This. When I was a kid, I asked this same question and it took me years to fully wrap my head around it.

The ELI5 - When we pick food, we often pick it when it’s the most fresh. We want the freshest apples, the healthiest corn. That also applies to meat. We kill animals at their peak, and harvest them for meat.

When you die, it’s because something is rotten. Lung. Heart. Cancer. Its part of aging. If some part of your body was rotten enough to kill you, that means that was circulating through the rest of your body. Say that a rabbit was killed by poison gas. Would you eat it, if technically, the poison was mostly in its lungs?