"A lot of the commonly sold 'vegan' alternatives from the hipster food section in our super markets are produced by big corps and shipped around the world."
You're making a few conjectures here: (1) vegan food is produced by big corps (2) vegan food is "shipped around the world."
On (1): which big corps are you referring to? which vegan food? Have you noticed any broccoli or kale propaganda from these companies? Or maybe some vegan sausage commercials, or oat milk radio ads or.... any vegan food propaganda/ads? Isn't this the characteristic marketing approach for these companies?
On (2) Most vegan meat alternatives are soy based, so it's not as if these products use some rare ingredients that have to be grown in Peru. Side note: 70%-80% of the soy we grow is actually eaten by animals [1] [2],
"I love to waste time in meat areas to find the single most ecological variation I can buy" It's cool that you eat local meat, but regardless of where it comes from, animals have to eat food in order for you to eat them, so this is inherently a less efficient process than just eating the food directly (plus local animals still need to be transported to a slaughterhouse, disemboweled, etc). As for grass fed beef, they are an immensely inefficient use of land and still produce plenty of methane [3].
[1] https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexisten... [2] https://globalforestatlas.yale.edu/amazon/land-use/soy [3] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/grass-fed-cows-won-t-...