A lot of people in this day and age don't need meat because they have access to such a wide variety of food that they can acquire the needed nutrients they're used to getting from meat, from other food.
So, if you're in this situation, which I imagine 99.9% of Americans are, killing animals for food is wrong. You're killing them for no other reason than "they taste good". At one point in time, for a long time, we didn't have many other options if any at all, and needed to eat animals to survive. It's something we've done for thousands of years. It's practically embedded in our DNA.
I still eat meat and probably won't ever stop, but I feel slightly bad about it and acknowledge that
technically, it's wrong.
Also this:
You also have to keep in mind that most people didn't eat as much meat and eggs and dairy as they do today, because they weren't as affordable.
For thousands of years, most people probably ate 1/ 15th of the amount of animal products they do today. Government subsidies have made animal products so cheap that people can eat them at every meal now.
That didn't used to be the case.
They only people who could afford to eat as many animal products as most Americans eat today were the ultra rich, the kings and queens, ect.
They all got the heart disease, strokes, diabetes, gout, arthritis, kidney stones and cancer that poor people and average wage people couldn't afford to have.
Those were rich people's diseases that even poor people can afford to have today.
The argument that people ate meat for tens of thousands of years and humans got along pretty well health-wise and so it is normal to eat animal products today in mass quantities is flawed.
When you start eating 10 or 20 times as much of something as your ancestors did, it radically changes your health.
People maybe ate meat once or twice a week tops. A lot ate it only once every two or 3 weeks, if not 4.
If people ate meat with the frequency of their ancestors thousands of years ago, heart disease, strokes, arthritis, and gout, along with cancer and other diseases would become much more rare again.