Why can't people just eat vegetables instead? Seriously, I've worked at a renown vegan and vegetarian restaurant and I never understood why people didn't just e

Why can't people just eat vegetables instead? Seriously, I've worked at a renown vegan and vegetarian restaurant and I never understood why people didn't just eat veg/tofu stir-fry instead of having us go through so much non-sense to re-invent a burger or a crabcake? The things took so much effort and were an inferior version to the real thing, not to mention the amount of oils necessary to keep them intact. The closest thing we had was this creole veg serve with polenta, that had tons of oil and butter in the polenta and the creole veg had been marinated in quite a bit of oil along with the spices to keep them moist throughout service. I'm an omnivore with a massive conservationist mindset, and did Biodynamic Ag. So I just intermittent fast for 16 hours a day and only eat once a day now that I don't farm any more. But I grew up on cantonese food where protein was used sparingly, and unlike most kids in the West we gladly ate tofu and vegetables all year round in our homemade meals. Eating unadulterated seasonal veg is way tastier than eating a mushroom burger with absurd amounts of oils and saturated fats and breading, smeared with vegan mayo etc... I never ate anything but the soups at work, as the rest of the menu all had so much more stuff added to it that caused a very noticeable feeling of inflammation--which is typical for vegetarians and vegans. I've ate those impossible burgers when BK launched them and did side by side with a normal whopper when they were on the 2/$5 promo for a while, and the way I ate them (I sauted onions with korean BBQ sauce and garnished with kimchi and maybe an egg if I really had time) you couldn't tell a difference. But, as a cook I was always perplexed: why put so much inputs into something (burger) that wasn't meant to be eaten more than once a week? The real issue to the obesity issue in much of the West is a lack of exercise coupled with over consumption of calories, from all sources be it veg or animal protein, instead of having a burger as a treat once a week: many people, mainly the poor, subsist on this stuff due to the race to the bottom price wars typical in fast food paired with a sedentary lifestyle. But the price factor is not as day and night as it's made out to be if you actually have an education on diets suited for your lifestyle, something entirely missing in the US. I think post-covid people need to take a very serious look at who was really affected by COVID in the West--I'm aware that India is getting hit hard and they have a mainly plant based diet, but this seems mainly due to an inability to convince it's population to follow lock-down, quarantine, or mask wearing measures and an ability to vaccinate due to an ongoing lack of trust in their government. Most of the deaths in the West were from the elderly population, and the medically ill with a remarkable concentration on people with diabetes, obesity, asthma as the co-morbidity factors.