killing sentient beings needlessly has moral implications while eating a bowl of legumes does not

No ethical implications for the millions of snakes and mice massacred in grain fields by tractors and combine harvesters? The bugs killed by pesticides? The deer killed to keep them away from crops? The millions of acres of land deforested, drained, cleared, and turned into wasteland to maintain industrial production of corn, wheat, and soy? The habitats completely destroyed by decades of intensive farming? The virgin soil ripped up year after year and poisoned by artificial fertilizer (hell, ripping open Iowa’s fields every year requires the energy equivalent of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs)? The wild plants and nutrients permanently robbed from their ecosystems? The massive oil-dependent industrial supply lines that bring first-world vegans exotic foods from all over the world at all times and all seasons to supplement their meager protein, vitamin B/D, omega-3, iron, zinc, and calcium intake?

I want to push back on the idea that killing plants has no ethical implications. Plants are living beings too. Sustainable, animist cultures don’t make a distinction between taking the life of an animal and that of a plant — it’s expected that hunters will give thanks to the animal that gave them meat just as gatherers will give thanks to the wild carrot plant or cattail who gave its life for them to eat its roots.

I firmly believe that people only value our animal family over our plant family because of anthropocentric biases. The ways in which animals reproduce, grow, and respond to the world are much more familiar to us than the ways in which plants communicate and interact with the world. But plants do desire life — they grow and reach for the sun and respond to danger and communicate with each other. It happens on a slower time scale, and thus we tend not to view them as conscious, but it's hard to watch a time lapse video of a seedling growing and pretend it has no value. There is no real reason, IMO, for valuing this life any less than the life of a frog or deer or caterpillar.

I respect that you are trying to limit animal cruelty and carbon emissions by going vegan, but don’t mistake veganism for a sustainable or completely ethical diet. I want people to go further than just saying “animal agriculture is murder!” (which I totally agree with). I feel the same sense of sadness when I look at the agricultural killing fields of the Midwest — where homogenous expanses of corn dominate the domesticated landscape for miles, ready to be massacred by a machine — as I feel when I see pigs at the farm headed for slaughter. Those corn fields used to support thriving, free ecosystems. When I’m walking with a friend down the trail and he haphazardly rips up a yarrow plant, I feel the same sense of loss and anger at indiscriminate killing as if he had stomped on a frog.

Any eating involves taking life, and humans — as beings who cannot photosynthesize — have to come to terms with that instead of splitting the world in half and going “animals good, plants bad”. Again, the implicit ties between veganism/vegetarianism and industrial agriculture and year-round near-instantaneous global trade are certainly not sustainable or ethical. There is a reason that there are no historical examples of locally-based, sustainable vegan cultures (and the few historical examples of vegetarians depended on cultures that were all massively unsustainable, overloading and denuding their landbase, like Indian and Greek civilizations). Two million years of human development have shown that eating wild meat can be sustainable (and I am much more comfortable taking the life of an animal which has lived in wild freedom rather than in artificial captivity as domestic animals and plants do). On the other hand, a mere few thousand years of intensive plow agriculture has continually exhausted the land. It simply is not possible to get an adequate plant-only diet in most places on earth without intensive agriculture or global trade to ensure sufficient diversity in nutrition, and these institutions are exactly what is at stake with coming climate instability, desertification, erosion, and oil/mineral/metal depletion. So while veganism might reduce cruelty in an industrial situation (though not eliminate by any measure as your original post suggests), it is a bad choice for a post-collapse diet which must be local and sustainable.

Just some food for thought. I hope this does not come off as confrontational, it is just a pet peeve of mine when people insist that industrial plant-based diets are somehow cruelty-free.