Out of interest, how do we decide if something is a torture? Imagine a machine that’s broken, does it feel pain? Say, you drop your iPhone with Siri on the floor. Is it cruel? Isn’t a lobster the same kind of machine, just a biological one?
We can say that insects don't have the brain capacity to be conscious. I'm pretty sure we might say the same about many fish species.
Think about how useless our intuitions proved to be when it comes to other phenomena like gravity or electromagnetism. It took a while to (kind of) figure these out despite them being easier to measure than consciousness.
W.r.t. fish: they act in a way you'd expect a creature to act if they felt pain. If they had vocal cords and thus the ability to scream, would you agree that they feel pain? Same applies to insects.
I guess it also applies at some level to animals and insects - we can assume they feel some of the basic things as us, but their "understanding" of it might be quite different.
> This is all disgraceful, and if we can't at least respect the animals we eat, we probably don't deserve to eat them.
This will sound completely bananas to someone who doesn't live by the same principles as you do.