>> Nature is cruel and uncaring

These are not the same thing. You're interpreting "uncaring" as inherently cruel, but it's not; just uncaring.

Nature is not cruel, don't anthropomorphize it. Nature has no free will or emotions or intelligence. It is indeed uncaring, because it doesn't have the capacity to care. Nature is neither good nor bad. It just is.

Whether or not it is moral or ethical to eat animals is an arbitrary decision made by emotional beings. There is no right or wrong there, only what people feel.

Someone who is vegetarian or vegan for moral reasons is making a choice, not living some sort of universal truth. Someone who eats meat is also making a choice.

Someone who eats meat but criticizes others for eating the "wrong" kind of meat is a hypocrite.

Certainly the way we farm animals for food can be sustainable or unsustainable. I wish people would focus more on that aspect than pointing fingers and making it a moral issue.

You really need to define "good" in this sentence. How can nature move beyond nature?

Literally picking a fight with Nature, what a trope.

What will they think of next man versus self? What if the thing that man creates in his hubris isn’t actually better?

There are plenty of great moral arguments for why animals (or humans) shouldn't be eaten unless they died of purely natural causes. Factory farming is just the strongest to argue against and the main source of both suffering and death, so it's what people focus on. If factory farming were abolished overnight, vegans and vegetarians would (rightly) immediately move onto hunting and small farms.

(I personally think there's nothing wrong with home/farm egg laying as long as the animals are taken care of well and the male ones aren't killed. That's why I'm vegetarian rather than vegan.)

Nature can be harsh and cruel indeed.

I think we agree the term “natural” should almost always be questioned and unpacked. It often serves as a rhetorical device instead of a nugget of wisdom.

Dismissing an idea solely for being “unnatural” is premature. Or vice versa.

At the same time, there is wisdom in being curious about weirdness that seems nonsensical. Some weird things have a backstory and even rationale that is non-obvious. Or maybe their benefit is subtle or hidden to those who only look narrowly. (Chesterton’s Fence)

Slight topic shift, but conceptually related: I hope the slash and burn “reformers” we’re seeing have the humility to recognize that institutional knowledge is diffused in ways they do not understand as outsiders. It doesn’t grow back quickly. Just because Chaos Monkey works at Netflix doesn’t mean it works for Congressionally-authorized government agencies. Rapid destruction can be far worse than measured reprioritization.

I get it though — as a programmer I sometimes prefer to throw out a previous code base and start a-fresh, and this can help with clearing out technical debt. Such a rewrite is risky though, as is well known. Besides, technical abstractions are often orthogonal to domain knowledge and expertise.

I absolutely love this characterization of modern discourse.

Eh, not sure I buy that interpretation. Ensuring that the meat you eat only comes from ethical sources is hard, especially if you eat at restaurants, or if you eat food that other people have cooked. (Do you really want to be that person who goes to someone's house for dinner and on-the-spot refuses to eat because their host isn't sure of the provenance of the meat?) It can also be significantly more expensive. It would be entirely reasonable to decide to give up meat rather than deal with all that, if it matters to you.

And on top of that it does make a statement about one's values. Even if someone was ok with doing all that homework, they might want to give up meat as a form of protest against all the factory animal farming out there.

Best course of action imo is watch yourself in that moment, understand that people are going above and beyond for you even though they don't fully understand you, they are trying to accept you. I'd go to the bathroom, try to reason with myself that no animals are being killed specifically for you, the accidental touch won't give any flavour to your dish and it's all in your head. There's no ethical issues whatsoever in that situation.

If after that you still can't make yourself eat it then you should apologize, explain it to them, tell them you tried to make yourself but couldn't and I bet you'd get a LOT more sympathy.