I'm fairly sure the giant piles of salad I eat regularly have very little starch, sugar, or trans fat.

Of course it's possible to make and sell bad vegetarian food, but suggesting that it's "often" just as bad as non-vegetarian food is simply nonsense.

People become vegetarians for all kinds of reasons. I became vegetarian when I learned enough about industrial meat processing to decide that I had absolutely no interest in eating anything that came out of it.

It's much harder to fuck up a salad or a grain/rice/nut thing than it is to disguise the presence of pink slime or some other random body part slurry that most people wouldn't touch if they saw it being made.