Everyone and everything dies in the end. It's fairly common among religions to presume that fate is inexorable and already written, with free-will being only an illusion working towards the predestined plan of god(s).
The crucial difference of course is that most of us aren't forced to live day to day in horrifically cruel conditions and then killed about one tenth of the way into our natural lifespan, purely for the pleasure of others.
Cruel conditions aside (which could be argued as morally bad thing), this:
> then killed about one tenth of the way into our natural lifespan, purely for the pleasure of others
does not seem to be rational. Humans and animals don't eat only for the pleasure, then need to eat something in order to live. Your stomach and other organs do not really care about your conscientious choices about what to eat, whether you had to kill for that or not. The natural lifespan is also partially influenced by 'demand' for the species by the predators, so the fact that some animal populations in wildlife have ten times the lifespan can be explained by the fact that those animals do not have humans in their natural habitat. Those which do end up in farms and their natural lifespan is lower.
Anyway, I believe eating meat is so profound on moral debates only because humans are apex predators and no one preys on us. If there were such things then maybe our moral choices about animals could be more compassionate (in order to possibly influence moral choices of the human-eating predators).
It's easy to live a long healthy life without ever eating meat, so, with a few exceptional cases, yeah it's completely a question of what you prefer to eat.
A cow will live about 20 years on average. A dairy cow will live about 4. I'm having a hard time coming up with a definition of "natural" that fits the latter. And for most of human history it was a small fraction of animals in the wild that would up on a human's dinner table (American Buffalo, for example).
It doesn't seem likely that humans are ever going to have to worry about predators again but meat production is a huge contributor to climate change so we are going to pay for our meat habit one way or the other.
