I'm a meat eater. Let's say I want to significantly reduce my meat consumption. I'm used to eating meals that are meat centric. Growing up most dinners would be a meat, a starch, and some vegetables. The easiest way for me to reduce my meat consumption would be to replace the meat with something else. Should I replace my chicken with mushrooms, tempeh, tofu, something else? How firm should the tofu be? What's the deal with pressing your tofu? Maybe I'll just stick to chicken. If you want to encourage me to stop eating animals giving me an easy, clear substitution, like chick'n, seems like a reasonable thing to do. Would you prefer people ate chicken or chick'n? Would you say the two are morally equivalent? Would I be a horrible person if I said I won't eat animals anymore because it's unethical while still viewing them as very tasty?

Indeed, and thinking that

> the end goal of more widespread veganism is actually undermined by the existence of meat substitutes

as the GP says and OP agrees with, does not make any sense because offering a substitute that allows more meat eaters to ease into vegan eating can (from a vegan point of view) be a strictly morally superior action over meat eaters continuing to eat meat.

It's an interesting perspective, I have to acknowledge. I'm viewing it from an extreme outside position (I literally kill and eat wild animals as a hobby), but an interesting comparison I can see might be to cannibalism. There's nothing practically wrong with making a facsimile human leg out of pork, calling it "I can't believe it's not human flesh", and selling it in a grocery store...but I mean, most people would find it distasteful and upsetting. They're not engaging in cannibalism of course, but the ritual of cannibalism, the idea of cannibalism, is unsettling in its own right to most people. If someone said "man, I wish I could eat people" unironically, I might not want to attend their next barbecue.

Your view seems perfectly consistent to me -- if you believe killing animals is morally equivalent to killing humans, then meat eating could be considered morally equivalent to cannibalism. Even fake human leg is still creepy to such a non-cannibal -- even fake turkey thus may be creepy to a vegan.

Perhaps it's because of the variety of reasons people are vegans -- many aren't truly abstaining from eating animal meat because they think it's wrong. Some are vegan for health reasons, or for environmental reasons, or because it's fashionable in their social tribe, or because they vaguely agree with anti-animal-eating philosophy but still internalize contradictory opinions. I know multiple adventurous vegans who would be ok eating roadkill deer if I served it to them (from their perspective, it does not contradict their belief that killing animals for meat is wrong -- it died in an accident, after all). But they would have a different opinion if I served them roadkill human, even if I showed them the human's death was purely accidental.

That reminds me of another cruelty-free animal product: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eignblunzn

A blood sausage made from human blood. Nothing wrong with it ethically, but upsetting enough for performance art.