Family habits

33.

Everything happens within the context of its surroundings. Take a typical family, where eating habits have formed since birth and parents pass on these habits to their children. The eating habits of the whole community have been the same since time out of mind. Food outlets offer the same types of food they’ve always done. Beliefs about the need for animal protein outweigh the recent warnings about its danger to health. Most of these factors encourage conformity - if we eat what others eat we’ll feel normal! We’ll be easier to cater for since animal foods are easy to prepare and are guaranteed to satisfy. Children enjoy food and snacks and confections which taste good, and since they have no way of assessing foods other than by taste, it’s likely they’ll go for what they like! And animal foods are very available, as are most foods made with animal ingredients. Kids care little for complex ethical arguments concerning food, even if they understand them. They eat for reasons of immediate satisfaction, as indeed adults do too. Very often the kids call the shots though, determining what the family meals consist of. And we end up with a nation of junk food eaters who need expensive medical insurance to defray ever-increasing medical bills. The junk food being eaten is almost always heavily animal protein based. You might say that the typical family doesn’t stand a chance under the pressure of so much promotion of conventional animal-based foods.

            The pressures on a parent to conform to majority eating habits are immense. It’s a brave parent who will change their own diet and then enforce that same change on their children, unless kids’ habits have been established from birth. So they continue to buy meat and dairy foods and, if there are animals at home, plenty of pet food too. As it happens, it may be possible to raise a cat on a plant-based diet as long as the diet is supplemented with the necessary essential nutrients missing in plant foods. But again, to change this natural carnivore’s diet in mid stream is inadvisable and only really possible if done from birth. It may well be possible to have the complete household, including companion animals, adequately fed on plant-based food, but it’s rare, even for vegan households which include a dog or cat, not to buy them meat ... and if they do, then they are causing the deaths of many other animals who are killed for pet food.