Introduction

Let's start with a widely accepted definition:

Meat is animal flesh eaten as food.

Does that definition bother you? It bothers me.

Imprecise

I cook meat (as defined above) often; I eat meat even more often. Yet in neither case do I tend to think about meat as animal flesh. In fact, I would rather not think of the meat as animal flesh; that thought upsets me.

Unintuitive boundaries

This definition of meat includes fried spider and excludes Impossible Burger, a binary that very much contradicts my intuition. How can burgers and sashimi and the aforementioned fried spider fall under the same umbrella, yet Impossible Burger gets left in the rain?¹

I'll hazard a guess that if I gave you an Impossible Burger you would think

What did not-quite-an-expert mix into this patty?

rather than

What non-meat did not-quite-an-expert sandwich between these buns?

If not, I'd otherwise guess that you would associate Impossible Burger much more closely to beef than fried spider to beef.

Duck test

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it's probably a duck.

By analogy,

If it looks like meat, smells like meat, and tastes like meat, then it's probably meat.

I stated before I tend not to think of animal flesh when cooking and eating meat. Instead, like I imagine most people do, I think of the look, smell, and taste of meat. I like the duck test analogy as a more intuitive definition. However, it obviously suffers from cyclicity.

Conclusion

If we define meat as “animal flesh eaten as food,” it works well in the context of the ethics of food. Some people feel so disgusted by the thought of eating another animal that they don't.

However, I find that definition doesn't work well in the context of cooking and eating food. In all situations I can conceive off the top of my head, we would do better in just specifying the type of meat. I don't just want any meat in my burger; keep your fried spiders for later.