Genesis 9-Sounds like they were not allowed to eat meat?

No. In context, Genesis 9 explicitly gives permission to eat animals, while forbidding the eating of blood.

Genesis 9:3 says:

“Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.”

Then verse 4 places a restriction on that permission:

“But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.”

So the plain sense is: they were allowed to eat flesh, but not flesh with its blood in it. The prohibition is not against meat itself; it is against consuming the blood.

The reason is stated more fully later:

“For the life of the flesh is in the blood…” — Leviticus 17:11

And again:

“For it is the life of all flesh; the blood of it is for the life thereof…” — Leviticus 17:14

So Genesis 9:4 distinguishes between the flesh as food and the blood as representing the life of the flesh.

A helpful way to read Genesis 9:3–4 together is:

• Verse 3: animal flesh is permitted as food.
• Verse 4: blood is excluded from that permission.

This same concern appears in Acts 15:20, where Gentile believers were instructed to abstain from “things strangled, and from blood.” That reinforces that the issue is blood, not a general prohibition on eating meat.

So the conservative KJV reading is: meat was allowed; consuming blood was forbidden.