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?