Oh they don't in-general. I know how you harvest :) And we've spoken about how I let my greens overwinter after they go to seed and they grow new heads from the old growth of the previous year and I harvest some there without ever killing anything. But we both know that you and I are exceptions to the rule that most people tend to completely dig up any cruciferous vegetable they harvest (or the farm-worker does).

There's definitely a spectrum to it though when it comes to fruit/nuts. For example, with many fruits we could say that the seeds are what are "alive" in some state, whether dormant or not, while the body is not. For example, we generally eat the bodies of apples and avocados and not the seed. The seed would be the thing living in a very loosely termed state of suspended animation. But if we mishandle the seed(s) by throwing them in the trash or in somewhere they can't grow, then we've effectively killed the ones that didn't die en-route to us. Other creatures tend to eat these sorts of things and poop the seed and the seed grows. We generally don't fulfill that role as we (again, most people) don't let our poop hit the soil and generate new life. No, we send the seed to die a watery death.

Similarly, with nuts, those are most definitely things living in a state of suspended animation. The trees that produce them generally know that most will not survive, so they create a lot of them at once. But that in and of itself is evidence that the tree knows that mass murder is occurring on some level and attempts to account for it. As I said in my original post, I believe we should eat these things not because they aren't alive or don't have a desire to live, but because they are the most capable of dealing with our eating of them on a large scale. It's a form of harm reduction.

I agree. In using that framing, I'd argue that in a sense we're all actors who get to choose how we play. And a lot of people choose to build mental structures that support a tremendous amount of guilt and/or accountability avoidance through feigned ignorance.

To the former, I tend to ask the question, "What would happen if I did nothing?" As it regards many plants, lets use lettuce as an example, it grows to certain point then flowers and provides for insects, then it seeds. The seeds fall and more lettuce grows. If I cover half the lettuce in shade, it bends towards the side with more light. For fruit tree seeds, if I plant them in the right conditions, they grow. If I put them in a poor situation, they die. If they can transcend the poor situation I put them in, they will live albeit with signs of stress or trauma via scars or thinness in certain areas. It's truly not all that different than anything else that we would say lives. I think what I've attempted to express in other posts here is that even the idea of the universe of experience is something we can communicate and express to each other but cannot do so with other creatures. We cannot know what they do or don't experience except through poor inference. However, some people choose to use inference to assume they experience nothing while I choose to use to to the contrary. This is not currently a provable thing. And it bothers me that an entire culture has been built on the assumption that not only it is currently provable, but has been proven. So as I've said in other posts, given the unprovability one way or the other, what evidence is available to form an opinion of what might be the case? A lot of folks seem to use human and/or animal physiology to explain a phenomena that we still cannot fully grasp in humans and try to map it to other species. I find this notion to be terribly off-base given what we may deduce from the size of the known universe. But that then leads to a whole 'nother conversation.

Towards the second question, my basic answer is I don't know. The more complicated answer is no if I'm using the conventional definition of alive that fits for a lot of biological things but not viruses. It again gets back to Godel's incompleteness theorem. The very definitions we use for things like "alive" or "conscious" necessarily create edge cases that do not fit in either category squarely. And since I know these paradoxes exist and cannot be solved at the level of the words themselves, I know that there may be a further abstraction that can resolve the seemingly paradoxical. But I don't know what those are at the moment...so I say again, I don't know. And truthfully, nobody does. But people find comfort in accepting certain definitions without ever thinking about the paradoxical edge cases.

EDIT: I appreciate the questions :)

The literal definition is: 1: responsive to or conscious of sense impressions https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentient

You're doing exactly what I accuse most people of doing with things they eat. You even tacitly concede that it can't be proven that they aren't. Yet you then proceed to argue that they aren't because you can't prove it. That's an assumption. The way in which this

And even if they were (they aren't), you couldn't compare plant "sentience" to animal sentience.

sentence proves my exact point about the farcicity of proclaiming facts around other being's states by use of anthropocentric reasoning with anthropocentric limits of perception without acknowledging them as actual constraints worth accepting with humility. But go on about how "we" can't compare one to the other, I'm interested to read your case.