Meaningless distinction. Poorly stored fruits will rot just like poorly stored meat. There's plenty of decent arguments to be made, no need to defend a terrible one.
I agree with the sentiment but I have a small metaphorical bone to pick which is that nothing is any more or less evolved than anything else. This phrasing helps perpetuate a misunderstanding of evolution, which is surprising because NP is quite well educated.
It's very obvious that she's using one of the multiple meanings of "evolution" outside of biological evolution. I don't get where you're coming from here; Portman does know what biological evolution is.
Outside of biological evolution it is still somewhat of a misnomer to say that something is more or less evolved than something else. Again - I get what she is saying and I agree, but when I hear someone say ‘less evolved’ it comes across as a sort of sloppy way of describing something.
How do you verify what you eat isn't "factory farmed"? Do you eat meat, eggs, dairy, etc. out at restaurants ever? Get store-bought foods created on a production line that have those products? If your barometer says "free range means not factory farmed", then your barometer for this is likely extremely faulty.
A friend of mine has a farm and adopts the occasional "free-range" chicken (which just means there is some outside part accessible from the cage). They are so heavily bred that they kept falling over because their breasts were too large, so they wouldn't move much.
This is always what I think about when I read free range. Basically a chicken too fat to move that can look outside an open window.
99% of meat consumed in the US is factory farmed. If you bought it in a supermarket, it came from intensified animal agriculture, regardless of the feel-good marketing language.
It's always so depressingly funny to me that the default response by meat eaters to being presented with the unfathomable cruelty of factory farming is some combination of denouncing it while still:
saying they don't participate in it but failing to explain how – despite how incredibly difficult and meticulous that would be (arguably somehow moreso than a plant-based diet)
saying they try not to participate but never explaining what "trying" means or making any indication of concrete goals
or elaborating only to show through regurgitating industry buzzwords that they live in a fantasy land born from a cocktail of wishful thinking and corporate astroturfing.
... And then, as you point out, after all that, the amount of meat in the US not produced via factory farming is functionally a rounding error. Someone's lying to someone here, and my hot take (as someone who used to say these same things) is that it's carnists to themselves.
We're also constantly being threatened with illness, debilitation, premature death, and catastrophe, which will undoubtably be seen as archaic some day.