I think you and the parent poster missed the intention behind what I was saying. Not that we should have a nihilistic approach, but that the baseline for these conversations should be to assume suffering is a universal part of life and we should be focussing on how to minimize the amount of direct suffering each of us cause in our day to day life, rather than worrying about which suffers more, plants or animals.

It's not comparable, they're two entirely different forms of life, suffice to say, they both suffer, discussions around how people can directly if not reduce suffering mitigate it.

Telling people to only eat vegetables because suffering animals or it's cool eat meat because suffering plants is an utterly pointless topic of debate.

A more useful topic for debate if we're going to talk about such things would be maybe something like mitigating the suffering on both plants and animals through industrialized agriculture by returning to small scale production of both. Or something like that anyway.

The article as framed just didn't really talk in any useful way about the issue.

Which, if you are serious about ending suffering, a plant or animal grown in a small scale way where it can be looked after properly is going to suffer significantly less, even if it inevitably will die to feed somebody.