The hold animal-derived foods have

1099: 

The fear associated with food starts with a fear of starvation.  We need strength-giving food plus a guarantee of supply.  If food is in doubt we go crazy worrying about starvation.  But now, for those of us living in the wealthier world, all this has changed. Food is no longer scarce.  It’s available and affordable.  The supply of food is guaranteed, and there is no fear of starvation.  But the fear has merely transferred from the earlier fear to a fear of losing out on the pleasure food brings us.

The hold food has on people is of central concern for vegans. The ‘hold’ grows stronger the more interested we become when certain food items become attractive.  The habit of choosing what foods to eat, based almost entirely on the prospect of personal satisfaction, rules out or downplays every other consideration:  “I like chicken, I buy it, I eat it.  And if chickens suffer whilst being reared, then that’s a shame, but it doesn’t make me want chicken any the less, knowing how they were treated”.  The food and the animal are not linked, the food is of great interest, the animal is of very little interest, since it has been transformed from a living-breathing animal to a tempting nugget.

This temptation is what we are UP against here.  Chicken, for example, appeals to most people’s taste in whatever part of the world they live.  Most people don’t spend any time actually thinking about the origins of their food, they just concentrate on bringing the raw foodstuff to an edible state.  If they were to think about the rights and wrongs of food at all it’s likely they’d follow the crowd and not think about it for themselves at all.  Their food choices are virtually made for them by the marketeers, and their involvement in the buying, cooking and eating it is deeply embedded in habits, which are the bridge to their world of plenty (of yummy food).

Things have changed over the last sixty odd years, during this long period of plenty, mainly at the expense of animals, most delicious foods are full of animal-derived ingredients and are available to anyone.  These are the foods which have the strongest pull on people.  That is the hold these foods have those who haven’t yet questioned the ethics of the food they eat.