Cowspiracy

[Fake Messiah]

1.  We -do not- compete with livestock for veggies.  Livestock eats grain, and the grain livestock eats isn't fit for human consumption.  It's grown on more marginal land, with less input and labor.  

Then there must be a lot of marginal land out there since according to a 2011 analysis, 75% of all agricultural land (including crop and pasture land) is dedicated to animal production. Also recent studies find that global crop demands will likely increase by 60–120% by the year 2050 (from baseline year 2005)
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.108...ld.iop.org

2. Livestock -are not- inefficient.  We've put them to inefficient use.  We've done so as a consequence of working a miracle over the last half-century with corn yields - but cattle, for example...can eat something that we simply can't.  Grass.  Most cattle are pastured, ofc, and that's why.  

Not for a long time anymore. Take chickens for instance. For the first 99.9925 percent of their domesticated careers, chickens ate all sorts of stuff: blades of grass, leaves, seeds, bugs, mice, frogs, meat scraps, dead rabbits, even snakes. Their human keepers carried the barest understanding of a chicken’s dietary needs. BUT by the turn of the last century, poultrymen knew you could fatten chickens by feeding them things like ground-up corn. But they also knew that if all you gave chickens was corn, they’d get sick. So they sent chickens out to forage, and their beaks would find the foodstuffs that kept them healthy. In the winter, chickens would get milk, cabbage, green onions, bran, and table scraps. Without green treats and outdoor foraging, chickens got sick and died. No one knew why. BUT then it was dicovered that vitamin B1 is tha factor.

SO chickens didn’t need to go outside anymore. They didn’t need to eat cabbage and table scraps or a dead toad to get a “complete” diet. And with those pesky essential nutrients out of the way, it was at last possible to concentrate on the stuff that really made chickens get big fast: carbs. In the late 1940s, a new and important feed was unleashed upon poultrydom: the “high-energy diet.” For chickens to grow twice as fast as their recent ancestors, they needed to mainline carbs.

SO there is another problem. The feed is typically a blend of seeds and while some seeds (nutmeg, for example) are flavorful, the seeds we feed chickens are not. Therefore chicken doesn’t make its own flavor. The taste of animal flesh is strongly influenced by what an animal eats. Scientists refer to this as biodistribution—it’s the same reason a dairy cow that eats onion grass produces milk that tastes like onions.
Modern chickens suffer from a flavor brownout. Also high-energy diet, with its dusting of essential vitamins and minerals, enabled the production of giant babies. And meat from babies is bland. Veal is blander than beef. Lamb is blander than mutton. Suckling pig is blander than mature pork (which most people today have never tasted).
In the old cookbooks recepies for chickens used to be just salt & pepper not due to failed herb crops, a trade embargo on spices. Herbs and spices were there if you needed them. But fried chicken didn’t need them. Now since chickens taste like cardboard we deep-fry it. Now we dip it in buttermilk before dredging it through flour so that it becomes encased in a savory Dorito-like shell.
Celebrity chef Thomas Keller’s recipe for buttermilk fried chicken for brine alone calls for twelve bay leaves, a head of garlic, black pepper, thyme, honey, rosemary, parsley, and five lemons.
Chef John Currence soaks his chicken for four hours in Coca-Cola mixed with liquid smoke, Tabasco sauce, and Worcestershire sauce, and then flavors the batter with cayenne pepper, garlic powder, and onion powder.
Most people don’t bother. It’s easier to buy chicken that’s been preflavored.

COWS don't spent its days outside eating grass and dropping turd on the good green earth, and during winter eat plenty of hay. Today, the average cow lives the broiler chicken life, packed into a barn of airplane hangar proportions eating an unending supply of corn, soybeans, and roughage.

OP said "Meat, in moderation, is healthy" but what is moderation? 1-2 times a week? Who has that moderation? People indulge themselves all the time and of course there is the fast food. We saw in documentary "Supersize me" that majority of doctors say that it's never good for health to go to McDonald's. It's toxic, it eats your liver cells, clogs your veins.
But that is processed meat, what about regular? I said in previous topic that meat today contains about 50% fat, compared to wild animals that have 5% tops. Indeed if you go to the store and look at the meat label of the fattest meat approved by the USDA will read: “70 percent lean, 30 percent fat.” the lean-fat labeling causes shoppers to think the meat has less fat than it really does—if they are looking at the label at all. The more fat that meat has, the less it costs.
Lean meat would mean 10% fat so add that to that 30%, but also meat industry has freedom around what is considered lean.
On top of that cows are frequently given steroids like Zilmax, which is a drug that can be mixed into cattle feed during the last month of the animal’s life, after it has already been well fattened on corn. The results, by all accounts, are astounding. The animals blow up like muscled balloons. And Zilmax doesn’t just make the cattle bigger, it makes them yield far more beef per animal than their peers. But the downsides of Zilmax are also beyond dispute: The amazing growth comes at a cost, and that cost is the quality of the taste.