I eat meat but I am not a big fan. What makes a difference is that it is reasonably easy to season meat and thanks to the Maillard reaction it tastes good.

I love vegetables, but seasoning them so that the taste is not bland requires more work and skill.

For sure, it's always a tell of a good chef if they can cook vegetarian or not. If a restaurant doesn't have a good selection of vegetarian options I'll generally assume the kitchen isn't all that skilled in most cases (back when there were restaurants...).

Seasoning vegetarian dishes isn't all that difficult once you dedicate yourself to learning. You'll often need to look to non-European/American recipes though. I was lucky that I grew up in a household with a North African parent where I learned a lot about seasoning just by osmosis (even if they aren't veg, there were lots of vegetarian dishes). My partner is South Asian and there's obviously a long, rich history of vegetarian cuisine there. It's worth learning!

Just using the same grain to feed humans instead would be rather easier. It's not like humans are incapable of eating corn, barley, oats, or soybeans.

I think the real problem here isn't that we can't get by without meat packing plants. It's that it's been 2 or so generations since the last time a really large of North Americans have had to adjust their diets in response to a major situation like this, and so we don't know what to expect, and the most psychologically available stories to look to are ones of actual famines.

Crops raised as ruminant food have different mechanical, nutritional, and yield characteristics than crops raised for humans, they are optimized for things other than being easy and palatable for humans to consume.

Consider edible beets and sugar beets. Sugar beets are technically edible but many people would find the experience of eating them to be unpleasant, since they were not bred to be edible by humans.

No. Ruminants eat food that humans can’t. Furthermore, grazing grassland uses marginal land unusable for industrial scale farming. And, locally operated meat processing works just fine.

Virtually all of our problems with the meat supply are self-created and can be fixed — lets just return to the horror show we had 30 or so years ago... wait - it was just fine 30 years ago, and someone who ate the same meat he sold you was responsible for raising and preparing your food.

Source: family owned and run feedlot, and worked at a local abattoir thru university.

Ruminants CAN eat food that humans can't, but they're not - they're fattened up on grain that could be fed to humans. Feeding that grain to humans would be more efficient.

It varies by locale. Most of the rural places I lived did not use human consumable cereals, as that would be far too expensive.

I'll bow to your experience; we can't just ship the same crops to people.

Still, growing crops to feed to cows to feed to people is an inefficient path to getting calories to people. Grow people crops, skip the cows.

The cereals in the supply chain today aren't going to be convertible into food for humans before the meat in the supply chain runs out. The meat supply chain is much shorter because it's much more expensive to keep meat fresh. Even if you don't care about the people who work in the meat industry and you think it's evil, surely shutting it down so abruptly (with the entailed food shortage risks) should be a last resort?