From Plate to Planet: How Veganism Can Foster Real Change

Michael Herst
00:00:00

Hey, one more thing before you go. Have you ever considered how your food choices impact not just your health, but the world around you? I talk about it all the time on the show.

Or how living a vegan lifestyle could be a profound expression of philosophy and ethics.

Stay tuned because we're going to explore living life as a vegan, discovering the intersection of animal ethics, food systems and philosophy as a way of life, and how the ideas in Hungry Beautiful Animals, his new book, can be put into practice for real life change. I'm your host, Michael Hurst. Welcome to One more thing before you go. Dr.

Matthew Haltiman is a professor of philosophy at Calvin University, a fellow at the Oxford center for Animal Ethics, and an ardent advocate for human flourishing, animal freedom, and food systems transformation.

His new book, Hungry Beautiful Animals, is a heartfelt, humane, and even hilarious account of why rule obsessed vegan practices fail and how focusing on flourishing can lead to an abundant future for everyone. As an author, teacher, and an advocate, Dr.

Alterman is committed to exploring how the choices we make around food can shape a more compassionate, sustainable, and joyful world, which we all need. He serves on the board of several animal advocacy and food justice organizations.

And his life pursuits include practicing partnership, parenting, friendship, and indulging in vegan desserts, which I am all in for. Matt, welcome to the show.

Mathew Halteman
00:01:43

Thanks so much, Michael. I'm thrilled to be here. And you were right to lead with desserts. That is probably why one of my greatest passions in life, especially vegan tiramisu.

And I can tell you, for those interested in Hungry beautiful animals, my recipe, 20 years in the making, is appendix B. So you too can enjoy my favorite vegan dessert.

But I have to say, I can't miss this opportunity to say that I resonate a lot with the idea behind your podcast, because we philosophers, at least in the tradition that I come from, thinking of philosophy as a way of life, we think of philosophy as training for death.

And so I see myself as an educator, as trying to get people to do one more thing before they go really, really well, because you just never know when your time is coming. And so living with joy and curiosity and striving to live the good life, there's not a moment to lose.

So I'm really glad to be here for a conversation that I think is in deep resonance with your mission.

Michael Herst
00:02:47

Very, very grateful for that. Yeah, life can change in an instant. And vegan tiramisu. Italian here. Okay. Vegan tiramisu. I haven't had tiramisu for 25 years.

Mathew Halteman
00:03:03

Michael, your Life is about to change. This podcast is going to be a transformation for the host for once.

Michael Herst
00:03:10

Absolutely, absolutely looking forward to that. But we've got much more podcast important things to talk about. Although a tiramisu is important, but let's talk about.

We got so many things we gotta discuss and kind of hopefully to inspire, motivate and educate people into a life transformation which doesn't have to be abrupt, it can be gentle and you can take your time, but it is beneficial to you in our lives and others lives as well as our environment. And so many things that becoming a vegan or living the vegan lifestyle can help us to contribute to the world. But I like to start at the beginning.

Where'd you grow up?

Mathew Halteman
00:03:51

I grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, which is a suburb of Chicago, about 26 miles west. And my people are actually from eastern Pennsylvania. So I come from eastern Pennsylvania, agricultural Mennonite stock.

Both of my grandparents on both sides were in agriculture. My paternal grandfather was an egg farmer and my maternal grandfather was herbicide and pesticide chemist.

So though I grew up in Chicago, my roots, my people are Mennonites from eastern Pennsylvania. So food right, not just at every meal, but at every celebration, every time we mourn, every time we do hospitality, food is there.

But food was also the vocational pursuit right on both sides of my family until my dad decided to become a professor and my mom a spiritual director and fair trade activist. So we ended up in the west suburbs of Chicago.

But food right is pretty deep in my history and it's, it's why I'm so excited about and passionate about the transformation of food systems.

Michael Herst
00:05:10

I think that's an amazing opportunity, you know, for the whole way around.

Coming from your environment, how do you develop such a deep commitment to human flourishing, animal freedom and food systems, especially the transformation portion of it. And how does communal cooperation come into play with that? Because you mentioned Mennonite kind of environment, how does all that play into that?

Mathew Halteman
00:05:33

Yeah, so, you know, Mennonites are well known for the desire to, you know, be the hands and feet of Jesus in a suffering world.

A lot of Christians that I knew in the west suburbs of Chicago grew up in a form of Christianity that really emphasized beliefs and belief system and defending beliefs and being right about the beliefs. And um, the Mennonites do it a little bit differently.

It, it always in my tradition was about action, about being salt and light in a world full of suffering. And so I wasn't thinking much about the metaphysics until a little later when I became a Philosophy professor.

For me, it was always about, well, how do we live our lives in a way that provides service right to others? And in my family tradition, as I mentioned, agriculture was the way that we thought about that.

The idea was that the world needs high quality protein.

And a lot of people in the world who don't have access to that can benefit from the green revolution in agriculture can benefit from these herbicides and pesticides that allow us to grow a lot more grain and get the animals off the pasture and inside into confined feeding operations and the like.

And you know, back when this was happening initially, I mean, I think it's so easy to look back in retrospect and imagine people in agriculture as right, these horrible people who are sort of forecasting a dystopic future greedily, right, to try to gobble up all the profits.

But on the contrary, you know, for my family, this was a part of a, a Christian vision for helping other people you've never met before by providing high quality protein to them through innovations in, in science and, and, and food technology.

So deep, deep in my roots is this idea that service to others and the transformation of the world in favor of more joy and more beauty and less suffering was to provide food for people. And so obviously we human beings, our feet are made of clay. We know sometimes our best intentions don't turn out the way we hoped they would.

And I think right when we look now at some of the challenges our current food system is facing, we see pretty clearly that there are some big problems here for the way that we're treating the human beings who work in these systems, for the way that we're treating the animals who are raised and slaughtered within it. And of course, the way we're treating the Earth and the use of finite resources to get it.

And so my passion for food stuff is really, I think, you know, it might seem counterintuitive because a lot of people think, oh, you're a vegan, but you're from, you know, agricultural Mennonite stock. How does this work?

And I guess I think, well, a big part of being a humble servant of others is to realize that sometimes the strategies you started from need to adapt and evolve, right?

So in order to do the same thing, to serve a suffering world with better food options, we need to recalibrate the message a little bit to serve this the same mission. And so I actually see what I'm doing as a continuation of what my grandfathers hope to do.

You know, they hope to feed people and make the world a better Place, I'm looking for the same thing. But I think that we need to recalibrate the way that we do that both as individuals and in terms of the way that we raise and, and distribute food.

So some might see it as a radical break.

I actually see, you know, my interest in, in vegan education as a continuation of, of a passion that's been in my family for many generations to make the world a better place by looking carefully at the way we eat.

Michael Herst
00:09:47

Well, you know, it's interesting because when you, when you look the, the evolvement of all of that, the evolvement of even farming. When I, when I was a kid, I grew up on, partially for a short, very, very short period of time on a farm.

And in regard to watching how the, they did things, where we went out to the pasture, we pulled the cows in, then the cows were hand milked, they weren't milked by machine, for example, and things like this, I think that there was a more personal contact with the animals. You had a better journey with the animals.

There was more humane and again, this is just, from my perspective, more humane than what you see nowadays where they're all in a stall and they're stuck in a stall and they pretty much spend their lifetime in a stall and so forth.

So I think your approach to educating individuals and trying to transform that journey for everyone involved, to allow for more compassion, more human contact, more understanding that we're all in this together is a wonderful opportunity. What is your journey from, in other words, how do you. In other words, let me try that as a different question.

How did your journey come about into becoming a vegan or veganism? Mine itself. I think we talked a little bit about it. It was an easy transition for me.

I went to a Mediterranean diet and then from there I learned how food affected my disease.

So in understanding how that took place, it took me more along the line of becoming a vegan and learning firsthand through the transformation of my own body, my own health, my own journey. How did yours start?

Mathew Halteman
00:11:35

Yeah, so I don't know. I, I get the feeling in talking with you, Michael, that you'll, you'll resonate with this. We human beings are pretty complex people, right?

And I always feel like, well, there's not just one of me, there's many of me.

Lots of different things going on, and I'm the type of person that has a hard time changing or getting motivated unless a whole bunch of the parts inside are kind of have an epiphany or come together in a certain way and I'll tell you what I mean, you know, we human beings, we're physical organisms. We have social lives, we have emotions that kind of regulate our social situations.

We get a little older and we have intellectual lives that enable us to kind of get outside just the emotional and the social and, and think from a more disinterested perspective.

And, you know, as we get better at that, we get this moral point of view where we're able to kind of abstract ourselves from our own idiosyncratic preferences and kind of try, at least for the purposes of living a better life, to, to take the standpoint of the universe and think outside our own, you know, predilections and ideas. And with all those things going on at once, if you're like me, anyway, sometimes those are at war, right?

So, like, our gut wants a burger, our heart wants to nuzzle a cow, and our mind is sort of bobbling back and forth between wanting to defend the old ways of eating and getting curious about new ways of eating. And so for me, it really took multiple epiphanies inside that inner family.

And there were sort of three big ones that hit me emotionally, intellectually, and socially. And it really took all three of those to. To motivate me to make some changes.

Because as I discuss in the book, you know, in high school, I was the typical, you know, corn fed Midwestern boy, no neck football player, captain of the football team type of person, weightlifter and all that good stuff. And I did not see being a vegan in my future, to say the least. So when I was, I don't know, 30 years old, ish, I three things happened.

So we got a dog, and my wife grew up in a dog family, I grew up in a cat family. And our cats were relatively aloof.

And I was willing to see them as kind of smart, ambulatory organisms, but they never struck me as being unique, irreplaceable individuals in quite the way that I came to see animals after meeting and living with a dog. So Susan said, when we can finally have pets, right, when you.

When we're out of this housing situation that doesn't allow pets, we're gonna get a dog. And I don't care what sort of dog, you get to choose that. So we got a bulldog.

And this is before I knew anything about the selective breeding practices that produce bulldogs. That's a story for another podcast. Unfortunately, it's not a happy one.

But, Gus, this bulldog convince me beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is a canine person. Now I'm not crazy, right? It's not a human person. There's a lot of really important differences there. But a person nonetheless.

An irreplaceable individual with likes and dislikes people he can't stand, people he loves, foods that he wouldn't eat if his life depended on it, versus his very favorite things, carrots. This dog ate about six pounds of carrots a week. So the emotional bolt from the blue was getting to know Gus and realizing this dog is a person.

The intellectual challenge came from a philosopher friend who at a lunch one time said to me as I was eating a French dip sandwich with some beef hanging out the bottom of this French roll, he says, aren't you a pacifist? And I was like, well, what's that got to do with anything? Right?

And eventually, in conversations with him, ended up teaching a class on food ethics that I thought sure was going to give me 10 knockdown, drag out arguments to keep eating just exactly what I had grown up eating and loving. And then, much to my chagrin, the evidence persuaded me otherwise.

And then the social transformation came from my wife, Susan, who is a really amazing home cook. And, you know, she was kind of for years a vegetarian for human development and sort of global justice reasons and environmental reasons.

I was an extremely reluctant, you know, vegetarian by marriage. Sometimes, you know, occasionally I'd get a port, a pit chicken on the way home, especially if we were in an argument.

So very, very reluctant to do this.

But when my emotional commitment to animals through Gus and my intellectual commitment to taking a harder look at these issues came together, I was initially like, well, let's just, you know, let's just keep eating this way until I figure out all the answers. And Susan was like, no, let's do a vegan experiment. I love to cook. I like to do new things. We can do this. And boy, oh, boy, could we ever.

I mean, she made things that were so delicious. And we embarked on a social journey that convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt that this would be a life of abundance and not deprivation.

So those three things, the emotional hit, the intellectual hit, and the social hit, it took all three of those things kind of happening in rapid succession to convince me that this was going to be about transformation rather than deprivation. And boy, am I grateful to the fates, right, for bringing those three things together. Otherwise, who knows?

I might still be dangling short rib bones as vampire fangs at family events like I used to.

Michael Herst
00:17:40

Yeah, it kind of changes your philosophy just a bit as a philosopher, right?

Mathew Halteman
00:17:45

Absolutely.

Michael Herst
00:17:46

You know, it's interesting because when we look at animals, we. Charlie, I'm pointing to Charlie down over my shoulder here. He's laying behind me. Every animal we've ever had in our family, we still call family.

And you know, it has always been that way. Kids grew up that way with cats and with dogs and whatever we had had. I even owned a horse at one time. Well, it was a pony. It's a Shetland pony.

He's a mini horse.

Mathew Halteman
00:18:14

A little guy.

Michael Herst
00:18:15

Yeah, mini horse. But yeah, I've always treated them with compassion in regard to that.

And it, you know, even the cows that I milk, I told you earlier, the pigs that I slopped or the chickens that I fed always went out and talked to them like they were people. You know, I didn't go out and just throw food at them and, you know, milk them and then slap them on the butt and tell them, get out.

It was a conversation. I'd say, hey, thank you for doing this. Thank you for being here.

And for some reason, and I bring this up because I think it innately within my own heart and my soul, I knew that they were a being. You know, they may not be a human being, but they were a being.

So even at a young age, I was able to recognize the connection between an animal and us. And you see within them, you see love and you see compassion.

And you mentioned it in what you just said with, you know, they like this or they don't like that, they like you, they don't like that person. You know, they make decisions in choices, in everything. So I think. Did that help you develop a relationship between. You mentioned it a bit ago.

Animal ethics in human flourishing.

Mathew Halteman
00:19:30

Absolutely. Yeah. I think, I think the thing that really got me was this bizarre experience I had. You know, when you.

The thing about animal consciousness, this feeling that maybe other creatures are sentience too, you know, with lives of their own, is that it dawns slowly. Right. I think everybody has had the experience of loving a dog, or many people have.

Maybe not everybody loving a dog, loving a cat, loving a cockatiel, loving a horse, but it's something different. To get that uncanny feeling, wow, this is a personal intelligence or this is it, right?

I mean, it, it, it's like it's pretty easy to treat companion animals as furniture for a little while and then sort of in the course of the relationship, it dawns on you there's something more complicated going on.

And at the moment that I think I realized, holy smokes, it's no longer possible for me to think of animals as sort of second class beings, was when this weird thing would happen. So Gus loved company. He was our. Our bulldog. And he despised it when we would get suitcases out.

And I always thought this was odd, you know, like, why. Why does this dog hate it when we get suitcases?

I mean, I hadn't considered at the time that this really complex biography was unfolding in his life, right? Why did the suitcases make him mad?

One day he got so mad that he went to the middle of our dining room, which is like the epicenter of our hospitality. It's where he had seen hundreds and hundreds of meals with.

Our house is kind of a revolving door with friends and family and activists coming to town. And I, you know, founded a festival. And so we always had people in the house.

And Gus went right to the middle of the room and just took a dump, right? In protest of seeing this luggage. I thought, what is going on here? Like this. This is really making him furious. And then it dawned on me.

He knows that we're leaving, and he is desperate either to convince us not to leave or to show us how furious he is that we'd have the audacity to do this again after what he had to endure last time. And this feeling just chilled me to the bone, right?

Because as a philosopher, rather than just letting, I started thinking through all the complex cognitive and emotional processes that have to be up and running in his being in order for this to make sense, right? So he sees the suitcase, and it's not just a matter of perception.

There's a previous experience with seeing the suitcase, which means that memory is up and running. And it's not just a memory. It's a memory that creates in him anxiety, right? He doesn't like this. It doesn't feel good to him.

And then it's enough to create agency. He makes a plan. He wants to tell me that this is something that makes him fearful.

And then when I don't listen and I keep packing the bag, he goes into the dining room and makes it clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is unacceptable. That's not second class being, right? That is creaturely flourishing to a baffling degree. And I realized this dog has a past.

This dog can project into the future.

To have anxiety when you see a piece of luggage means that there's a biography, there's a story, there's persistence through time, there's consciousness of the world around. And that thought left me both dazzled and horrified. It. It was dazzling because I had never. I mean, it. I.

It was the moment I Came to terms with the fact that all these other beings have biographies, right?

Michael Herst
00:23:48

They're.

Mathew Halteman
00:23:48

They're persons in. In their own way.

But it was also horrifying because I realized this meant that billions of other creatures biologically just like Gus, morally indistinguishable from Gus. We're not just living in a painful present, but had lives that stretched out through a past that could generate anxiety about the future.

Suffering in the moment. That's not just about persistence, but that's about dread. And that, Michael, that.

That realization, I think, was what moved me into a completely different level of animal consciousness. And. And that's when I had to face, right, that this is suffering. Right? This is. This is not just one bad day, as they sometimes say.

This is a life of oppression. And so. Absolutely right. The short. You'll never get a short answer out of me. I apologize for that. But the.

The short answer to your question is absolutely right. That experience with an animal creature is what moved me into that space of animal ethics and food ethics.

Because when I realized, holy smokes, animals have biographies at the same time we're treating them as property that we turn into food. That is a controversial matter for ethics.

And it's time to inhabit the moral point of view in a more rigorous way than I had had the courage to inhabit it before.

Michael Herst
00:25:25

Yeah, it's really interesting, your experiences in regard to that and how it changed you. And, you know, we can all see that.

If you think about if you own a pet, you own a dog, you have a fur baby in your home or even on the farm, you know, reality is, Charlie recognizes when Diane pulls the bag of cheese out, because Diane police cheese. And he understands that, oh, cheese, that bag. I recognize that sound.

Or when you start the can opener or, you know, anything along that line, he'll tell me when it's time to eat. He knows it's. We feed him at 5:30, we feed him in the morning, we. And at 5:30 in the morning, we feed him at 5:30 in the evening.

And at 5:30 he's sitting in front of me like, do you know what time it is?

Mathew Halteman
00:26:13

I know what time it is, Michael.

Michael Herst
00:26:16

So, you know, when you look at this, you can see compassion. You see sadness. You see, you know, you see the anxiety when you leave. Then you see the happiness when you come home.

And you know, those kind of things, I think, resonate with us. You can see it is. I have watched videos where you see a cow literally crying when they know they're going to go through the slaughter thing.

And, you know, you see the desperation of pigs that are crammed into the back of a truck, that you can see that their fear. And you can see they're scared. You can see that they have emotions like we as human beings have emotions.

And I think that, yes, I understand that the food industry from that perspective is never going to cease because obviously we are carnivores, we are herbivores, and we are a combination of both.

But in regard to the, again, the, the ethical and the moral aspect of how we, we work within that community, that industry, I, I do think needs to change to a point because, you know, it is, it is a. And, and, and, and obviously we could go down a real big rabbit hole with this.

But, you know, it, you know, I think that part of it is a corporate, the corporate concept of how much can I get through, how much can I do? You know, I don't treat these animals as an animal. I treat them as properties. What you just said, right?

I know there's a lot of misconceptions about being vegan. I've talked, I've spoken to a few of them throughout my podcast, especially in the early portion.

What are some of the biggest misconceptions about veganism and how we, you know, some of these people think, well, how can I get, how can I build muscle? How can I, how can I live on this? How, where's my protein? You know, I get those questions all the time, you know, what do you eat?

You know, and I said, I eat the same thing you do. I just do it in a different way. I do, you know, approach it from this. So can you help us understand some of the biggest misconceptions about vegan?

Veganism?

Mathew Halteman
00:28:26

Yeah.

So I think, you know, one of the biggest misconceptions that I run into in the classroom is just that, you know, going vegan is primarily a path of deprivation. Right.

That going vegan is about being against things that are terrible and sort of reorienting your life to try to perfectionistically never do these terrible things again.

And one of the most important features I think, of Hungry Beautiful Animals is the attempt to kind of flip the script there and say, no, you know, what going vegan is about is the opportunity for deeper, richer flourishing. Right. The reason that vegans are against suffering is because we're for creaturely flourishing.

And so that, I think, is one of the key misconceptions that going vegan is about scarcity, it's about opposing suffering, it's about stringent abstention from doing things or supporting things that are bad. I think actually at its essence, going vegan is about opportunity, it's about abundance.

It's about right, doing things that will make the world a more truthful and beautiful and good place for all creatures to be. Another misconception, right?

Although it's, it's getting easier to, to avoid this illusion these days because nutrition science has made an awful lot of progress. But the protein myth, right, where, where do people get our protein? And I think now we have resources, right?

Like Michael Greger's nutrition facts.org where anyone who has any skeptical questions about whether a plant based diet can, you know, be one of, of joy and good health, spend even 15 minutes on nutrition facts.org and you'll see the science, and nutrition science specifically is very much confirmed.

Not just that one can do well on a plant based diet, but there's all sorts of health benefits and even the possibility for deep healing of some of the diseases of affluence that have become coin of the realm, right, in, in a place where we eat upwards of 220 pounds, right, of meat per person per year, 25 times the amount that an average Bangladeshi will eat.

So that's the second myth, I think, another myth that I mean, and I don't, I want to be careful here because this is one of those things that really differs from person to person. It can be difficult to find a well balanced, whole foods, plant based diet depending on where you live.

And so I don't want to discriminate against people who have less, less access or, or less food autonomy or less food sovereignty, you know, the ability to decide what their food shed is going to be and, and, and eat from it in the ways that they'd like to. But I think on balance it is much easier now to eat foods that look very much like what you're used to that just come from different sources, right?

So now we have burgers that are virtually indistinguishable from, from beef burgers. We have sausages and egg substitutes and all these things right now they're a little bit more expensive.

But nobody has to forego forever, right, the mouth feel the experience, the, the nostalgia, right, of, of these foods they really love.

So I don't want to say it's a myth that going vegan is, is difficult because for some people, I, I want to honor the fact for some people it's harder than others. For some people, easier than others. Privilege and affluence, of course have a lot to do with those things.

But generally Speaking most people these days, even in some places where you'd be surprised, can go in and find really delicious plant based options at the grocery store, in restaurants.

And so yeah, those are three things that I think people are commonly concerned about that once you get into it a little ways, it turns out, oh no, you know, it's, it's not about abstention and scarcity at all. It's about abundance.

It's actually quite easy to meet those nutritional needs and it's easy to eat delicious food that's accessible in your average hotel and your average restaurant. Even in increasingly in college cafeterias now there are entire cafeterias. The University of North Texas has a cafeteria that is 100% plant based.

So the world is changing and I think that's making greener eating easier than ever.

Michael Herst
00:33:42

That's a really good thing.

I mean I obviously I loved it when like beyond meat came out in, in the, in the beginning and they worked on that and you would feel you're eating a burger. I mean when I say feel because obviously we know as individuals that really appreciate food.

You know, it's a combination of not just taste, it's a combination, it's a visual, it's a smelling, it's a taste, it's a feel. It all applies together.

When you will pick up a piece of food to want to eat it or when you get a plate put in front of you, you know, it's always, you touch all of those senses in regard to that and your body then adapts. That goes, hey, this is, you know, this is what this is and I'm looking forward to this.

So yeah, it gives us the opportunity to kind of enjoy that again.

You know, if you have switched to being a vegan, I know there's some people, I have friends of mine that have their kids grew up vegan and so they know nothing different, you know, kind of a thing. You can't see my hands going all over the place. They know nothing different.

So, so I think that what you had mentioned is that the food systems are transforming in regards to that. That's amazing that they've got some university campuses that have got vegan options, number one and full vegan dining halls.

That's something I think that I think is a very positive step in the right direction. How can the food systems, transformations like that contribute to a more like compassionate, sustainable world? We want to talk about sustainability.

Becoming a vegan contributes to humanity, the planet Earth, our environment, sustaining itself.

I just had a conversation that's going to go up effectively and went up today where we talked about bees and the contribution to bees and believe it or not, locusts and how those contributions to this society help sustain the earth environment, which then helps humans sustain and animals sustain and the environment to sustain and the ecological system work the way it's supposed to work. So that's a long question, isn't it? Okay, that's a good one. Food system transformations can contribute to more compassionate and sustainable world.

Mathew Halteman
00:36:10

Yeah, I, I mean, I, I love a long question because it shows just how complex, right, this situation really is. And, and to ask this question appropriately, you really do need to give a nod to all those different levels, right, that food systems touch.

I mean, one of the things I love about being a part of food systems conversations is everyone, you know, is party to the discussion.

And once you start to study food systems, you realize from the soil to the stratosphere, everything, right, from the microorganisms in the, in the soil that we use to grow, the grain that we use to feed the animals that we use to turn in. I mean, you, there's not a, A better example that I can think of of how everything from top to bottom is linked, is one, right?

The flourishing or languishing comes packaged as a whole.

And, you know, when I'm teaching on these things, the way that I like to try to help people see the whole business is just to take the example of what it makes to bring, say, a steak or a piece of chicken or eggs right to your plate. And I think a lot of times we focus only on the suffering of the animal.

And I think it makes a lot of sense to, to place the emphasis there because from the moral point of view, that is a, a dire, urgently important question. But when we only focus on that, we miss all the other layers here.

And what's going on, right, Is that if you want to eat collectively, you know, 220 pounds of meat per person per year, well, that meat doesn't just descend from Platonic heaven, right? You've got to grow all that meat.

And because growing meat means growing physical organisms, right, individual creatures, well, you've got to feed them, you've got to get them water, you've got to provide them housing. When you feed living organisms food and water, what happens? They produce waste.

When you have 80 billion land animals that you're slaughtering a year, that you're giving all this food, that you're giving all this water, that you're stressing the topsoil to grow, all that grain that you're confining that, right, their flatulence and their urine and their feces have to be stored somewhere right here. You can see it's not just about animals.

It's about grain, it's about water, it's about oil that we use to make the pesticides and the herbicides and the fertilizers that we need to support all this massive grain growth.

It's about all the externalities that pulling all those things out of the earth, putting them into the metabolisms of living creatures and then having those excreted out back into the planet's water systems and, and waste systems. You know, this is our current food system, a massive generator of harms.

And then when you think about, well, how does this animal go from, you know, being a living organism to being a steak or a pork chop?

Well then you've got to have a human workforce that has to systematically, hundreds of times in a day, deny the cries for mercy of fellow living creatures as they move along an assembly line.

And then people wonder why, right, the mental illness rates are higher, why the physical debilitation rates are higher and spousal abuse and crime rates and etc around these operations.

Because the emotional trauma of working in these operations, the physical danger of working in these operations are deeply problematic from the moral point of view, from the standpoint of human worker justice, right? Completely aside from the moral harms that are inflicted on, on fellow sentient creatures.

So just by looking at what's on your plate and tracing that back to all, all the things that have to be done in order for the pork chop to be there in front of you, you know, it's a reminder of how from the soil to the stratosphere, our daily choices create externalities, create massive moral and practical harms.

And you know, if we want 10 billion human beings by 2050, if we want to have an Earth that can sustain life on the planet by 2100, if we want to create a labor force where people don't have to wear diapers because the assembly line is moving so fast and is so relentless that they don't have time for bathroom breaks, right? We have got to change our preference patterns and the way that we're spending our money.

But those aren't things that are easy to see when you're just looking at a sumptuous looking, delicious smelling, right, hockey puck sized piece of flesh on the plate. Those are the farthest things from our minds.

And obviously in that moment we don't want to think about the harms that are radiating from, from that experience of deliciousness. Short sighted as it is.

Michael Herst
00:42:01

You know, it is interesting when you. I watch a lot of National Geographic, I watch a lot of jackana. It's unfortunate he's got the disease, he has ticking all that away.

But in learning all of this, you watch where the animal kingdom understands the balance that they need between what they eat and whether or not they're killing for the, you know, nothing more than survival. You can see where if a pack of lions, I guess you call them a pack of lions, could be a herd of lions. Pack of lions, herd of lions.

Mathew Halteman
00:42:40

The pride. I believe it is a pride.

Michael Herst
00:42:42

There we go, pride of lions.

You can watch where, you know, if they've already eaten for the day, they can sit right next to a whole herd of antelope or whole herd of something else in regard. And they don't bother each other because they understand the balance that we need in order for survival of everyone.

Because if they go through and eat everything in sight, they know that there won't be any food next week with an understanding.

So from a again long question, so from that perspective, how do you see our responsibility as a community or society to cooperate, Achieving the goals of animal ethics and, and maybe the, the food justice, I guess would be a good word.

Mathew Halteman
00:43:39

Yeah.

So what I'm trying to do in my book Hungry Beautiful Animals is really convince people that this is not a path of scarcity, suffering, obligation so much as it is an opportunity to be the change we want to see in our world from the soil to the stratosphere, right. That by, by eating more plants, by eating less meat, eventually, I hope by transitioning fully to a plant based diet and entering right.

The space of abundance that comes with that transition, expanding our consciousness of the flourishing of other sentient creatures. That happens right when, when we're no longer eating animals, it becomes much easier to consider who they actually are. Right.

I mean, it's hard to have a conversation about how intelligent pigs are when you're halfway through a pork chop. But nobody wants to experience that, that cognitive distance.

But once you've sort of moved in a plant based direction, suddenly where you know, you were defensive in the middle of eating a pork chop, you can get curious, right?

There's this transition that happens from defensiveness around the abilities and intelligence and, and sociality and, and emotional nature of, of fellow sentient creatures to a curiosity about how that works. And so I think this evolving journey of going vegan, we start with baby steps.

We start with, you know, exploring new exciting plant based options that expand the range of the Things that we're eating, we move steadily away from that standard American diet that we know is generating diseases of affluence, making it harder to live vibrant lives. We start to experience those physical health benefits. We start to get more curious about all the other benefits that are happening.

And over the course of, you know, a couple years of experiments in this regard, we start seeing how we, ourselves, with our unique talents and gifts, can become leavening agents in this transformation of social consciousness that we need. And what I mean by that, Michael, is that, you know, Hungry Beautiful Animals is not about a one size fits all approach to going vegan.

It's about encouraging people to see that their own evolution in the direction of all these improvements and benefits can inspire them to be leavening agents in the world in ways that only they can be.

So if you're, if you're like Michael and suddenly you are, you know, have a media company and you're making podcasts, well, you can invite vegans on to talk about that.

You know, if you're working in a law firm and you're somebody who, you know, wants to make the service project for all of your 200 employees that particular year to be focused on animal welfare, well, then you can do that.

If you're a professor or a kindergarten teacher or somebody who's a motivational speaker, you can integrate these issues into the content that you're delivering to help other people aspire to do better.

If you're a custodian at a high school, you can see this as an opportunity to maybe address the food waste issues and start a recycling program or a composting program, right? I mean, every single person on the planet eats, and every single person on the planet is engaged in this system.

And that means every single person on the planet can be inspired by taking account of what their gifts and abilities and passions are, and then channel those into this set of practices, going vegan, that over time can catalyze a change that could transform the world on a grand scale.

So this is really about encouraging people to find their own personal journeys of transformation that then enable them and empower them to go out into the world and share that right with the people in their. In their own areas of influence. And none of us has to bear the. The weight of the world on our shoulders, right?

I mean, in the account that I'm trying to offer, all you got to do is worry about how your diet, your unique talents and gifts, your vocational life, your friendships, your social life, that tiny little area of influence that you, a human being, with feet made of clay, someone who's error prone, someone who's definitely going to make some mistakes. You're not going to transform the world, but you can transform that tiny little patch of earth that you call home.

And if we all work at our own little patch, well, pretty soon we're going to have a quilt.

And if that quilt gets big enough because of the impact of the way these things work, the world could be a totally different place in 50 to 100 years. And that, that's the hope, right?

Maybe it'll take us longer, maybe 200, but we, we need to do this soon because the impact of the way we're currently doing it is not sustainable for much longer. And so no better time than the present.

Michael Herst
00:49:30

I agree, I agree. And I think anybody that's a vegan right now, if you want to be an activist in regard to this, it's you.

There are some steps there and some concepts in your book that will allow people to move forward with helping this whole thing.

On the same note, there are individuals that listen to this that may be on the cusp of, or on the fence, the old cliche of whether or not they really want to go into this lifestyle or whether or not they're going to understand that eating this way is a better benefit to themselves. Practicing a vegan lifestyle is a benefit not only to us, but to our environment. What advice could you give someone who is considering. Excuse me.

As I clear my throat. Let me try that question again. If I remember it.

What advice would you give someone who's considering transitioning to a vegan lifestyle but feels overwhelmed by the idea how can we help them to transition into. I told you how I did it. It was real simple because the way I did it.

But there are people that have lived a, shall we call regular, I guess, regular lifestyle, you know, as a carnivore, you know, and occasionally putting a little bit of vegetables on their plate, you know, like I'm eating vegetables. Look into this lifestyle.

Mathew Halteman
00:50:55

I. One of the things that's really important to me is to remind people again and again, it's not a one size fits all.

Everybody's journey is going to be different.

And for that reason, I tack hard away from the idea that veganism a, a, a rigid set of rules that, or, or an identity, right, that you earn or lose by what you eat on a given day or what you wear on a given day.

I think identitarian conceptions of veganism are very fragile because the minute you make a mistake or if you haven't decided if you want to adopt the whole worldview yet, right? Well, then you're, you're out every time you make a mistake. Or maybe you never start because you're worried that only the perfect can apply, right?

For this vision, what I try to do instead, I want to kick veganism, right? Rigid rule based ways of thinking about this to one side and invite people instead to think of going vegan.

And what I mean by going vegan is, look, this is an aspiration. It's not something we do at one go.

No human being can actually be perfect at it because of the ways in which we're intermeshed with everything else, right?

Even if we never eat another animal product again, you know, we're driving cars that harm insects or we're eating vegetables that have been raised using pesticides or combines that affect field animals or. Right? I mean, there is no way for a finite, error prone human being to achieve a full fledged vegan identity.

Totally cruelty free, completely insulated, right from the vicissitudes of being a finite, error prone creature. That's not something that's possible for human beings.

So I would discourage people from thinking of going vegan as a stringent rule following ism and think of it instead as a trajectory where they see this vision. Wow, look how much more beautiful the world could be if animals had a fair shot at living flourishing lives.

If the earth wasn't suffering under the strain, right?

Of all of these difficult practices for the environment and wasting water and wasting grain and wasting agricultural land, what if our personal health were more resilient in our public health, we had to worry less about pandemics and we had to worry less about global hunter. What if that beautiful world that a transformed food system could deliver to us?

What if I just started to adopt daily practices that moved me incrementally in that direction? So I think diet is one of the more powerful ways to do that. Certainly it's one of the more efficacious ways to start moving in that direction.

But as I tell my students all the time, you know, some people maybe don't have the freedom to do this dietarily at first.

So maybe they do it by reading a bunch of books or watching some documentary films or focusing on expanding animal consciousness or learning more about worker justice, right?

On my view, you're going vegan so long as you're finding practices that are moving you in the general direction of that beautiful vision of a transformed world. So, you know, how might this affect someone on the fence? Well, I would say Lean into your curiosity.

If you're thinking to yourself, man, this looks really interesting, but I'm worried that I won't be perfect. Or this looks really interesting, but I don't want to become one of those bunny huggin lunatics who judges everybody.

Or this looks really interesting, but I don't want to fall into this set of stereotypes. I say more power to you. Follow your curiosity.

Do the things that look like they'll be blessings to you and blessings to the people in your immediate spheres of influence.

And what I've seen happen to many, many, many people over the years, as you know, somebody who's been doing vegan education now for two decades, those baby steps help people to gain confidence. Those baby steps turn into bigger and bigger victories and more and more highly evolved moral and environmental consciousness.

And before you know it, those people who wondered, well, you know, how can I eat differently at all?

Are now trying to figure out how can my career as an attorney or how can my career as an environmental justice advocate, or how can my career as a business person, or how can my career as an entrepreneur or a custodian or a kindergarten teacher help the world woo the world right into seeing what this transformation has to offer them. So my advice is lean into the curiosity. Tack away from those defensive feelings. You're not going to be able to do this all at once.

String together a few tiny little victories spurred on by your curiosity. And I predict then as your confidence grows, your curiosity expands, your consciousness becomes, right, more engaged, your path widens.

It's shocking how transformational this path can be if you have the courage to lean into your curiosity instead of letting that, those few remaining defensive, skeptical worries, right. Keep you from taking that first step. So lean into curiosity.

Be wary of those defensive feelings that arise when we're kind of in fear of perfectionism or in fear that we have to be the perfect vegan. I say banish those thoughts, kick perfectionism and shame and blame to the curb and say, how can I follow curiosity into something beautiful here?

And let's not think about the destination, let's, let's think about the next tiny little step and see where we end up.

Michael Herst
00:57:34

Sounds like a wonderful philosophy that we should all incorporate into our life.

Mathew Halteman
00:57:39

Well, I hope so. I, I, I've tried very, very hard to make this a book for everyone, right?

To me, you, you don't have to be somebody with the word vegan tattooed across your neck, right? Or somebody who is, you know, on fire for environmental justice.

I mean, I think this is something that every Person who wants to move a, a fragile body full of thoughts and feelings and a desire for joy. This is a path that's, that's open to everyone.

And you know, as I tell my activist friends all the time, something I need to remind myself from time to time, what we want from our advocacy is for this to become common sense.

Michael Herst
00:58:26

Yeah.

Mathew Halteman
00:58:26

I mean, hopefully one day we won't even need the V word because it wouldn't occur to anyone that we need to do all these things and cause all these harms to eat a delicious, sustainable, earth friendly, health friendly diet. I mean, my dream is that one day it'll seem as strange to us, you know, that once upon a time we, we ate animals and in order to do that we caused.

Right. All these, these, we've wreaked all these terrible things to happen across the planet and into the lives of our fellow human beings.

I mean that'll seem as, as strange to us as it now seems that we were willing to enslave human beings or that we were willing right to. I mean there's so many things that would have seemed shocking, right. 200 years ago that are now common sense for everyone.

Doesn't matter what their political identity is, doesn't matter right. Where they're coming from or what their experience base is. My hope is a revolution in food is that next step. Right.

That goes beyond identity politics, that goes beyond. Right. Our experiential differences and something that just everyone will one day take for granted. That's the hope. Anyway.

Michael Herst
00:59:50

I think we should all hope for that. I think it's a wonderful, again, an amazing opportunity, a brilliant opportunity for us to be able to take an active approach to all of this.

And I like to tell when people question me in regard to whether or not we get enough protein or whether or not what I'm eating, I say the largest land animal in the world is a vegan and a gorilla. The elephant and a gorilla is a massive as a gorilla and the strength that gorilla has is a vegan. So you know, don't be afraid of that.

I had to throw that in there, so just toss it. Absolutely. Tell people how they can give some help, how, how they can get involved and how to get your book.

And you have so many opportunities on there like Tom's story and Joanna's story and we can even buy lunch for a donkey.

Mathew Halteman
01:00:47

HungryBeautifulAnimals.com is the website. The title was weird enough, Michael, that the dot com address was still available so we, we took advantage of that. But lots of resources there.

So on the resources page, you can find a whole bunch of ways to start your journey into going vegan that don't necessarily require right an an overnight flip of the switch, ways to build your consciousness, ways to help individual animals, ways to make connections between justice for human beings and justice for members of other species. Lots and lots of things there on the resource page. Of course, you can buy the book anywhere books are sold. There are links there on the website.

And I want to call readers attention in particular yet to the stories page.

And that's where people who have read and digested the message of hungry, beautiful animals talk a little bit in their own voice about how this opportunity is unfolding in their own lives.

And I encourage, you know, readers who want to share stories to reach out through the website because we're always looking for new stories to feature and maybe your story is the one that will inspire an untold number of folks to, to follow in your footsteps and to find that one more thing before they go. I think this is a beautiful path to travel. And hungrybeautifulanimals.com it could be your first step.

Michael Herst
01:02:21

There you go. And I'll make sure that there's a link in the show notes so that everybody has an easy way to find it. You won't even have to look for.

Just click it and it'll wonder. Well, thank you very much for being on the show. I really appreciate it. This is one more thing before we go.

So I always ask, is there any words of wisdom before we go?

Mathew Halteman
01:02:40

I think look for joy in a world brimming with suffering. It's so easy to focus on the overwhelming amounts of suffering in the world, the overwhelming amounts of oppression in the world.

But until we find our joy and maximize that joy among the members of our inner families, our efficacy, our power, our motivation to go out into the world and make it a joyful place is going to have a harder time finding us. And so my advice, one more thing before you go, find joy and nourish your inner family.

Because if you treat all those parts of yourself well, the physical you, the emotional you, the social you, the intellectual you, the moral you, the power that you will have for taking it to the street and helping others to find their joy will be so, so much richer and your enthusiasm will be more contagious. So go for the joy. It's a joyful case for going vegan.

Michael Herst
01:03:51

Brilliant words of wisdom. Thank you very much for sharing those. I appreciate them very much. Again, Matt, thank you very much for coming on the show.

Thank you very much for spreading your wisdom, your wealth of knowledge, your expertise and your passion for taking this forward. I appreciate you.

Mathew Halteman
01:04:09

Well, speaking of joy, it has been a rich one. Thank you, Michael.

Michael Herst
01:04:13

Grateful as well. For everyone in the One More Thing before you go community, thank you very much for being part of this community.

Everything we just spoke about, you'll be able to connect with Matt and let me start this over just a second. For everyone else in the One More Thing before we Go community, again, thank you very much for being part of this community.

I will have everything in connecting Matthew in helping you on your vegan journey or helping you to become a vegan activist, how to get his book and some resources and buy a lunch for a donkey. You have to. And one more thing before you all go. Have a great day. Have a great week and thank you for being here.

Thanks for listening to this episode of One More Thing before youe Go. Check out our website at before you Go podcast.

Mathew Halteman
01:05:05

Com.

Michael Herst
01:05:05

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