Asklemmy

If life is to continue on this planet simultaneously with ethics, there must be an exception for living beings to morally participate in the food chain as their bodies evolved. This does not excuse our modern industrial system or domesticating animals, it excuses carnivory as it evolved only.

Now you might say "but humans are meant to eat plants" or "humans are omnivores meant to eat a large variety". No, you're deluded. No animal on Earth has every evolved to eat a large variety of foods, plant toxins are too numerous and varied too allow this, that's why humans cook and process most (non-fruit) plants before eating them. Animals we call omnivores are really flexible carnivores that would die on an all plant diet that wasn't fortified or selected by humans from plants outside of the animal's habitat.

Most of the plants we eat today did not exist in our specie's early days, we've bred almost the entire produce section at the grocery store, taking toxic barely digestible plants and changing them into broccoli and such. The plants we eat that did exist only existed in their native habitat, which was not necessarily where humans were. A human in Africa was not eating oranges from China 300k years ago.

Animals that evolved to eat plants have digestive systems oriented around providing an environment for bacteria to break down cellulose, they have adaptations to withstand the specific toxins in the specific plants they evolved to eat. Rabbits have to eat their shit and re-digest it get enough nutrition from plants. Cows have a multi-chambered stomach without an acid barrier in front, horses have to eat constantly. Gorillas are "hind gut digesters" that fart constantly and have massive barrel torsos to fit a digestive system large enough to support the rest of their bodies. Human digestive systems are clearly oriented around digestion of meat and using high-energy density fat to provide the massive amount of energy our brain needs.

But why don't we have claws and fangs like other carnivores? Well, first, many carnivorous animals don't fit this mental image. Second, human ancestors were frugivores going back like 5+ million years that started eating meat via scavenging, this explains our stomach acid on par with buzzards and condors, an acidic stomach is an "acid barrier" bacteria cannot pass. Then we evolved to eat large prey with lots of fat that we hunted by group coordination, ability to throw, and ability to create weapons, ability to direct an animal to fall to it's death. Humans didn't evolve to directly chase and kill animals with our hands and teeth, we're tool masters.

Our bodies do poorly with chronic carb intake, this is the cause of most modern maladies. Our bodies evolved to fuel themselves with saturated fat we eat, small animals with little fat are inappropriate human food (e.g. "rabbit starvation"). In fact, almost all animals are "powered by fat", not by sugar as we're told. Cows are powered by short chain fatty acids produced by bacteria eating the plants the cow consumes.