> key issue is "poor practice and animal welfare", it's exchanging another animal's life for a few minutes of personal pleasure and eight-ish hours of energy.

This presumes so many things, chief among them that plants are neither alive or intelligent, and I can assure both are not true--plants are incredibly intelligent actually and have mechanisms that we should mimic now that only now we have the capacity to observe and measure them.

My time in tech notwithstanding, I have a background and careers in both the Life sciences and spent time on farms and cooking in kitchens and it became very clear to me at a young age that Life feeds on Life [0].

So long as you live in this physical Universe you have to take in the elements of another living being in order to not die and the best one can do is be considerate and take this responsibility. You can abstract this all you want but the end is that this must take place in order for your body to continue to stay alive.

I'm a total glutton by nature with an incredibly fast metabolism and I have in earlier and darker periods of my life over-indulged in both food and drink, but I soon realized that despite thinking I was 'deserving' of it I felt ill every time as body had been optimized and used to intermittent fasting and nourishment rather than over eating and drinking everyday like it was my last day on Earth.

> With sufficient research, I believe we can free ourselves and other living things from that dynamic without sacrificing the experience and benefits animal products provide, and I'd be happy to live in that future.

See above, but I will add that I have ever since I started to farm and focus on farm-to-table cuisine I formed a deep respect for every meal I eat (plant or animal based), it came at an immense cost (that I think everyone should experience) after having done the back breaking labour to grow and slaughter animals that I then ate or sold in the market(s). I can assure you that what you are advocating for is the fantasy, and most undesirable, aspects of my trans0humanist leanings. When one eats it is more than just input and output, and when we address that way it is no surprise our Western Developed nations are incredibly sick, depressed and despondent and that the 1-2 biggest killers in developed nations are food related (heart disease and diabetes).

> And in the meantime, I agree: eating less meat and favoring producers who treat their animals well is the way to go if avoiding animal products entirely isn't on the table.

I cannot see myself enjoying Life at all if we deny that food is and has been the reason why our very constitution as Homo Sapiens has pushed us this far along the evolution scale; such that we have tamed and evolved alongside with dogs, ventured and conquered this planet and sadly have gone to war with our very own (eg salt wars) in order to be able to feed ourselves and our tribes. I refuse to see how we wouldn't lose a very fundamental part of our psyche and the Human experience if we lost this and to be honest I'd be the first to resist that: given how lonely and depressed became when COVID struck and they couldn't go to their favorite restaurants and longed so much for those days that they would even risk getting sick in order to return speaks volumes: also worth noting is that despite front line workers like doctors and nurses being so exposed to COVID patients, even without PPE, it was cooks, farm workers and meat processors who had the highest number of deaths [1] in the US!

Putting on my pedantic hat on: Having done all 3 at some stage of my culinary career it has long been taken for granted the sacrifice and risk some of us have and will continue to go through in order to fulfill this vital role in Society; I just wish most would take it more serious and see how fundamental it is the Human Condition and a part I would be despondent if it ever went away.

0: https://allpoetry.com/poem/14460785-Life-feeds-on-life-by-De...

1: https://qz.com/1962493/a-new-study-shows-occupations-with-th...