Vegans and vegetarians can move along and enjoy their day. You're cool already, and off the hook.
Cows are ruminants. That's a group of animals that are specially adapted to eat nutritionally-useless grasses. That's their whole deal. If you're living in a pastoral or premodern farming society then that's great because you can't eat grass and you can eat cows, so it's free food. But instead you live in a society (insert meme) where we grow food specifically for cows then ship it to cows. Again, the animal that's specialized in eating things that have no nutritional value, so we're going out of our way to grow plants with no nutritional value, and then ship enough of it around to feed an animal anyway.
What does that mean? It means by whatever metric you choose, cow meat is worse than half as efficient as other common sources of animal protein.
Feed conversion ratios. Enough feed to make a pound of beef is enough to make 2.5 pounds of pork or 5 pounds of chicken.
CO2 per calorie. 1000 calories of beef costs 13.8 kg of CO2. 1000 calories of pork costs 4.45kg CO2. 1000 calories of chicken costs 3.37kg CO2. Also note lamb topping the charts, which will be a running theme. (Also an extra reason not to use broccoli as your primary calorie source, if eating 13 pounds of broccoli a day wasn't a good enough reason on its own.)
Land use per year per calorie. How much land did that 1000 calories take? You'll need 119 square meters for beef, 7.26 square meters for pork, or 6.61 square meters for chicken. Note lamb topping the chart again. (Also apparently prawns can be farmed super dense, that's something interesting that I didn't know.)
Why do sheep show up so high on some of these charts? Because they're also ruminants. Don't eat sheep either.
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dunno what it's like in the land of the free, but here in new zealand meat is freaking expensive, so good veg recipes actually go really far. here's one of my favourites, that's easy as fuck to make, and this is coming from a person that hates cooking. https://www.theironyou.com/2016/03/vegan-easy-chickpea-tikka-masala.html
that's it, that's all the ingredients that you have to actually buy.
I spend less money on food as a vegan than when I ate meat. I just don't use many of the meat substitutes which are the pricy part.
Can I ask what your favourite meal is? The first step for me personally was learning to make a cheap and vegan version of my favourite meals and then I never looked back.
Dude I'm spending like 2/3 of what I used to sfter going vegan. There are a million cheap recepies on youtube. Just buy some spices and you're gucci.
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Do only eggs & fish! It's easy as fuck, won't frustrate your habits at all, and will be much cheaper. Chicken probably have a soul so make sure to find a provider who does actually happy free range eggs, but sardines and other small bottom-of-the-food-chain seafood probably don't have a soul, I mean come on. They can cover a huge variety of day-to-day culinary cravings depending how you prepare them.
Happy free range eggs don't exist. The happiest chicken in the world has been bred to produce far more eggs than her body can handle and there are often some really nasty side effects (impounded eggs, nutritional deficiencies, many more I'm sure, but eggs aren't my specialty).
And for seafood, it's not about them having a soul (although come on, they do), it's about the rest of the food chain depending on these small fish. It's about fishless oceans by 2048 because of commercial farming. It's about larger marine life, whales, dolphins, orcas, sea turtles, losing their habitat and food source, not to mention getting caught in commercial fishing nets and left to die.
So no, eggs and fish aren't a good solution. Maybe beans and rice seems boring, but with the right spices, holy hell are they tasty! Try lentils with cumin, turmeric, curry powder, and a little bit of cinnamon, but mix the lentils with heavily caramelized onions. So fucking good!
Yeah of course actual veganism is good, while fish&egg-only is only "slightly less bad". But the latter requires zero effort and change of habits, while the former requires a small effort. In a reply to someone who keeps postponing "going vegan" indefinitely, why not offer the no-effort, no-excuse solution that they'll barely notice if they start today? I won't shatter the laziness barrier through text, but I can point out a complete lack-of-barrier they might not have considered. We all do it to some extent no matter what, for example I've never seen anyone warn against the insecticide-heavy crops when trying to convert omnivores, because the step of going vegan is obvious and significant while preferring oats to rice just saves some insects. Still saying to a meat-eater "try eating rice and beans it's good, farming practices are a question for another time" is fine, even though the better thing to say would be "try eating oats and beans, growing rice kills too many critters please nobody fucking recommand the scourge known as RICE in this thread"!
The stuff I said about sentience was bullshit though that's fair.