[AlbertCory]

Let's stay on eating for a sec:

When I was about 3, I suddenly rejected most of my mom's cooking. Probably most parents can relate to that :)

Was I emulating some other kid who ate different things? No, and you'll have to take my word on that. It had to do with my relationship with her (and that's all I'm saying about that on the interwebs). I didn't watch enough TV to have picked it up from "society" and none of the kids I knew acted like that.

I can see that if a modern teen-aged girl suddenly announces she's a vegan, that is probably peer-influenced. But this wasn't that.

We could go back even earlier in child development to show the absurdity of a single-factor theory of desire. You can be generous and say he doesn't really mean that, but you still have his actual words to ignore.

I'll concede that Girard may have some useful theories for certain situations, and so did Karl Marx and Friedrich Hayek and Sigmund Freud and lots of other thinkers.

[twayt]

It is clear that the subject of Girard claims is a person who is assimilated into society and observes other people (true of most people).

For example, I doubt that he would make the claim that a recluse who was born isolated and never got in contact with humanity is somehow still influenced by the desire of others.

I don't think it is necessary to throw out the entirety of Girard's theories just because they're not all encompassing.