[Fyron]

2) Like most foods now days it's becoming less natural and more "processed."

In what way is meat "unnatural" today? The fact that they cut up the animals and package it, rather than selling you whole, live animals for your own personal butchery circa 1300 CE? A few growth hormones here and there that have no credible scientific studies indicating any potential side-effects to humans eating the meat? Growth hormones are perfectly natural. So what if the cows mature physically a bit faster than they normally would? It doesn't harm the meat in any way.

3) It takes more time and resources to raise an animal for food than it does to grow plants for food. It's one of the strongest points of the vegetarian philosophy.

Actually, it is one of the most asinine things espoused by some overly-political vegetarians that do not really understand food production and biology. While it is technically true that it "takes more time and resources to raise an animal for food," the claim is rather disingenuous because the food that is used to feed the animals is not suitable for feeding to humans, does not decrease the amount of human-quality grains grown, and in fact raising cattle and other livestock is an important part in the cycle of producing more demanding crops (most of the fruits and vegetables we eat).

The land used for cattle ranching is not suitable for growing human-grade crops (without a ton of fertilizer and nutrients added to it, which comes from the cattle...). Only tough, hardy crops can be grown on it; crops that are really bad to feed to humans, but are fine for herbivorous animals that can actually digest them somewhat well. Most of the grains grown to feed cattle et all are of really low caliber, not suitable for human consumption (think millet, long grasses), which is grown on other tracts of poor quality arable land. Of course, some excess wheat and corn and such is fed to livestock, but this is only done because too much was produced and it can't be sold, and would go to waste otherwise.

There is no particular lack of arable land in the country (or the world as a whole), so any argument related to wasted land usage is completely non-sensible. Pretty much all of the high-quality land that can be used to grow crops for humans either is used to do so, or is left fallow due to not enough demand for more.

We can grow quite a lot of poor-quality grains and such to feed to animals, but we can't really use the land they are grown on to feed humans, without ending up harming them due to malnourishment in the process. If you actually look at the energy efficiency of the food production overall, it is in reality better to have animals processing all of those hardy, malnutritous (in human terms) grains and grasses, than to try to feed them to humans. We can make much better use of it by eating the animals afterwards, and we get huge amounts of natural fertilizer as a by-product.