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It's not about "all life" but about "all sentient life". Only beings that are able have pleasant and unpleasant experience should be considered. If something (living or not) cannot experience suffering then you can't harm it, by definition.
Sentience is studied scientifically. It cannot be stated with absolute certainty but scientists have good sets of criteria and experiences that helps identify it. With the current knowledge it's almost certain that all mammals are sentient, like us. Fishes and birds are also very likely to be sentient. Some species of insects are probably sentient while others may not be. And plants are likely not sentient.
But even if all living things are sentient, it doesn't change very much. Speciesism means treating beings differently only because they belong to some specific species. There are good reasons to treat different beings differently but they should be based on the beings' interests, not their species (and studying sentience helps identifying these interests). It's very likely that we do less harm by growing plants than by breeding animals. And even if it was the same amount of suffering we would still do less harm by avoiding eating animals because breeding them to eat them actually requires more plants than just eating plants. We should seek to minimise suffering and avoiding eating animal is a good way to do that.
I don't agree on your analysis of sentience. The term sentience has no concrete meaning, so how can you base your moral judgements on this? Plenty of plant life has senses and are able to "feel" things.
This follows no definition of harm that I am aware of, and I do not agree with it. If you are not aware that you have been harmed, you are still harmed. So you should also be able to be harmed even when you could not be aware of it. Therefore, I do not accept this sentiocentric (just learned this word) argument.
And this is one of those reasons. A human's (or any other animal's) continued existence is mutually exclusive with the food's continued existence. If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans.
I've heard this tired argument that plants and sentient mammals have the same capacity for suffering so many times. I think it is a disingenuous way of excusing the suffering your choices support.
A plant does not grieve when it's offspring is removed from it. It does not have fear, or joy. Plants don't play with each other and bond.
Yes. They communicate, and react to stimuli. So does a computer, but neither are sentient
I don't think it is disingenuous at all. You may draw the line at sentience, but you have provided no argument for why this is correct. Why must we consider the harm exactly up to sentience? Why must we only consider conscious pain resulting from harm, and not nociception? It is easy to dismiss people as disingenuous, especially if you don't really have any arguments for your case.
I don't see how there can exist any good arguments for where to draw the line, which is why it bothers me when people claim the moral high ground, but cannot offer any arguments on why their behaviour is most morally correct. You can say "reduce suffering of sentient beings", and most people probably agree, but I think it is completely natural to prioritise yourself, your family and friends and your species above other animals. So how much suffering of yourself is as important as the suffering of a chicken. Probably substantially less. I don't think you will ever convince anyone of your beliefs by simply denying that their weightings of human-to-animal suffering is wrong and yours is right.