It is a personality trait I identify with, made more stark because my wife is quite the opposite.
IMHO, good fiction asks us to suspend our disbelief to create a novel setting and unique circumstances. Having accepted that, we still expect the world to behave according to its own logic.
Bad fiction abuses the suspension of disbelief, and it rubs people like me (and the gp) wrong.
In this case, it is a silly short story, so it doesn't bother me much. On the other hand, complaining about TV shows and movies can practically become a sport with the the right company.
For example, I quite enjoyed the Netflix movie Spectral, right up until the end, where they tried too hard to explain the mystery and violated things that I had not suspended my disbelief about. The TV show Fringe had a ton of these moments as well. Some were easy to accept, some episodes were painful to get through.
As a (former?) physicist, I very much prefer to try to imagine what would need to be changed in our rules so the presented world would be possible, rather than "ok I accept this little change but everything else has to work as close as possible to our own universe"
Agreed. In this case we could infer that perhaps members of this alien species are either not all super intelligent, not super knowledgeable or at least not super knowledgeable in all areas. In this case, however, the the usage of "meat" here is intended to be a commentary on humanity of some sort. If the idea is that "aliens would just see humans as meat" then I do in fact think that point is somewhat diluted by GP's comment. "Meat" is not really an accurate word here, unless we take it as it's broader meaning of "food"[0], at which point "food" itself would be a better word.
