Sorry, yes I should have put these two points in.

Waste is a big fucker, as is the over supply of meat.

However where I diverge is that I still think livestock have a strong role to play in established and subsistence agriculture. I mean this in the way that fish can be put in the loop for hydroponic, chickens to reduce pests, or pigs/sheep used to rotivate fields. Not in the way that we devote vast amounts of land to pasture. (although there are questions to answer about how to manage rich grasslands that are carbon sinks.)

Ain't this the truth. It's an incredibly inefficient way to feed the human race. And to boot, there's fewer starving livestock then there are starving humans.

Northern Europeans and many steppe peoples exist largely because livestock can be raised on terrain that's not suitable for animal farming.

Factory farming uses almost no land. The animals never leave the building or their cage.

I don't quite get the point you are making. Can you rephrase it?

You can't plow a mountain side and grow acres of corn or build a feedlot. But you can run cattle and sheep over it which are able to forage the grasses while climbing the terrain.

So mountainous people are able to obtain calories from animals in places otherwise unsuitable for more conventional farming methods.

No one is trying to force people to abandon their locally sourced food. The problem is with people in developed nations who live in cities. Also the point is you wouldn't need to expand the farmlands, quite the opposite.

Thanks for clarifying.

Letting cattle and sheep and goats forage in terrain unsuited for agriculture is fine.

I still think we should stop feeding that 1/3rd of our grain to cattle.