In that example, 1 oz of beef contains 10 of my taste units while 1 oz of almonds contains 0.5 of my taste units.

Since each person's taste units are different, humans have decided that the best way to allocate food is to sell it on something called a "market", where each person can express their own individual taste units, or "preferences", by buying the food on this "market".

The price of the food on the market reflects the scarcity of the food and everything it took to produce it, although sometimes there are distortions which should be corrected externally (e.g. by a government), not by restricting the types of food we consume, but by addressing their root causes at the source (e.g. by artificially adjusting the water price to address the tragedy of the commons, or by taxing CO2 production at a sufficient level).

Beef and dairy can be a way to convert grasslands to human-consumable calories or be used to convert overproduction of grains (necessary as insurance against crop failures) into high quality protein, but it can also be a way to degrade marginal ecosystems and convert groundwater into an unhealthy national diet.

The problem is that the water is still pumped out the acquifer, and non-acquifer water is still water which generally becomes unavailable to other uses because it evaporates or is too polluted.