glenn, I was actually like writing to people at ag schools and saying, does anybody, you know, has anybody made a moral case for this? And what I got over and over again,

A practical case, allegedly, although I think that is a dog's dinner. that's not, that's not even kind to a dog's dinner. mean, it's not, not a viable case anymore, given what we know now. And of course, economic arguments you'd hear, right? Well, we can't risk, but nobody was making the moral argument. And when I looked to the philosophical literature, I found that, my gosh, all of the papers that are kind of aggregating what people in the discipline think at large.

I mean, there's the nearest thing I've seen in philosophy to consensus that our contemporary food system is not just morally indefensible. That is that nothing can be said right in favor of it, defending it morally, but that it's morally indefensible from a wide variety of different theoretical and practical perspectives. Right? So you can choose which ethical framework you want to tackle it from.

and you're going to find, you're going to argue to the same conclusion in every case that really was shocking to me. And Glenn, was initially very unwelcome because at least at the beginning, I wanted to find a way to continue, putting fennel rub pork loin in my pie hole. I'm not going to lie. I, you know, I was not super excited. still respect you, but yeah, how that happened. don't know.

Yeah, well, I was very much, you know, raised in a culture where the celebration foods were meaty foods and I love to eat those things. And as you know, multiple sport athlete in high school trained up on this idea, you know, the protein myth and the virility myth, I was heavily in the grips of that mythology. And so initially I wanted to find a way to have my ethics and my meat too. And

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The case was not forthcoming. Let's just put it that way. Well, what's happening now is a kind of consensus is developing around this very idea that everybody hates CAFOs. Everybody knows that feedlots are unhealthy places to raise food. And everybody knows that putting 30,000 chickens in a warehouse doesn't lead to anything good. And now we have to deal with bird flu.

And so what we have now is the on the medical front, we have the the doctors who are vegans or making strong case in different ways or all the health benefits of usually a low fat or at least moderate fat, whole foods, vegan diet. And on the other side, we have people like Dr. Mark Hyman.

And Dr. Casey Means, I've just read their books, who will say that eating, there's nothing wrong with eating animals, but it has to be, they have to be regeneratively raised. If they're grass fed, organic, regeneratively raised, then it's healthy. And Casey Means, Dr. Casey Means says essentially,

As long as it doesn't matter whether you eat a fruit or a pig, it's all healthy as long as it's organically raised. But the rhetorical opportunity presents itself here because 330 million Americans cannot eat even if they were right and they're wrong. But 330 million Americans cannot eat

meat that was regeneratively raised because there would be no land left on Earth. You can't do it. For Americans to eat as much meat as they eat now, there must be CAFOs. There is no alternative mathematically. We must have CAFOs if we're going to eat meat.

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everybody wants to be against CAFOs. So if they want to sell a lot of books and ask and tell people they could keep eating meat, they just say, well, eat some regenerative bison. You know, but if everybody did that, no earth left. Yeah, I don't think there's any risk of everybody doing that. I mean, right now it's less than 1%. And I think the ethical case is. Yeah, I mean, I'll hold my tongue, but I do not.

think very highly of the ethics of Regen Ag. Just generally speaking, it seems like they punt on all the important moral questions, right? I mean, at the end of the day, I think from the perspective of animal concerns, you've got to have an answer to why it's okay on your view morally to inflict harm.

on a creature who can and wants to experience flourishing. And what I've never been able to, I mean, the argument that just seems perpetually missing is how there could be any such thing as humane slaughter. I mean, it just seems like an oxymoron to me. There's no way to do this. The advocates for the regeneratively raised meat say, oh, these

cattle have much better lives roaming, being rotated from paddock to paddock in the fields and so forth. But then they go to the same slaughterhouses as the Kefo They go to the same slaughterhouse. And also, by the way, their beautiful lives are like, and before their adolescence. So this is a very strange understanding of flourishing, right? That, gosh, I guess their ability to have these beautiful lives

just so happens to end a precise moment that they hit market weight and I find them delicious. I mean, it just doesn't. I've I've tried long and hard to find some version of this argument that'll work because that's initially what I wanted. I mean, that was kind of the wish fulfillment. Spent a long time before you vegan. were you were going to. Yeah, I was going to go in that route. I well, I mean, I don't know if I was there. I guess I guess I desperately hoped.

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there would be some good arguments down that path. And what I found was just incredibly intellectually unsatisfying. Now, I understand why it appeals to people, right? Because of course, it feels like a blank check. mean, the way I often see it function in classrooms and elsewhere is that as long as the intellectual space exists for so-called humane meat eating, well then,

we can just keep eating the way we always have because somebody's doing it humanely. So it can't be wrong out of hand to be doing this. And so it functions as a kind of, right. it, it, it allows people to believe that there's a humane way to do this, which is all they need to sort of return to the status quo. so I've never, I, in, in 20 years of teaching these things, I mean, I, I can count on one hand, the people that I've taught,

out of hundreds, maybe thousands, I'd have to do the math. Don't quote me on that. But who's actually gone to a diet where the only kind of meat they're eating is, is pasture raised meat. Right. mean, it just brings us to the fantasy of lab meat, which is the, the next way the meat eaters hold out hope. So you're a, you're a skeptic of, of, uh, cultivated meat.

I'm a complete skeptic. I don't think it's ever going to happen. And I think it's the animal agriculture interests that are helping to feed this fantasy. So people can keep eating meat because one day you will be getting it from the lab. You're never going to get it from the lab. don't think I have an interesting perspective on that. think, well, I have, my partner is in that industry.

and so I have some insight, right into the people who are doing this work. And in my experience, anyway, there are people who are trying to find a way to move us in the direction of a, of a cultural tipping point, right? Where, where we have the means at our disposal to

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eat things, right? That will provide the same aesthetic experience with a much lower carbon footprint, and a much better, right? Cruelty, footprint for the people who simply aren't going to hear, right? Any pitches about, right? Change. And I think this is a real problem that we have, right? Because we don't have that much time, left to

to try to change people's minds. And I guess it seems to me, and again, this is not my calling, Glenn, so I'm not, right, this is not work that I'm on the front lines of doing. But when I think about where our movement is and the fact that some people are called to see how science and technology and commerce might be leveraged, right, to help the movement, I guess I have some hope that,

these kinds of technologies could play a role in getting a larger percentage of people into the head space where the revolution in consciousness that I think we really need, right? As a culture can finally get traction. I think as long as people are eating animals, it's really, really difficult to make headway on the expansion of consciousness that we really need to have in the world.

And so if there's a way to have bagels and breads and cereals that are served right in institutional cafeterias, where it turns out there are vegan ways to do it without anybody even realizing they're vegan. I think on the aggregate, the world will be a better place. If we have the means at our disposal to meet omnivores where they are.

to provide some experiences to them that are familiar and desirable because not everybody's on the moral vanguard and not everybody's going to be an early adopter, right? There's this really significant swath of people that we need before we get to the tipping point who are not going to be on the tip of the spear and they're not even going to be early adopters, right? They're going to need to see

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really status quo sorts of things, right? They're going to need to see a bacon at the store or a juicy marbles steak. and they're going to have to have that at a Christmas dinner and think, huh, okay, well maybe this isn't so bad. So I think unless our movement comes up with better strategies than I've seen so far for moving that middle, right? I think our movement does a great job with the 1%.

Right. We've got incredible, maximally convincing arguments for people who are going to be on the tip of the spear. Right. And since 1975, we've got about the same number of those people, right. As we had when animal liberation was written, um, you know, uh, and then we've got early adopters who, as the tip of the spear starts to really make headway, we're getting more and more people saying, Hey, this looks interesting. Let's go along with this.

I think the folks who are trying to leverage commercial, and, technological approaches to these matters, they're not thinking about the moral vanguard and they're not thinking about the early adopters. They're thinking, how do we get this middle? Right. Far enough along on the journey.

to really move us in the direction that we need to go. And so I think it's, can completely understand why someone would be skeptical of that theory of change, but I haven't seen anything in the movement to suggest that the more purist ways of approaching things are going to have any luck with that swath in the middle. Well, let me engage with that. We already have, when I got to the grocery store, I see Beyond Beef.

and the Impossible Burger and a company called Meat-E made with mushrooms and all kinds of fake meats, if you will. And we've had that for a long time and we have it increasingly. And so the idea of holding out hope that sell meat will somehow turn the trick and we'll get all those

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meat eaters out there to say, well, that's still meat. I'll have that. It's still going to be just as unhealthy as the meat I'm eating now. So I'll go for that one. I don't think it's ever going to happen. I don't think it's technologically doable. I don't think it's economically doable. I don't think it's environmentally doable. I just think it's a fantasy that is being held out as a hope.

And that's why I think companies, and maybe I'm getting this one wrong, I apologize if I am, but I Tyson Foods or other companies like that are investing in it because they just want to hold, they want to greenwash their business and hold out this hope for people that there will one day, don't worry about eating the K-Fo meat now because one day we'll make it in a lab. I don't think it's ever going to happen.

I'll tell you the story. I used to be a standup comic in San Francisco. And there was a comedian who... No, was a comedy producer named Lenny who came into town. And one day in a club, he says to me, Glenn, I'm opening a comedy club in three weeks and I want you to be a headliner. Well, I got very excited. He liked my stuff. He wanted me to be a headliner.

So I waited the three weeks and the club didn't open, but I discovered that he told 10 other comedians the same thing. I want you to be a headliner. My clubs go open in three weeks. Three months, six months later, he was still opening a club in three weeks. Two years later, he was still opening a club in three weeks. We called them three week Lenny. And finally a friend of mine,

A friend of mine said, you know, Lenny really is going to open a club in three weeks. They're just not consecutive. And I have heard that lab meat is coming in five years. And I think they've been saying that for about 20 years. So I just don't believe it will ever be here. think essentially what they have to do in the lab...

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is recreate the cow. The cow has an immune system to prevent disease, as we all do. And so they have to somehow, they have to keep that lab sterile. You know, they have to compensate for all the organs that they've removed from the equation. And, and, and somehow

create the meat. They're capable of doing it, but they're not capable of doing it at cost. And the energy involved is extensive. And the other thing is that I think that if they're ever able to do it, and I don't think they will be able to produce the meat at a competitive cost, the grocery store meat,

People, the meat eaters will say, why should I eat that? I'll eat the real thing. You know, people will be skeptical of eating Frankenmeat. So we're going to all this extraordinary expense and effort to do something that I think at the end won't be better than the Impossible Burger or the Beyond Burger.

Time will tell. Time will tell. I will know in five years. I think there will be, I think there are really interesting discussions to be had about theory of change, about how we should be leveraging science and technology. And I think we can come down in different places there, but I do believe we're in an all hands on deck situation. And I think generally speaking, at least in my experience, different people are called

to different things, right? And oftentimes the way, none of us knows, right? Which solution, which theory of change is gonna be the right one? I guess I'm pretty promiscuous about letting many approaches to advocacy bloom because I think the people who are working on their approach probably would not work very well into another approach.

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Right. That's just the way we human beings are. We do what we've been wired to do when we get on fire for something, we use the skills at our disposal. Most of us aren't capable of completely remaking ourselves. Right. And so I guess what's, what excites me is that there's work to be done for people who are scientists. There's work to be done for people who are thinking about how do we use technology here? there's work to be done for people like me.

right? Who are philosophers. There's work to be done for people who are whole foods, plant based nutrition specialists. And I guess my hope is that, you know, even though none of us knows right now, which of those different approaches is going to win the day. I suspect there's a really complex cocktail of transcendence that is in the mix here. And so I'll keep chipping away at the stuff I'm called to do.

And you'll keep chipping away at the stuff you're called to do. And I guess I have hope that the folks at GFI and at other places that are really working within the movement at making opportunities for omnivores to continue eating things that they like with the better health footprint, a lower environmental footprint. Yeah, I wish them well, even if that's not what I'm called to, if that makes sense.

Sure. Your philosophy is encompassing and optimistic. So let me close with this question. People will often, omnivores might say to me, Glenn, I can eat everything you can eat, but you can't eat everything I can eat. So they feel that they have greater abundance in your diet.

But in your beautiful book, Hungry Beautiful Animals, you talk about veganism or you don't like the isms, the going vegan as a way of creating abundance. So talk about that a little. Yeah, that's wonderful. Thank you for that opportunity. So when I went vegan, and I know it's different for everyone, my repertoire of the foods that I was eating on a daily basis

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vastly expanded. And I think the reason for that is, you know, what we're used to in the United States is kind of a hockey puck sized, you know, piece of flesh. And then since we're always focused on the flesh, we don't have as much talent in making vegetables. So it might be overcooked or soggy or saturated with butter or whatever. And so we have this very, straightforward and frankly,

not very spicy way of thinking about, you know, what comfort food is, you know, um, when we went vegan, was this fascinating explosion of variety and color. You know, Michael, Dr. Michael Gregor talks about eating the rainbow, right? And this is absolutely literally right. What happened in our diets is all of a sudden there were blue things and red things and fuchsia things and

fruits we had never heard of and vegetables we had never heard of. Kohlrabi sticks with hummus and all kinds of stuff. And if you're somebody who's curious, if you're somebody who loves to try new things, if you're somebody who loves to get out of a rut, man, man, I mean, we discovered all kinds of different world cuisines that were super vegan friendly. mean, one of the biggest surprises to me,

when we first went vegan was that most of the options were already there in completely mainstream Asian restaurants, right? So the Thai food and the Chinese food, the Indian food, the, just, was amazing at these restaurants that I had been to before, but never noticed there were eight, nine vegan dishes. Whereas in certain quote unquote, the American or nouvelle cuisine restaurant or whatever,

There might be one dish and it's always pasta primavera or whatever the least inspiring thing or portobello mushroom cap sandwich or whatever it is. so our experience of going vegan was this propagation of diversity and color and texture. And we went from this kind of relatively predictable, right? Two or three textures.

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one and a half to two colors, know, a little brown, little green, little beige for the chicken, you know, when it wasn't steak or whatever to this, you know, radically more diverse and interesting palette of colors and textures and tastes. And so I had, you know, the absolute opposite of that. Well, other omnivores can eat more foods than I do.

On the contrary, right? mean, I, I'll bet that if I went around from friend to friend 20 years ago, I was eating a more diverse diet by a factor of 10 than a lot of the people, right? Who had the illusion that, that they were eating, you know, that, my options had decreased or something relative to the options that, that they had. So for me, it was this radical expansion.

and a freedom to discover things that, you know, I had never thought about before. I mean, you know, Michael Pollan way back in the old days when he wrote the omnivores dilemma in 2006, I remember the first time I read that, that sentence, I think it's in the omnivores dilemma where he talks about, we have this illusion of great diversity in the standard American diet.

But really, it's just metabolized corn and soy. It's like almost everything we're eating is metabolized corn and soy that comes to us from somebody else's flesh. And there's this illusion of diversity. We call it chicken or pork or lamb or whatever it is, beef. But in fact, it's all just repackaged, mono-cropped corn and soy.

Going vegan for me was, was an escape hatch from that sadness, right? Where we went on this incredible journey into international cuisines. We'd never eaten before, nuts and seeds and vegetables and greens that we'd never tasted before fruits. and, and, and it wasn't more expensive. I mean, this is another myth that, needs

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dispelling, right? Is it a lot of times people say, well, you know, of course you were able to do this because you had two incomes and lots of education and whatever. Most folks in the world, right, are living on some version of a starched starch based diet, right? and, and diets where these staples that vegans eat are among the cheapest things you can buy, right? Things like beans and like you said, brown rice and

sweet potatoes and, uh, know, root vegetables generally, these are not foods that will break the bank. And maybe that's why recent studies are showing that it's actually about $500 cheaper per year in groceries, uh, to eat a vegan diet. Um, so for us, yeah, you know, as long as you're staying away from the very expensive, highly processed foods,

Right. And sticking mostly to the staples. Now I'm not against eating processed foods for pleasure from time to time. You know, you'll find some meat substitutes in my freezer. I love to have sugary foods from time to time, probably more than I, than I should, but on the whole, what I want to do is be putting whole plant based foods, as many of them as possible.

with beans and greens at the tip top right of that list and, nuts and seeds to, the bulk of my diet is going to be coming from those foods. And let me tell you what, they're not the world's most expensive foods. They're among the world's cheapest foods. And so it was like, you get diversity, you get affordability, you get a massive influx in color and beauty.

I'll tell you what. And color, color is the key. There's a clue in color because carnivores, animals that are carnivores are colorblind generally. And we see and appreciate color. That's because we evolved as herbivores and we are attracted to color. And I love everything purple, purple grapes.

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Purple eggplant. Purple Swiss chard is one of my favorite things. Purple cabbage. Purple cabbage. Red onion, as they call it. I just love me those anthocyanins. But I love the purple foods. Purple potatoes and purple sweet potatoes.

And so color is the key. really can, you know, if you take an aesthetic view of food and you want it you want that your plate to be beautiful and colorful, you're also making yourself healthier. Absolutely. That has been my experience. don't have nutrition credentials, but anecdotally and experientially that has absolutely been my experience, from beginning to end.

eating a plant based diet. Well, Matt, it's been a pleasure speaking with you and getting to know you. The book is called Hungry Beautiful Animals. I commend it to everyone for the content and for the style, because Matt, you're just, think, congenital congenitally incapable of writing a bad sentence. Well, I wrote a few.

Luckily, they didn't make it into the final cut. had a great editor. And the website is hungry, beautiful animals dot com. Yep. Hungry, beautiful animals dot com. We've got a nice little press area there where you can find a lot of the stuff that we've been doing. We've got a story section where you can read about how hungry, beautiful animals has sort of taken root in the lives of some readers. And yeah, I love to hear from people.

So please feel free to contact me with questions and concerns. And Glenn, I have this whole academic year through August of 2025 to do nothing but work full time on getting these ideas out there. So if your listeners want to collaborate on something, if your listeners want me to zoom into a class or something like this, by all means, reach out. Let's collaborate and make the world a more beautiful place.

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All right, folks, take Matt up on that. Matt, again, pleasure speaking with you. Thanks so much, Glenn.