not sure why this was downvoted. i'm not native English speaker and would have assumed chicken is poultry not meat

"Meat" is the flesh of any animal. So poultry is just a type of meat; frogs legs, fish, octopus, worms, all "meat".

Not sure about insects, but I think they'd be called "meat" too in culinary terms.

(Native British-English user.)

Yes, insects are meat. The kernel of a nut is called nut meat, even though it is not made from muscle fibers.

I think the line is drawn at poultry and fish sometimes because the input costs are so much lower than mammalian meat. CO2 taxes would incentivize this sort of vegetarianism.

>The kernel of a nut is called nut meat, //

It can be, but it's exceedingly rare IME.

I'm trying to remember but can't quite, there are other non-flesh things someone referred to as meat too, after a similar line to your nut example. It's an analogy, you peel back the skin and underneath is the "flesh" (like a peach, or any fruit).

You could say, when carving a pumpkin, "get right in to the meat of it", but it's euphemistic in this case.

English language is crazy.

In addition to what everyone has said about "poultry" being a subset of "meat", if you want to specify mammal flesh in English, you typically have to say "red meat". Of course, there are some who don't consider pork to be red meat, and round and round we go.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poultry