First off, thanks for the robust and healthy debate.

I wouldn't lump Vegetarians in with the same group as Vegans. Many Vegetarians have that philosophy. But plenty of others don't. For example, I was a happy Vegetarian for a year and a bit and didn't hold that philosophy at all.

> most people draw the line based on an organism's developed nervous system

That's a red herring of an argument and entirely arbitrary and convenient. If pushed, many Vegans would basically agree that Eukariot/Opisthokont/Animal is the group that's right out regardless of nervous system development. It really has nothing to do with a nervous system. All kinds of living creatures have some kind of nervous system and display stress responses, and quite a huge number of them are on the Vegan menu (or on the dunno, don't care list).

The typical argument is "I don't want to cause pain to a living thing", but again pain is just a stress response, and all sorts of things exhibit stress responses. If I anthropomorphize my lettuce in just the right way, pulling leaves off of the plant for salad causes them to wilt, while bathing the same wilted leaves in cold water causes them stiffen again. Since a lettuce plant has no central nervous system I have to assume cognition (as it is) is distributed (plenty of animals have distributed thinking systems, why not plants?) am I soothing the orphaned leaf? The parent plant will also spring into action and repair the damage I caused through a complex response system that I could squint and call a pain response.

Who am I to say my lettuce didn't just experience the plant world's equivalent of pain? Just because one of my ancestors happened to make it into the Opisthokont family and my lettuce's ancestor made it into Archaeplastida is entirely arbitrary to any possible sense of morale code.

What about Amoeba, Chromalveolata, Rhizaria (which includes multicellular organisms), Excavate, etc.? One of the most powerful demonstrations I ever saw on the question of life involved an Amoeba. Why aren't Amoeba on the "don't eat" list Vegans keep?

More concretely, Vegans' strange stated obsession with neuron based nervous systems locks them into a philosophy where life isn't important, only things that they believe can feel are. It's the dietary equivalent of "if I don't get caught, it's not wrong". But there's considerable evidence that all kinds of things on the Vegan menu can feel in their own way. Plants were the first things to colonize the land, why are we so arrogant to think they can't feel, but perhaps in a way unrecognizable to us Opisthokont/Animals? After all, our common ancestor was billions of years ago.

The argument Vegans make is curiously specific, if we met an alien species unlike anything we had ever encountered before, I'd rather send an omnivore to investigate, because if it didn't have nervous system built up of neurons, no matter how intelligent, a Vegan might put it on the dinner menu...that's a bad first contact protocol.

So here's a valid, no nonsense, alternative morality: I support what ensures the continued propagation of my species. An unbelievable number of my ancestors, most outside of my recognizable species, have lived, procreated and died in the most unbelievably brutal circumstances -- scratching and clawing their way through life, all so that I could live. They fought so hard that they survived through evolutionary and geological changes. They evolved better ways that I might live and evolved away anything that I don't need. I owe my life to their lives and I and my fellow progeny of their sacrifice must carry on in the best manner possible or their lives were all in vain.

You can derive almost every modern appropriate moral behavior from that moral axiom, to include the proper treatment of our food stock: plant, animal or other.

One last thing. I was particularly moved by a lecture I sat in on by the Dalai Lama about violence. One of the things he revealed and I felt particularly moved by was the concept of violence against ourselves. In his lecture he discussed self-immolation, but I took it to mean anything that does our own bodies harm. Veganism is not something that is good for our bodies, it does our bodies harm and is such "violence" against ourselves. Of course I'd also add that the Dalai Lama once had an army, and his favorite food is Sokham Bexe which includes minced meat and butter.