Consider that killing a living thing to eat its body is not unique to "meat", nor is raising it in a controlled environment for the purpose of consumption. Fish (as is sometimes classified separately) and vegetables are living things raised and killed for consumption of their bodies as well.
I believe reconciling all of these as ethically equal (including raising the ethical weight of killing a plant as equal to an animal) is important for sanely dealing with our natural ecosystem of food. The "aliveness" of plants is continually researched and shown in a positive light, and it's hard to draw a clear and reasonable line between "life that is acceptable to eat" and "life that is not acceptable to eat".
When you look at the spectrum of life and how ethically impactful killing it for food is, it tends to follow anthropomorphism and social compatibility with humans, which doesn't seem objective enough to be pursued for widely-accepted ethics, but merely for local cultural acceptability.
Suggesting that there's enough ambiguity for it to be reasonable to assume ferns exist on the same level of consciousness or understanding of the world around them as cows is a bit of a weak argument. There's a pretty obvious difference between the two, and even if you believe plants can experience pain or distress in a meaningful way, it still makes way more sense to kill a carrot over a pig if you have the choice, making the two very clearly not morally equivalent.
The parent has specifically mentioned that they love animals, and it's pretty easily to see why: animals are much easier to relate to, can show pain easily, and are much more similar to us than plants are.
Sure, but just because we relate to them more doesn't affect the ethics of killing other things that are just as alive but are simply less relatable. This has been a strong theme in the progression of civilization.
Ending life to feed our own is how much of nature works, and we have to deal with being a part of that in our ethical thinking, regardless of how associated we are with the life we're ending.
It's simply something to think about: Most people are as flippant about ending the life of a plant, as some are about ending the life of an animal (or various different species of animal, including fish & insects).
> it's hard to draw a clear and reasonable line between "life that is acceptable to eat" and "life that is not acceptable to eat".
How about the line between "life that will likely suffer when prepared for us to eat" and "life that will likely not suffer when prepared for us to eat"?
Even that can be a difficult distinction. Colonies of trees, for example, have been shown to respond to damage and illness.
IIRC, trees release specific substances into their root systems in response to damage or illness in order to communicate to nearby trees. Dying trees will even give up their sugar reserves to feed younger, healthier trees.
So, while it may not be on the same level as animals, I can see an argument being made that trees respond to something resembling "pain" or "suffering".
I did a quick search and stumbled across this article[1] from the Smithsonian Magazine which corroborates some of this and expounds on it a bit. It waxes a bit... mystical, I guess? It does seem to be based on science, but the only thing it links to are books on the subject. So, you know, grain of salt. It's a place to start, though.
I believe reconciling all of these as ethically equal (including raising the ethical weight of killing a plant as equal to an animal) is important for sanely dealing with our natural ecosystem of food. The "aliveness" of plants is continually researched and shown in a positive light, and it's hard to draw a clear and reasonable line between "life that is acceptable to eat" and "life that is not acceptable to eat".
When you look at the spectrum of life and how ethically impactful killing it for food is, it tends to follow anthropomorphism and social compatibility with humans, which doesn't seem objective enough to be pursued for widely-accepted ethics, but merely for local cultural acceptability.