Guiding young people

11.

If you’ve examined a school canteen lately, you’ll see an absence of the very worst foods including fatty meat dishes and sugary drinks and confections. Sometimes salads appear on the menu, but still, animal foods make a strong showing whilst substantial plant-based dishes are rarely on offer; although in fairness a vegan meal can be ordered in advance at most school canteens. The way young people are introduced to food outside the home is a long way from proactive encouragement of healthy eating let alone avoiding cruelty-foods. Students deserve to be taught about the health-giving qualities of non-animal food, but those who are supposed to be food guides (the consultant nutritionists) are not willing to speak out against animal foods for fear of causing offence, losing professional credibility or even losing their funding from animal-industry sources. Meat dishes are known, are popular and are the default because their ingredients are so readily available and volunteer canteen staff  may only know how to prepare meat-based meals. I imagine few would be familiar with making attractive, main course, vegan dishes.

The nutritionists and the teachers themselves allow students to remain unenlightened. Ideally school teachers (whom students already trust) could be teaching useful facts about plant-based foods and farm-animal life; but presently most of them know little about either nutrition or animal husbandry and eat meat themselves. They are hardly in a position to be impartial or encourage students to examine animal foods too closely. Therefore it’s down to those who have a ‘clean slate’ and the necessary information to guide children in nutrition and the truth about animal farming. But many of us are not teachers or don’t have access to young people.  So until there are enough school teachers who are at least practising and well informed vegans, children are unlikely to find out what they need to know until they are old enough to discover things for themselves. By then, too many bad habits are likely to be entrenched. For children and adults alike, there’s so much ground to cover and so much to learn. Being addicted, or at least craving certain foods, doesn’t help. Poor food habits hold most people back from contemplating the possibility of an ethically-based diet change. And apart from the animal population suffering the young people are suffering for lack of responsible guidance.