Indoctrinating kids

34.

Food is a dilemma. There’s too much promotion of unhealthy but attractive food and too little authoritative promotion of plant-based foods, which anyway, are not anywhere near as attractive to kids. And it’s kids who make the loudest demands. Unlike adults, children have fewer pleasures and freedoms to distract them, so food often figures large for them. They’ll make strenuous demands to have what they want, aided and abetted by the advertisers who heavily direct their messages towards young people.

            That old familiar boast by the Church - “Give us children for the first seven years and we have them for life” - applies just as well to diet. Raise children on meat and they’ll always see it as an essential component of every meal. But if that is true, it simply emphasises how impressionable kids are. Therefore it lays the onus on the parent to mould the habits of their children responsibly. What sort of mentality do parents want for their children? What priorities should they emphasise?

            My next door neighbours have just come back from their holiday in the country. I knocked on their door early, to give them their mail. Their little girl is four years old and she couldn’t stop telling me about the piglets she saw when they visited one of those ‘family-friendly farms’.  She was allowed to play with them in the straw. “They weren’t very little” she said. “This big - no this big”, she stretched her hands out wide, the size of her small dog. “Just like Sammy” she said. “And they snuggled and let me hug them”. “They grunted and pushed their noses under my arm”. She was over the moon.

            She went on like this for some time. While I was listening to her story I could smell their breakfast cooking in the kitchen. Bacon and the smell of eggs frying. I figured Mum and Dad weren’t going to be telling her about pigs and bacon. I assume they’d decided not to ... not to spoil her memory (her innocence more like). I knew they’d be nervous about me speaking up. As if I would!

            I’m not a parent. I don’t really know the dynamics of all this. But I do realise why the truth about animals may not be made clear to youngsters and that parents, usually quite consciously, decide that their kids must be kept in the dark to prevent them making the obvious connections.

            “When they’re older they’ll understand ...”. But understand what? Perhaps the kids will understand that a loving parent can be ultimately duplicitous, not on the scale of telling fibs about Santa Claus but over the truth about violating animals! If a young child’s curiosity about animals and meat and farms and killing can be sidestepped, it’s likely the whole thing will blow over soon enough. On some level, as a child grows older, they’ll stop worrying about the animals and start salivating over how delicious crispy bacon tastes, and how nice it will be with some googy-egg!

            Rules of parenthood might be: don’t make the connection between animals and the food you feed them. Don’t tell the kids if you want to keep their dreams alive. Keep the memory of that summer day at the farm with the little piggies - it’s priceless. Let them keep this much while they are children ... until they have to get their priorities straightened out in preparation for the real world beyond, so that they fit in. So that when they’re grown up they can, without a second thought, ‘bring home the bacon’.