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This would mean either that we would have a lot less food, or we would have to divert a lot of effort from other productive activities to make it up. Maybe that's okay, but still this idea is not free, and not low-hanging fruit.

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Not less food, just less meat.

Not just meat, also dairy & eggs. Thats significant.

I like how you don't even contemplate reducing profits as solution (as opposite to mass deaths or mass starvation).

How would you go about reducing profits? If you add costs, the farmers will either pass them along to the purchaser or they will get out of the meat business. That means either higher prices (which should lower demand) or lower supply. In either case it looks like consumers eat less meat. I'm not trying to defend antibiotic usage. I'm curious what a reduced profit solution would look like, maybe I'm imagining it wrong.

I do not see how profits have anything to do with antibiotics and the level of effort required to produce animal products.

Antibiotics allow us to produce animal products with reduced effort per unit than otherwise. If we ban antibiotics, it will require more effort to produce the same amount of animal products. That is true regardless of what happens on the money/profit side. This may be a fine tradeoff, but it's still a necessary tradeoff.

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