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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.
It does have a concrete meaning. Scientific papers usually define what they are studying. For example the Review of the Evidence of Sentience in Cephalopod Molluscs and Decapod Crustaceans has a definition. It also has criteria to evaluate it.
Having reactions to external stimulus is different from having feelings. Feelings require consciousness, or sentience.
Even having nociceptors doesn't mean you can experience pain (see the above review in the "Defining sentience" section).
Yes you can be harmed without knowing it, but it still must have a negative effect on you. If something can't have negative (or positive) experience then how can you say it's being harmed?
If I throw a rock to the ground, it doesn't make sense to say I harmed the rock, because a rock can't experience being harmed. Being sentient is having this ability to experience being harmed. That's why I meant it's by definition that non sentient beings can't be harmed. The word exists to distinguish what can and cannot experience harm (among other feelings).
But having food doesn't necessarily mean harming something. And even if it does, different foods have different level of harm. We can choose the foods that minimize harm.
Indeed meat eaters don't really have good reasons to exclude human meat.
When I say concrete meaning I mean that sentience is an abstract concept of which we can observe evidence of, but we cannot define clearly what it is. In the report you mentioned, you will see that they give 8 criteria for scientific evidence of sentience, i.e. these do not define what sentience is, but they are criteria that we presume sentient beings should satisfy. They even require several pages to explain the complications of how to define sentience and how to observe it.
I do admit that the extent of study on sentience of animals is greater than I initially thought, and I can see that one might have reasonably sufficient knowledge to judge, with some certainty, which life organism might be sentient (under definitions such as the one used in the report). But it seems to me nearly all animals fall under this umbrella of "some level of sentience", I found this paper highlighting that many insects seem to have cognitive abilities, and might be capable of feeling harm. So to what extent must this go, can you not swat a mosquito in fear of its suffering?
But a rock is not alive, there is no evolutionary force driving its interest, as with all other living organisms. A sea cucumber has no proper nervous system (as I understand from a quick search), and thus could not "feel" pain. Yet, if you cut one in half, I would say that you have harmed it. But this is really just discussing the semantics of the word "harm", the real point is that you are doing something to the organism that goes against its natural interests.
Yes they do, speciesism. A quite natural reason.