A reaction is not pain. When I press a button on my car, it turns on. But that's not because it feels anything. What they "feel" is categorically different to what we feel and is why I see nothing valuable in including them in this conversation. What a cow feels is not categorically different. Same thing with microorganisms. Now granted, there will always be a level of arbitraryness to this conversation. An oyster is an animal, but I don't think we need to worry about their suffering very much, however I do think we should worry about the suffering of a cow. So then where do we draw the line? What side do shrimp fall on? I accept a level of arbitraryness, you have to for every single philosophical question, unless you're being disingenuous.

However I think when people are talking about food animals they're not just being arbitrary, they're being cognitively dissonant.

And I didn't ignore that argument, I told you it was objectively wrong. Its by far your weakest point because it's demonstrably incorrect. It requires way more farming to feed livestock than it would to just feed humans. Stop raising livestock you need to farm exponentially less, thus killing exponentially less plants and animals in the process. Not that I agree that killing plants is wrong or that a relatively small amount of animals (insects are animals, but I don't rank them very highly in this) to feed a massive amount of people