These are not the same thing. You're interpreting "uncaring" as inherently cruel, but it's not; just uncaring.
Whether or not it is moral or ethical to eat animals is an arbitrary decision made by emotional beings. There is no right or wrong there, only what people feel.
Someone who is vegetarian or vegan for moral reasons is making a choice, not living some sort of universal truth. Someone who eats meat is also making a choice.
Someone who eats meat but criticizes others for eating the "wrong" kind of meat is a hypocrite.
Certainly the way we farm animals for food can be sustainable or unsustainable. I wish people would focus more on that aspect than pointing fingers and making it a moral issue.
You're defining the word cruel to narrowly. Per Merriam-Webster "causing or conducive to injury, grief, or pain" and Cambridge "(of an event) causing suffering". Natural forces can be cruel. So can fate and life.
What will they think of next man versus self? What if the thing that man creates in his hubris isn’t actually better?
We are the ultimate result of 4 billion years of evolution. Nature has made itself redundant in some ways.
Actually, transcend is the wrong word we are still a part of nature of course but we can literally leave the planet and have the ability to irradiate this globe to erase most macroscopic life.
We are an outside context problem as an Iain Banks Ship Mind would say.
It’s a huge responsibility and opportunity that we will almost certainly squander.
Our culture and foresight has brought us into such misalignment that 25% of the US population is on psychiatric drugs, you have a lot of homeless, a drug epidemic, there's a general crisis of meaning, males have given up on finding partners, women are all competing for a few men or think they're all animals and stay away from them. To be able to eat quality food costs a lot and few people have the time or energy to cook anyway because city life is so stressful to most.
We are living in a profoundly sick society and economy all over the world. WW3 is knocking on the door, one wrong move and we fuck up the only ecosystem we have in the galaxy.
I'd bet if people were given the choice between living in a small fishing village from 2000 years ago and modern lower middle class the choice would be obvious.
So to say we have mastered nature and we know better requires a lot of hubris.