For instance, New Zealand lamb flocks are grown high up in the mountains, eating and drinking from local sources unsuitable for plant farming. It would literally take more arable land for the equivalent plant based diet.
When you're talking about scale, feeding 10's of thousands of people, plant based food sources win out.
Without those animals, that land would have been literally useless for humans to produce food.
That's such an edge case though.. Burger King and Mcdonalds aren't selling lamb burgers in large quantities.
What about all the cattle farmed all over the world? They're not all on a steep mountainside. Most will be on plains or more factory like conditions.
Lambs are usually slaughtered after 6 months. In Sweden, to use an example close to me, lambs have the right to live outdoor for two to four months during the summer depending on where in the country they live, which means that they spend at least 2-4 months indoors not grazing this non-arable land. They must be watered and fed, which increases energy consumption, and usually fed from land that could have grown crops for humans directly. Only a fraction of the energy we put into animals gets returned when we eat them, which means it's far more energy-efficient to eat the plants directly.
That's not necessarily true. I think you are underestimating the amount of land that's suitable for animal farming but not crops. It's a lot.
> Only a fraction of the energy we put into animals gets returned when we eat them, which means it's far more energy-efficient to eat the plants directly.
That's technically correct but still wrong. We can't eat grass and lichens, no matter how many calories they have. Animals can.
Other resources, such as fossil fuels and water, are used at a much higher rate when raising animals than when producing crops. Grain-fed beef production uses 100 000 liters of water per kilogram of food produced, broiler chicken 3500 liters per kilogram, and soybeans 2000 liters per kilogram. Water is a precious resource in many places of the world.
This is the way the world works today, but you don't argue for animal products over vegetables, you argue for grass-feed animals instead of crop-fed. You should vote with your wallet and only buy grass-fed meat, both when you cook at home, when you buy an animal-based snack, or when you go to a restaurant. I think that many meals would have to be vegetarian, because a purely grass-fed meat, dairy, and egg diet would be hard to uphold.
What is a generalization and is not true in many cases is that the meat we eat is produced in environments unsuitable for plant farming.
Maybe not oversimplification but deceiving. It makes it sound like we can eat grass.