> You are consuming it in a condensed secondary form (one tropic level up).

I always find this is looked over and a double standard. You can raise an animal on a diet of anything along with medication, drugs, and supplements, and advocates will label the beef/chicken/pork product as "meat" and "natural" as if it was a single pure ingredient. But then if a non-meat alternative like a burger is mentioned, every individual ingredient used gets scrutinized, even if that ingredient is often fed to farm animals like soy or grain.

This, in my opinion, is the most important point in the thread and the clearest expression of it. For purposes of this argument, meat is conceived of essentially as a single ingredient, and the raising of the animal in artificial conditions, on hormones, fed on processed food with its associated environmental footprints are kind of sidestepped, while alternatives have to answer for every step in the chain of production.

That mapping seems correct to me, as a lot of the objections here are free-floating one-offs that presume these background assumptions more so than they are apples to apples comparisons intent on clearly comparing them in totality.