> For sure - it's just that the word "meat" ruins it for me for the reasons I wrote, and "flesh" would only be minimally better. I guess "biological tissue" just wouldn't have the same ring to it.
If we extend the setting a bit such that multicellular life is vanishingly rare, you could replace "meat" with "scum", and add a few more lines about mobile chunks of scum, chunks reproducing by extruding a smaller mobile chunk, chunks of scum growing by absorbing other chunks and then inefficiently breaking them down to the molecular level and building more scum from scratch instead of just repurposing the absorbed scum, thinking maybe the planet is intelligent with an adjunct distributed network of chunky-scum-based manufacturing, storage, and compute units, etc.
If we extend the setting a bit such that multicellular life is vanishingly rare, you could replace "meat" with "scum", and add a few more lines about mobile chunks of scum, chunks reproducing by extruding a smaller mobile chunk, chunks of scum growing by absorbing other chunks and then inefficiently breaking them down to the molecular level and building more scum from scratch instead of just repurposing the absorbed scum, thinking maybe the planet is intelligent with an adjunct distributed network of chunky-scum-based manufacturing, storage, and compute units, etc.