meat uses up enormous quantities of water. potatoes for instance use about 75 gallons to produce 2000 calories compared to say 1500 to 2500 gallons for 2000 calories of beef.

For grass fed cattle, the vast majority of said water is from rain that would have fallen on the land with or without the cattle. It's not generally municipal supplies of water in use for naturally raised cattle.

Water is not equally scarce everywhere, this is a simple matter of producing things only in places where the production thereof makes sense

A lot of the "meat uses too much water" arguments are stupid because they're based on food grown in places where it rains all of the water they ever use.

We drain the land in Iowa otherwise the north half of it would be a swamp. Complaining about water usage for all but the western edge of Iowa is much the same as complaining about how solar panels use up the sunlight.