Meat used as part of a throwaway metaphor doesn't trigger that sort of thing.
When I hear the word, 1-3 images of tortured animals usually briefly cross my mind, and I know there are much more emotional vegans than me. Speak for yourself. And even if torture mindkills some people, like I said, you can't properly discuss some important topics without it, so if it spawns 1000-post threads that aren't worth reading, too bad. (When I've used torture thought experiments so far, it hasn't.)
Edit: Actually, I probably would stop talking about torture if every time I did it spawned a1000-post thread that wasn't worth reading. But if that was what LessWrong was like, I would probably leave. Or if it was in every other respect the same (an implausible counterfactual), stay, but not enjoy it nearly as much.
A long blog post explains why the author, a feminist, is not comfortable with the rationalist community despite thinking it is "super cool and interesting". It's directed specifically at Yvain, but it's probably general enough to be of some interest here.
http://apophemi.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/why-im-not-on-the-rationalist-masterlist/
I'm not sure if I can summarize this fairly but the main thrust seems to be that we are overly willing to entertain offensive/taboo/hurtful ideas and this drives off many types of people. Here's a quote:
The author perceives a link between LW type open discourse and danger to minority groups. I'm not sure whether that's true or not. Take race. Many LWers are willing to entertain ideas about the existence and possible importance of average group differences in psychological traits. So, maybe LWers are racists. But they're racists who continually obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities. So, maybe not racists in a dangerous way?
An overly rosy view, perhaps, and I don't want to deny the reality of the blogger's experience. Clearly, the person is intelligent and attracted to some aspects of LW discourse while turned off by other aspects.