Hungry Beautiful Animals

October 21, 2024
Halteman (Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation), a philosophy professor at Calvin University, serves up a muddled treatise on the righteousness of veganism. Attempting to break through readers’ indifference to livestock’s plight, Halteman provides a lengthy comparison of farm animals to his English bulldog, but his point that both are selectively bred in ways that compromise their quality of life is buried underneath tangential anecdotes about, for instance, his aversion to cleaning up his dog’s poop. Halteman includes surprisingly little evidence on veganism’s health benefits or the meat industry’s cruelty and environmental costs, instead relying largely on personal stories to make his points. For example, he strains to complicate the “human/animal binary” by recounting how he stopped craving meat after driving by a rib joint while listening to Elie Wiesel speak about Nazi crematoria on the radio, an experience that led Halteman to view meat as a “body taken by violence from a potentially flourishing creature.” “Spiritual exercises” aimed at acclimating readers to a vegan diet are just common sense, as when Halteman suggests that the “spiritual exercise of taking on responsibilities” might look like helping with Thanksgiving cooking if one wants vegan options. Filled with nebulous calls to harmonize “our deepest inner desires with the greatest needs and most hopeful prospects of the world outside,” this lands with a thud. Agent: Giles Anderson, Anderson Literary.

November 8, 2024

There's a tempting recipe for cashew coconut cream tiramisu near the end of this volume, but this is definitely not a cookbook. Instead, it's a heartfelt, well-argued plea for people to embrace a vegan way of life. Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics fellow Halteman (philosophy, Calvin Univ.; Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation) has no illusions about the difficulty of converting people from their closely held eating habits. But instead of shaming the unconvinced, his book discusses veganism's happy consequences for the environment and animals. His biggest and most persuasive argument concerns the health benefits--both moral and physical --of going vegan. VERDICT This title expertly shows that breaking bread together can be a joyful experience without the roast. It is a well-written addition to the literature of food ethics.--Ellen Gilbert

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