Family habits and dilemmas

1719: 

Everything happens within the context of its surroundings. Take a typical family, where the child's eating habits have been forming since birth. The eating habits of the whole community have been the same since time out of mind. Food outlets offer the same types of food that they’ve always offered, only more so and with greater variety. Beliefs about the necessity of animal protein in the diet outweigh any recent warnings about its danger to health, and thus encourage conformity - if we eat what others eat we’ll feel safe and normal! In addition, 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 yummy, and they’re very available, as are most foods that contain animal ingredients.

Kids don't care much about 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. It’s often the kids who determine what the family meals consist of. Adults go along with what the kids want just to keep them happy. And we adults are happy to be led. We reignite juvenile tastes for ice cream and candy bars and cream cakes. And we end up a nation of junk food eaters with chronic food-related illnesses, 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 such heavy promotion of conventional animal-based foods.

         

There's great pressure on a parent to conform to majority eating habits. 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 most people continue to buy meat and dairy foods and, if there are animals at home, plenty of pet food too. It's possible to have the complete household, including companion animals, adequately fed on plant-based food, but it’s rare. Even for vegan households, in which a dog or cat is living, it’s difficult not to buy them meat, and then we are causing the deaths of many other animals that will have to be killed for pet food.