There would be far less suffering if we all lived on a plant-based diet. As well it would help in the fight against climate change, reducing environmental impacts.
I’m referring to those for whom the initial response to the flavor of most vegetables is disgust. I’m talking about the signal between your taste buds and your brain, which like all signals the body uses to communicate, has a processing delay.
It's a learned response. Sometimes children have strange food preferences. Eg. can't stand chunks in their food, some food seems foreign to them so they won't eat it, somebody won't eat pasta, others fruits or vegetables.
I've just this week read about some moms trying to reverse this in young children (in adults it's worse, but not impossible), the article was not in english, so i won't link it here.
Their solution was to change the disgust with play. Like you don't like pasta? Come here, you don't have to eat it, just try if it will stick to the window. The kid plays with it, and in time it may change his perception of the food enough to try a small bite, their timescale iirc was two weeks. They explained some unexplainable occurences with prenatal conditioning ... like mum ate something and then fell, and those two unrelated things got written into child's brain.
Anecdotal evidence - my son when very young was suspicious to some fruits and veggies also. My solution was to eat the vegetables & fruits while watching tv shows with him. I've eaten whole apple, and gave him very thin, see-through slices of apple to play with, to look through, to suck and to nibble on. In a week time he was eating regular pieces with me and loves the fruits now. Small/thin pieces were the key for us.
TLDR: don't force children to eat something, it will only strenghten the problem.
Why is a reduction in suffering preferable? How do you even measure suffering? Are you certain that plants and fungi don't suffer? This all seems highly subjective.
More than 50 billion animals (land and sea) are killed each year for food in the United States, alone. Farmed animals must be fed to bring them to slaughter. If there was a reduction in farmed animals being eaten for food, far less agricultural land would be needed to feed people directly. Yes, wild animals in farmed land still would be killed, but far fewer. Not having or understanding compassion for living creatures is not something I can help you with. Cheers.
If it became technically possible to force all animals to eat a synthetic, fortified, vegetable-based diet even if they are carnivorous, would you endorse the idea?
Humans constantly try to distance themselves from nature even though at the basest level, we are still unavoidably part of it, as are all biological organisms on Earth.
In the US at least we have sufficient agricultural land.
Why do you think I need help? That seems highly presumptuous. Asking questions about the fundamental nature of suffering hardly implies a lack of compassion. Perhaps someone can help you learn how to avoid drawing illogical conclusions.
"each pound of animal flesh requires between four and thirteen pounds of plant matter to produce, depending upon species and conditions. Given that amount of plant death, a belief in the sentience of plants makes a strong pro-vegan argument"