A large part of cattle feed soy is based on leftovers from the food industry.

It's the other way around. According to the article, 77% of soy production goes to animal feed.

or is the soy oil a way to make more money off of animal feed?

you're absolutely right - preparing a high quality beef meal takes a lot more than just processing soy, but what I was aiming at was that we will replace one mass consumption with the other, just like we always do and that may mask the problem but I believe it won't solve it. I could be wrong though.

> but what I was aiming at was that we will replace one mass consumption with the other, just like we always do and that may mask the problem but I believe it won't solve it

You're comparing two cases of "mass production" without any quantifier.

Beef has an over 15 times larger carbon footprint compared to tofu.

https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food

So sure, if everyone switches we would substitute one mass production for another, but we could feed 15 times as many people (all else equal).

The issue is not judt the extra procesding cost.

I haven't ran the numbers, but parent hinted at a cow needing to eat, say, 10 Kg of soy per Kg of meat produced, while you could have just eaten the soy directly.

Meat production uses a lot of land to produce food for your food, that's why it's so inneficient. Instead you could just use a tiny fraction of that land, and grow enough food for everyone.