A few coworkers refer to cows as giant dogs. Then they sell them to be butchered.

As a new parent the agriculture propaganda from the very start is crazy! Look at this happy farmer and his cute pig its so happy in its mudpit, what a wholesome picture!

If you're eating meat, then you're contributing to the death of all of those plants that had to feed the animals you're eating. Even if you grant plants sentience, veganism is still the more ethical option.

fingers crossed we get star trek replicator food asap

You're conflating very different processes here. While there is the hard problem of consciousness and we can't falsify ideas like panpsychism consider a few things.

If you amputate my hand and press on it it will emit nervous signals. Does anyone feel pain? If you destroy most of my brain but keep me alive, then stab me almost all the nervous activity and hormones etc associated with injury will happen. Is there any reason to believe there is any pain felt?

I would say no in both cases, pain is not emitting nervous impulses, or something that precedes releasing endorphins and inflammatory factors etc. Pain cannot even necessarily be reliably correlated with stress markers like heart rate, and in the case of phantom limb syndrome pain can even be associated with a complete lack of signals.

There are good evolutionary reasons to exhange information and resources, even unwittingly. Apparently some bacteria in my tummy are in conversation with my body constantly but I'm not at all aware or actively participating in that. Maintaing pain only really seems to offer advantage if you can do something about it, while it's possible for things to exist accidentally it's not like grass can move to places without mowers or trees shade themselves. In all animals with nervous systems the nervous systems are the vastly most expensive thing to keep alive. In fact there are a few creatures who when entering an immobile stage of life rapidly digest their own (a good explaination for both tenure and retirees!).

Plants don't have rapid long distance communication in their bodies, they don't have centralised organs, they don't even have anything approaching the levels of activity we associate with the simplest nervous systems.

It's probably best to think of grass "screaming" as skin cells "screaming" for resources to make more melanin when exposed to UV. Or lymph nodes "screaming" when releasing hormones to heal a wound and stuff. This is all vastly below the level of consciousness.

Or whatever, embrace panpsychism, like the invisible dragon in my garage nobody can prove it false /shrug. Animals eat plants though and thermo law 2 is a thing so even panpsychics minimise suffering by being plant based.