Saturated Fat Controversy

[FlatAssembler]

Private citizens do, making sound financial decisions..and those sound financial decisions often starve people.

I don't really understand what you mean.
Do you mean that there are poor people because people are making horrible life decisions, and thereby sabotaging themselves and people around themselves? Vojko recently made a song in which he expressed that idea, it's called "Kako to", it's quite popular in Croatia now. Though it sounds humorous and smart, I don't agree with the basic message.
It's just hard to deny that famines are caused by epic government failures. No substantial famine has ever occured in a country that values free speech, that allows public criticism of the government.
For people to make sound financial decisions, they need to have access to the real prices. Prices are a way to communicate what the society needs more and what it needs less. They aren't perfect, but, when the government intervenes, they almost always make things worse. In Venezuela, people see apparent prices, but they don't see the actual prices, the prices they see, and thus the information prices convey, are very distorted because of the inflation and price controls. During the Great Chinese Famine, they basically tried to abolish prices, and came up with a system of communication about what the society needs which is based on bureaucracy, which, of course, failed spectacularly.

"Those same grains of maize" are not actually the same grains of maize - there are numerous cultivars, some specifically bred as feed

Well, like I've said, I haven't really studied it that much. I just assumed that "Most of the grain we can eat is given to the animals." is a well-known and uncontroversial statement. And it's a little hard to argue about what's moral to do and what isn't when people don't agree about the facts.
Why do the estimates abot what percentage of grain is being fed to farmed animals vary so widely? Some studies show it's close to 90%, and some show it's around 60%. Do those studies that show it's around 60% control for the fact that some grain that's given to the farmed animals can't be eaten by humans? I haven't looked much into it.

-ALL- crops have "special needs"

Well, as far I understand, cows also have special needs about which grass they can eat. The grass they eat has to contain the nutrients they need, although it's much less nutrient-dense than grain is. The best pastures are ones with many trefloils, and if trefoils can grow there, so can peas.
I think the right questions to ask here is why is the meat of grass-fed animals more expensive than meat of grain-fed animals, and why is meat significantly more expensive than most of the plant food? Meat has always beeen more expensive than grains and most of the plant food, it's not because of the government interventions. In the 3rd century, emperor Hui of Jin showed his exceptional incompetence when, upon learning that people had no rice to eat, he wondered why people don't eat meat instead.

Crops fit for human consumption have an immense irrigation requirement, in addition to safety measures not relevant to the production of feed not fit for human consumption.

As far as I understand it, the safety measures are mostly useless, it's just that the big corporations are lobbying for them because it hurts the competition more than it hurts them.

The hole of breeding animals so that people don't starve?

Don't you think that owning animals is comparable to slavery, and is thus wrong even if we think the consequences will be good?

Well, I know the insides and out of the slaughterhouse i work in. I can tell you those pigs don't feel a thing. ISO 22000 has rules.

So, as far as I know, the usual way of killing pigs today in slaughterhouse is to suffocate them with CO2. I want an honest answer, why?
First of all, why CO2? CO2 in blood directly activates the nociceptors, thus leading to extreme pain. Why not nitrogen? Nitrogen poisoning is at least known to be painless in humans. I don't know how certain we are that it's painless for pigs, since we know nitrogen poisoning isn't painless for moles (moles, unlike humans, can detect lack of oxygen in their blood), but we know for certain CO2 poisoning is painful.
Second, if people actually care about painlessly killing the farmed animals, why not simply behead them? Nearly all neuroscientists would agree beheading is, if properly done, a painless way to die. So why not do that?