I find the whole premise odd. Meat is fundamentally associated with living creatures. How could you have a concept of meat and simultaneously find it weird that creatures would be composed of it?
Perhaps they've been growing their meat without consciousness in petri-dishes for many thousands of generations and have forgotten the organic origins of meat. Or perhaps most meat in the universe just actually consists of very simple organisms not thought to be conscious (the Great Filter [0] theory considers the possibility that simple life is common but complex life is rare).
It is a translation into English from Alien. Really they meant not meat as such, but some broader category of substances. It was translated as meat because it is the closest match to a category used by aliens.
I think this is the attitude is what the author is trying to parody. It is OUR assumption that intelligence must emanate from something biological, whereas these entities are having sentimental chats with a hydrogen core cluster.
I am not saying stellar formations couldn't be intelligent. What I am saying is that if they are, then they would fall under the umbrella of life and therefore also biological matter. Biological matter is by definition the matter of things which are/were alive.
Obviously their conception of "biological matter" would then be much different and more general from our current conception of "biological matter", but what exactly in that difference makes ours inherently funnier than theirs?
> Man considered with himself, for in a way, Man, mentally, was one. He consisted of a
trillion, trillion, trillion ageless bodies, each in its place, each resting quiet and
incorruptible, each cared for by perfect automatons, equally incorruptible, while the
minds of all the bodies freely melted one into the other, indistinguishable.
They don't just find it weird, they find it deeply offensive; but not so offensive as to want to exterminate us. And they spent at least a century studying us, just to be sure.
There is an undercurrent here that drives the discussion. They know meat well enough not to like it, without knowing of any other thinking meat. So, they know of dumb animals, and animals eating other animals, and consider them disgusting to have around, for reasons obvious to one another, that we might not even be equipped to understand.
But we have exactly their reaction to outgroups of other people. So this is a lampoon of bigots who imagine themselves a cut above some other group. But they're just meat, too, and no more fit for galactic society.