The disconnect

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Because the law allows us to exploit animals it’s not a crime, whether it’s zoo-caging of exotics, vivisecting mice or factory farming.
There’s a ‘disconnect’ between our own inner beauty and our base food cravings. Animal food is endemic to human lifestyle, to which most of us are addicted. It’s attractive to educated and rich in the same way as the uneducated and poor. We’re seduced by it (to the blood-salt-sugar-texture thing).
Our number one impulse is to find food that’s nutritious and enjoyable ... and hot on its heels, guilt, sends us to number two impulse. We hurry to justify eating ‘that type of food’. No problem ... because it’s justified simply by being socially acceptable. If we can afford to buy it, we can eat what we like, and be liked despite what we eat. And in reality, it’s made even easier for us - because rarely, if ever, do we have to justify ANY of it anyway, to anybody. It seems that, for almost all people, the (ethical) provenance of our food is not a problem - animal-eating doesn’t bother us.
But it does bother children. When kids first find out about bacon being a pig or tender mutton being a lamb, it’s disturbing. I doubt if most kids ever get their head around that one - the contrast between the indelible feeling of adult-love and what must seem to them like adult-cruelty, in regard to animals just like their own pets at home. They possibly feel conflicted - perhaps smelling breakfast bacon cooking, conflicted between their own salivating tastebuds and thoughts about ‘what happens to animals’.
As usual, reality wins. Kids mustn’t complain. If they don’t do what they’re told they starve ... or, more realistically, they’re denied lots of yummy things that kids like. Children are bribed with food. They’re indoctrinated, from birth, to conform to a ‘meat-and-two-veg diet. They must conform, otherwise their carers are put to all sorts of inconvenience.
Is it called ‘neotony’, when you carry something juvenile into adulthood? Do we secretly just want to suck at the breast and not have to bother about investigating everything we put in our mouths? This ‘provenance’ thing (over food) - what’s behind it? Is it really worth looking into? Isn’t it better just to ignore it altogether.
It’s 2011, and are we still stuck between being loving-responsible-adults and teat-hungry-out-of-controls?