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.

And to be fair, one aspect that I forgot to mention is seafood. If you're only thinking along terms of sustainability in terms of the Earth, it would basically wipe off land-based meat production except for a very small subset of non-farmable land used for grazing animals. However, in terms of non-farmed seafood (all fish/seafood farms are still better converted to seaweed production in terms of resources), the oceans do have a vast amount of natural fish that can be harvested within certain limits without destroying the ecosystem, and these ocean areas cannot easily -with our technology -be turned into seaweed farms. 

So from a sustainability perspective, seafood is still very much on the menu. Assuming of course that mercury, radiation, and other pollution doesn't take ocean-based food off the menu (which I suspect it probably will in the next century - hell fish in the river are full of pharma drugs from human wastewater, and double digit percentages of fish in freshwater areas in many NA lakes are mutated due to pollution - plenty of articles on google on this).

Of course, the sustainability argument isn't the end all or be all of the dietary concerns, else you'd have absurd results such as concluding that we should be eating the flesh of loved ones who pass away - humans and pets included - which of course doesn't sit well for most of us.