Morally speaking, I don't see a difference between eating plants and animals. Both are alive. Just because plants express their distress in ways that don't trigger an emotional response in humans doesn't make it morally superior.

Environmentally speaking, yes I agree, eating plants is a more sustainable practice /rant

Plants are vanishingly unlikely to actually feel distress, so you are wrong to characterise animal and plant "distress" as the same. They may have survival mechanisms and reactions to being harvested, but this is different from having a central nervous system. There's also no way to know for sure that any given animal does feel distress, but we can make educated judgments, the same as we do for other humans.

>Morally speaking, I don't see a difference between eating plants and animals. Both are alive.

Really? I mean, people are alive as well. Is that on the same moral level as well? This just seems like a very specious argument...

That's a good point. Reflecting, my moral compass frowns upon cannibalism, but I haven't fleshed out the reasons why. Hat tip for punching a hole in my argument

You made it specious, putting words in their mouth. They claim that, of the things they eat, plants and animals are morally equivalent. You added "but People!"

There is a HitchHikers Guide restaurant that doesn't server vegetables - because intelligent vegetable people outlawed it. They just eat sentient meat animals that offer themselves to the patrons. They even kill themselves.

The argument was that because both are alive they are morally equivalent. This is specious because humans are also alive, and are clearly not equivalent to either unless you accept that it would be acceptable to kill and eat humans. It's not as stupid an argument as "but People!", it's pointing out that they are neglecting other variables, such as the capacity for experience.

> They just eat sentient meat animals that offer themselves to the patrons. They even kill themselves.

If a human were to do this today, we would question their mental health. If it were a sentient cow, most people would see no problem with it. These views seem at odds with each other, no?

Equivalently moral or immoral? Put another way, do you find both to be wrong, or both to be equally acceptable.

Equivalently moral

Maybe one day we'll be eating meat grown from trees...or 3D printed meat.

It's already been demonstrated that meat can be grown in vitro, and it's a very active area of research:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_meat

Perhaps far future, but I don't see this happening in < 100 years.

It will take exactly as long as it takes for lab grown meat to become viable. When that happens it becomes very easy for the general population to view eating meat from animals as evil.

Expanding...

meat:vegetarianism :: gas:electric cars

Meat is a dense carrier of protein and other nutrients (energy) and we need to build up infrastructure, break down inertial barriers, and have some technological breakthroughs before the current things secedes to the better thing.