The most pressing question here: is tofu ultra-processed? It's a protein isolate prepared by a solution-precipitation process. If you replace the tofu salts (calcium sulfate and similar) with ethanol (an anti-solvent for proteins) you get protein powder. This is not the most efficient way make protein powder, but the point is that on the one hand you have a traditional centuries-old process, and on the other you have what seems to be a sine qua non of ultraprocessed food, and the difference is... ethanol.
Beyond Meat, which contains... dietary fiber... is part of a particular subset of highly processed foods that are trying to be healthy. If you see "chicory root extract" on a food's ingredients label, it's probably in this club. This is a telltale sign of spiking the dietary fiber content. (Beyond Meat does not contain chicory; its fiber is from peas.)
Most ultra-processed foods are not trying to be healthy. They are designed to be addictive. It's a little bit like the old kerfuffle over "weapons-grade" encryption being restricted for export. The technology can be useful for military purposes, but encryption is not a weapon per se.
The critical diversion is not from meat to processed foods, but from the practice of deliberately engineering addictive foods to the techniques that facilitate it. The food product companies would like you to look anywhere other than their intentions, because they can always change the how and what in pursuit of them. They will always be happy to ostentatiously move away from the old way of making a bag of chips you can't put down, to the new way of making a bag of chips you can't put down. The root of the problem is the incentive structure.
The way to make a good profit in the food industry is to sell a lot of a product that you can sell for a good price, but have it be very cheap to manufacture. If you take really cheap input material that historically was used mostly for animal feed, like corn or oats, and can do a bunch of food science magic to it to make it very tasty and addictive, you can charge a good price and people will buy lots of it.
The problem with ultraprocessed foods is simply that the manufacturer has been given too many free parameters, and if they get enough they can find something addictive and unhealthy. Since shelf space on grocery store shelves is allocated based on sales, the shelves will be filled with addictive food. This is even true of the produce section. Fruits and vegetables are bred to increase their sugar content, reduce bitterness, etc. Luckily breeding fruit trees is more time consuming and less controllable than all of the chemistry that can happen in a potato chip factory. We will see how this holds up as genetic engineering becomes more predictable.
Anyhow the only solution we've really come up with to this social problem is to change our brains with Glucagon Like Peptides to be less susceptible to these tricks. We will see how long that is able to keep ahead of the food companies.
There are good reasons to question renewable energy: the cost picture doesn't make sense right now, it has intermittency problems, etc. But killing renewable projects because, uh, farming or whatever?, particularly at a time when the demand for energy is growing faster than ever, seems short sighted at best.