[Weatherlight]

You might want to google something like "vegan teen parents." I've seen a LOT of information dealing with getting parents to allow minor children to go veg*n, but too lazy to try to find those resources now.

Some minors in very uncooperative households have eaten as vegan as possible based on what was available, living off things like apples, fruit juice, potatoes, peanut butter, etc until the parents gave in and they were allowed to use the kitchen for cooking and buy some simple ingredients for healthy food. Not many kids are willing to go through that.

Cravings can be bad, but a little thought can go a long way to counter automatic desires. He could think about how much more animals "crave" relief from suffering than he craves some foods he's used to. He could look directly at the animal products and at the time picture the type of animal each one came from, maybe play little mental videos of their likely lives from birth to slaughter. He could leave the dinner table and watch Earthlings again. I lived for years where I had no access to mock meats, and when I tried a vegan ham sandwich, after all that time being reminded of what dead animals were and associating the smells with corpses, I got nauseous. It took a while to get used to eating mock meats. And it used to be so tempting to eat corpses! Hehe.

I don't think there's any particular gene for compassion or whatever. I'd try it even if he was adopted ;p