It would certainly shine a light on why people almost exclusively talk about meat when talking to vegans. If “meat” is being used to mean any and all dietary animal products, or even just including dairy and eggs, not just animal flesh, then it would explain a lot of behavior I’ve experienced.
I think vegans know, that all you hear from non-vegans is talk about meat. Trying to provoke us by saying they like/love meat, or meat is tasty, or that they’re eating meat, or in cases of the internet, people (farmers, homesteaders) informing us that they’ll be personally slaughtering animals in our name and attributing blame to us for that action. But even in less hostile cases, talking about how much they would struggle to give up meat, or debating the ethics, environmentalism, health & other factors purely related to meat production & consumption, defending their own consumption of meat or others’, while seemingly ignoring what a vegan is and treating us as if we’re vegetarians.
Ever since being vegan, it’s been a weird notable experience for me that everyone talks to me about “meat”. When I was vegetarian (by my understanding of the definition at that time, which just meant no consumption of animal flesh/bodies), no one ever talked about it. As soon as I’m vegan? “Oh, a vegan. Meat, meat, meat.” It would make more sense to me if people said that when I was vegetarian, and then started talking about dairy, eggs or leather to me all the time when I went vegan. But I digress. I do have theories, like maybe the existence of people who don’t use any animals with an ethical association triggers them more, and maybe that causes them to default to asserting their defiant attitude to continue consuming the “product” they’re most attracted to, meat (though you also hear very frequently “I could never give up cheese”).
Btw- “meat” isn’t what I would rather say. I don’t even like that word anymore, at least when used for animal flesh, because it feels like a euphemism & helps distance consumers from what “it” is. Plus, it denies the existence of plant-based meat or its meat status (nvm how meat just meant food originally, including plants). But I’ll call it meat for these purposes or clarity and because we’re discussing how language is used.
To bring it back to language and the word meat and what people mean by it, I have no idea why people use the phrasing they do. Some people told me things like gelatin and rennet aren’t vegetarian (even though many dairy products contain it, meaning I was never really vegetarian), and a lot of people say fish aren’t meat. Not much rhyme or reason lol, at least it seems inconsistent across different people who use the words. I’m sure some people are generalizing all animal products when they say “meat”, while others probably just mean animal flesh, and others still would mean the flesh of land animals, excluding marine animals.