Family habits and dilemmas

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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 that they’ve always offered. 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 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. It’s often the kids who determine what the family meals consist of. Adult tastes become juvenile-ised, and we end up with 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.

            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, in which a dog or cat is living, it’s difficult not to buy them meat, and then, if the vegan does that, they are causing the deaths of many other animals that will have to be killed for pet food.