Steak

[Whateverist]

I've never felt compelled to seek a justification. It is only from the point of view that sees us as rational beings that the idea even comes up.

Well, we are rational beings. Just because lower animals apparently don't have the capacity to reason isn't a reason to stop being rational. You can't just try to shut off your rational faculties so you can engage in some activity guilt free. If I were to take your argument and take it to the absurd (argument ad absurdum), I can justify any act such as human murder, rape, slavery etc. Your application of your argument is purely arbitrary and inconsistent.

Okay I agree that we ought not shut down our rational minds when it comes to meat eating. But I'm only concerned with minimizing pain and anxiety for food animals, not with killing them for food.

There are other and better reasons to limit meat eating though. Much more acreage of arable land are required to eat a steak vs vegetables and grains. Since I value living on a planet with a diversity of life forms, it matters to me not to squander resources. If you extrapolate our western diet to the rest of the world it probably isn't even possible, let alone sustainable. So we really should consider just how selfish we want to be about this.

Vegetables are not conscious. They don't think, perceive, have desires, etc. They're little different than rocks in that regard.

I don't know this. Plants are alive but so foreign to us that empathy fails. They do respond purposefully to their environments in response to various threats and opportunities. That response looks mechanistic to us, but I suppose those who argue against free will think something similar about us. Plants don't have animal consciousness, given. Do they have no experience of their environment? I don't know. (Doesn't stop me from eating them. Pass the asparagus.)

It is important to remember that we are animals ourselves and therefore part of the dance of eating and being eaten.

This is a fallacious argument of appeal to nature. Just because we're animals and part of the food chain does not justify that we can willingly be part of that system.

I think there is something gone wrong in losing sight of the fact that we too are animals. I agree that saying we are animals should not endorse any and all actions for which we can find an analogue in the natural world. But if you fail to take into account that our rational minds are an add-on to a mammalian organism, you may fall prey to another fallacy: thinking that our rational capacity should be as impartial as that of a computer when in fact we are embodied animals with emotional and instinctual layers as well.