I think that for vegans, "sentience" is a meaningless woo-woo word, like when a Christian talks about immortal souls. They use it because its origin in science fiction gives it the veneer of empiricism, but its all hollow with subjectivity.

Though it's been 10 or 15 years, Wikipedia used to have a page that listed 6 criteria for biological life (but it became politically inconvenient). The same ones we all used to learn in school. One of them was "responds to stimuli"...

If there is an objective definition of "sentience", then the only one I've ever heard is "responds to stimuli". Which plants (and even the most primitive unicellular organisms) meet. And if "sentience" doesn't mean this, then I challenge anyone to come up with another better one.

So, to make a long story short, I like eating sentient things, and I'm not ever going to stop. And it tastes even better when it seems to cause distress to vegans.

honestly, I don't know.

Sentience is consciousness. I can't imagine what it must be like to be a plant, the plants existence is too different from mine for me to imagine it.

It would be like trying to imagine life in a 12-dimensional space - I'm a human, with a human consciousness, living in 3-dimensional space, that makes sense to me.

I can empathize, and to a certain degree imagine what it must be like to be a dog or a cat or a cow, because they're very similar to me in how they work. They move, they eat, they poop, they reproduce sexually. They have similar mammalian feelings and similar DNA (well, more similar than the plant).

But for all I know a plant, say the spinach I had a few days ago, could be just as conscious, albeit in a way that I absolutely cannot comprehend, and my ripping off the plant's leaves to eat them may be, to the plant, every bit as painful as someone ripping out my lungs to eat them.

It sounds like you don't have a problem with killing animals. Is it just the living conditions? If we replaced factory farms with more ethical practices, would that solve the problem for you?