Did you know plants can learn from experience?

[xise]

Ah well, guess you'll just have to choose whatcha wanna hurt more plants or animal

This line of reasoning often leads to a common misconception: assuming or believing plants and animals suffer equally, so therefore it doesn't matter which you eat (though there is a very strong argument that the typical annual or biennial food crops do not feel suffering as intensely as 2D land animals or do not possess the same level sentience - but putting that aside for movement.) Due to the nature of the food chain and energy loss, every organism needs to consume more the further it gets away from the sun or it's main source of energy (some creatures live of the heats in deep undersea vents). Due to this loss, 2D animals that are eaten for meat calories consume many, many more plants calories than simply eating the plant calories straight as a human. 


Now this is a general rule, and there are exceptions: you could still argue that harvesting wild animal meat that died due to natural causes. This is not really feasible on any scale due to logistics of finding a recently dead animal and health and safety concerns, but it's possible. Harvesting grazing animals that thrive on land that cannot be farmed is a more real exception. However, given modern farming technology, this is a very small subset of land that is grazable and not farmable, much less than 10%, so meat production would plummet as grazing animals naturally is also much, much lower density than factory farms in terms of land usage, on the order of 5x or more. So you'd basically have maybe around 2% of the meat production as you currently have. But this all theoretical, and you cannot reasonably buy meat from non-factory farmed sources that graze on unfarmable land in today's world. Typically unfarmable but grazable land is borderline for grazing anyway, so it's not really profitable.


I think the bigger realization for applying compassion to all other-selves and entities of all densities, is that just like human slavery ended, and hopefully animal slavery will end, plant slavery too will hopefully eventually end. As we find products that replace using plants and trees in everyday products. Wood-free building materials exist nearly everywhere, because many current and ancient societies lived in places with few trees, however in forested areas wood building products are cheaper. As technology grows, we eventually will be able to go meat and plant-matter free in our dietary habits, but the technology to efficiently create nutritive substances from just the elements in limited in our world today.


There is an entire field focused on sustainable construction, and it does bother me more to chop down trees to build a house in a forest than it does to use non-wood building materials to build a brick, adobe, or stone house in the plains or other area. I definitely haven't significantly yet changed my behavior regarding all of this, but it's on the radar for sure.