Funnily I thought almost the opposite. I feel like "meat" is deliberately chosen in-character to be both less precise and less respectful than "organic matter". It would be like a species with organic computers incredulously describing our computers as "rocks".
I think that the computers-as-rocks analogy works even better than this story, since there is no such thing as non-sentient meat, but there most certainly are rocks that can't compute
You've crystalized for me what I've always liked about this story, it implies that for some (horrifying?) reason the aliens are totally familiar with non-sentient meat.
- Can you believe those so-called humans. They made their computing devices out of rocks! They shovel sand out of beaches, make disgusting plates out of it, and force electricity through little paths of metal on them.
